Marco Bezzecchi
Valentino Rossi retired from MotoGP four years ago, but racing is still very much on his mind and lives on through his VR46 Racing Team.
It has already been 16 years since he won the last of his MotoGP titles for Yamaha at the age of 30 in 2009.
Marc Marquez can break Rossi’s oldest champion record by nearly two years if he can follow through on a strong start to the season for Ducati.
Marquez was at the centre of one of the Italian’s greatest heartbreaks in 2015. It was arguably his last good chance to win a title.
The infamous Marquez kick changed Rossi’s reputation forever, after a tangle at the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix left him frustrated and sent to the back of the grid for the title decider in Valencia.
He would recover to fourth, but starting at the front would have seen him claim the title in all likelihood. He just had to control his frustrations at Sepang, and it could have been all different.
Valentino Rossi shares the ‘biggest regret’ of his MotoGP career after Marc Marquez battle
Rossi created revolutionary MotoGP moves and was the man to look up to for so long. In the eight seasons that he shared a grid with Marquez, he finished ahead of him just once.
That’s without counting the 2020 campaign, where Marquez crashed out of the opener and missed the whole season.
It’s up for debate whether Rossi’s supposed kick at Malaysia was intentional or not in 2015, but it did cost him the title.
At the end, all he needed was five more points to overcome Jorge Lorenzo, and there were numerous opportunities to pick those up in the final events of the year.
Speaking to La Gazetta dello Sport’s Sportweek magazine, the motorcycle legend revealed what he regards as the ‘biggest regret’ of his career.
“The final races of the 2015 World Championship are the biggest regret of my career. I could have won that title,” he said.
READ MORE: Uccio Salucci explains why Valentino Rossi talks to ‘nobody’ at Ducati despite owning VR46 team
What happened to Valentino Rossi after the 2015 MotoGP season ended?
Rossi would follow up his 2015 campaign by coming second once again in 2016, this time to Marquez, who had a comfortable gap of 49 points.
That was as close as he would get to winning another title, as he dropped off in the following years and was forced to watch his rival dominate the sport.
The 2017 Dutch TT would play host to his final win, while his last podium would come at the 2020 Andalusian Grand Prix.
Rossi had ‘weird’ pre-race rituals at Yamaha, but they always seemed to work for him. He was very much the rider of the 2000s, while Marquez was the star of the 2010s.
Their battle is enshrined in the history books forever, but how it could have been so different at the end of 2015 if Rossi had remained calm.
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