Rossi is beatable but the legend unstoppable

The shape of a top rider’s career is usually an inverted “V”, often quite a wide one, as he gains experience and momentum to achieve serial victories and championships, before running out of whatever it takes. Usually what multi-champion Mick Doohan used to call “the want”, rather than actual skill.

In Rossi’s case it’s more of an upside-down “W”, with a two-year hiatus marking his ill-timed temporary sojourn at Ducati. But while the results this year, including an almost unprecedented two successive race crashes, clarify that he is clearly over the hump, confirmation that he has signed to continue on a factory Yamaha for at least one more year further broaden the base of a career that has already spanned an unprecedented 25 continuous years, always at or very near the very top.

His manner of doing so is likewise unique, on two or four wheels. Michael Schumacher springs to mind in F1, Doohan in MotoGP. But Rossi is very different. As well as courting sporting success he has also courted the public with a consummate skill that came as naturally to him as his riding talent. Ultra-successful in both spheres, as long ago as 2012 he was in the top 20 of the Forbes sporting rich list. The result is a financial empire that he again has used in an entirely novel way, as a single-handed benefactor to Italian motorcycle racing, at the same time benefitting and helping to prolong his own career.

Working with the same small group of mainly childhood friends who have been with him throughout Rossi founded the VR46 Academy back in 2013, on land he’d purchased close to his Tavullia home. There he built a dirt-track offering several different layouts, while converting the existing buildings and adding more to create the classrooms, training rooms and other facilities, where a gang of hand-picked young riders came to learn from the master.

The academy offers not just riding training, though that is of course intrinsic, but a full panoply of related matters a rider needs for serious success. English lessons are vital, plus legal backing for contracts, and marketing for paraphernalia. Then there is camaraderie that goes beyond rowdy evenings at Rossi’s own Tavullia pizzeria, including trips to Florence and other cultural centres to add breadth to young minds that otherwise might be restricted only to study of the stop-watch and operation of the twist-grip.

It doesn’t work for everybody, of course. Romano Fenati, the most recent of whose 12 wins came in September this year, was one who rejected the all-boys-together atmosphere, and was soon afterwards dropped from the nascent VR46 Moto3 team, for a reported pitbox tantrum. (Fenati is a stereotypical biker bad-boy, banned for several races for squeezing another rider’s front brake lever at high speed.) But the list of rising youngsters from Italy, now beginning to eclipse the conquistadors of the recent Spanish invasion, is made up mainly of academicians (no-one graduates, because they keep coming back for essentially endless riding practice); making their way up from the smaller classes, with a first MotoGP victory this year.

Rossi founded his own Moto3 team, SKY VR46, in 2014, with Fenati and Pecco Bagnaia as riders. Bagnaia now rides a factory Ducati, and has come close to his first MotoGP win, especially at Misano in September, when he finished second to another academician and Rossi protégé Franco Morbidelli. Both are former Moto2 World Champions; while Valentino’s half-brother Luca Marini is currently leading that intermediate class, in the SKY VR46 Moto2 team that was added to the stable in 2017.

Rossi is thought to be waiting for his own retirement to mount a MotoGP team as well… though he might not be prepared to wait that long.

This booming racing enterprise works both ways. As well as a stable – actually more a conveyor belt – of young riders lucky and talented enough to catch the eye of an obviously gifted talent-spotter, the training regime is also of clear benefit to Rossi.

The dirt-track training sessions, which include an annual endurance race, are desperately competitive, and the 40-year-old Valentino takes a highly active part. Frequently coming out victorious. There can be few better ways for an ageing rider to keep his reflexes sharpened.

On the asphalt, his pupils are currently beating him, if not always by very much – the Morbidelli/Bagnaia one-two at Misano was only stopped from being an academy one-two-three when rising Spanish Suzuki rider Joan Mir snitched third from Rossi on the final lap, by less than half a second.

The Rossi legend is beatable, but still unstoppable.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.