MotoGP: The Yamaha M1 wins its fifth race from six starts

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MotoGP: The Yamaha M1 wins its fifth race from six starts

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The corollary is that Rossi decided to do what Giacomo Agostini never did and will hence, due to his subsequent actions, go down in history as the best motorcycle racer to have ever turned a throttle.

Agostini won 122 Grands Prix but most of them were on the omnipotent MV Agusta machinery that would have won with a lesser rider. Though he was the dominant motorcycle rider in the world for more than a decade, he has no defence to the claim that many of his victories were gimmes. Like Rossi, Agostini won in more than one class (68 MotoGP wins and 54 350cc wins) and on both two and four stroke machinery, and he also won in the 750 class and at circuits so dangerous that it took dozens of lives lost before the motorcycle world came to its senses.

Agostini's record could never be bested and yet, with his title win last year on a machine that has not been competitive in anyone else's hands for three years, he has staked an irrefutable claim for the title of the "best ever."

And Yamaha has inherited Rossi and will reap the rewards, the sales, the Valentino Replicas and the rub-off that Rossi's remarkable riding and public communication talents will add. There has never been a motorcycle racer or an automobile racer and perhaps even a sportsperson with the same flair for endearing public hi-jinx. Go on, send us an email if you can think of one that's even close. There's an image at the bottom of this page showing Valentino at the Yamaha factory with a few hundred adoring fellow Yamaha employees last November when he went for the Championship celebrations - take a close look at it - money cannot buy moments like that. Yamaha is winning a lot more than just races by signing Rossi.

And so we come to the present day, with the 2005 championship season six races old and Valentino leading with five wins and a second from six starts. To fully comprehend how much difference Rossi makes to the M1’s competitiveness, let’s consider the others to be riding an M1 at this point in time. Between them, in six races, Colin Edwards, Ruben Xaus, Tony Elias and his stand-in due to injury David Checa, have one third place, one sixth, one seventh, one eighth, three ninths, and three tenth places – the same pedestrian results obtained by everyone else who has ridden an M1 apart from Max Biaggi back in 2001 when MotoGP was new to everyone and Biaggi was hot. Unless Colin Edwards can do better than his two second places of last season when he was riding a Honda, it would be very hard to argue that the Yamaha is yet as good as the Honda.

Rossi’s win today was extraordinary, and will have largely healed the rift he had with the Spanish public in the opening race of the season at Jerez when he knocked local hero Gibernau off the track at the last corner and claimed the win.

That was the first time Rossi had been booed when he took the winner’s champagne in any of his 68 GP wins. Today there were a few who remembered the events of April 10, and the crowd applauded warmly and wholeheartedly because anyone who had been watching closely knew that they’d seen something very special – the stuff of legend.

Rossi had fought through from a bad start in the first lap to catch the hard charging Gibernau – the pair slowly despatched early leader Melandri and surprise contender Nicki Hayden and settled down for the prize-fight everyone had hoped for – the rematch on Gibernau’s home soil with most of the 105,698 spectators offering kinetic assistance.

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