Yamaha Crisis, Rossi: “In 2004 they were at my feet, then…”

Yamaha and Honda in the abyss

This weekend MotoGP celebrates the 75 years of the championship at Silverstone in Great Britain and for the occasion the manufacturers and teams have prepared special liveries. Honda and Yamaha, of course, have been able to draw from a huge range of options and their liveries are definitely iconic, but it is very unlikely that they will be honoured with results on a par with these two legends of motorcycling at the manufacturer level.

Yamaha and Hondain fact, are going through a technical crisis that still seems far from seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Ducati is dominating and has KTM and Aprilia as its main rivals. Dorna, through the new regulation regarding concessions, has tried to give the two Japanese manufacturers the chance to get back on track and it seems that Yamaha can take the road to ‘recovery’ before Honda, judging by the investments and moves recently made official and in the process of being made official (Dall’Igna Bartolini’s right-hand man has arrived from Ducati, the Pramac team will be the new satellite team and Lin Jarvis is about to leave his role as project manager).

Questioned by the French sports daily The Team on what happened to Honda and Yamaha Valentino Rossi responded like this: “It is incomprehensible how two houses that have dominated for decades and have always been great protagonists of the category are now in these conditions. Luigi Dall’Igna has set the bar very high, in Japan they slept and now it will not be easy to recover”. Rossi also wanted to reiterate the comparison between the Yamaha that welcomed him in 2004 and the one that no longer fulfilled his wishes a decade later: “I arrived at Yamaha at the right time, I was the piece of the puzzle that was missing. Masao Furusawa was a genius and had just taken over the reins of the racing department. We had unlimited resources, when I asked for a little more torque in acceleration two weeks later I had three new engines to test. In 2004 the Japanese listened to me religiously, they had total trust in me. Ten years later it was no longer like that, they told me to think about driving as a pilot and they were the engineers and they knew what to do”.