Marco Bezzecchi
Valentino Rossi received three penalty points for his infamous crash with Marc Marquez at the 2015 Malaysian Grand Prix. The FIM sanction effectively ended the title race.
Under the rules at the time, a rider faced a back-of-the-grid start when they accumulated four points. Rossi already had one for an impeding incident with Jorge Lorenzo at Misano.
With Rossi out of contention at Valencia, Yamaha teammate Lorenzo was able to snatch the world championship. In the eyes of The Doctor, this was a great injustice.
Do you agree with Rossi’s verdict on the Sepang clash with Marquez?
Rossi accused Marquez of riding dangerously, but the latter wasn’t penalised.
In the press conference before the race, Rossi alleged that Marquez had been toying with him during a battle at Phillip Island a week earlier in order to boost Lorenzo’s title hopes.
Marc Marquez said he couldn’t ‘get away’ from Valentino Rossi in Malaysia
In MotoGP’s official documentary looking back at the Sepang clash, former FIM race director Mike Webb recalled the aftermath of the incident. He allowed the riders to argue their case in the same room.
Rossi insisted that he hadn’t instigated the contact deliberately, while Marquez refuted the notion that he was holding the Yamaha up on purpose.
Webb acknowledged that Marquez may have been provoking his competitor, but said that didn’t excuse the offence. Though Honda claimed that Rossi had kicked out at the #93 bike, the race director couldn’t prove this was intentional.
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Rossi was ultimately punished for intentionally forcing another wide. He appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but was unsuccessful.
“We called them both together, basically to hear both sides,” Webb remembered. “That’s the way we did it.
“They very clearly defended their own positions, with Rossi saying, ‘No there was nothing deliberate, I was running wide, Marquez happened to be outside, unfortunately, there was contact.’
“Marc [was] saying, ‘I couldn’t run at the pace I wanted, it wasn’t possible to get away.'”
How the Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez crash changed MotoGP stewarding
In response to the controversy, the FIM set up a new stewards panel for the 2016 season. This would ensure the race director wasn’t stretched too thin.
Webb said: “We quite quickly moved to a situation where we had the FIM stewards panel, a separate panel, only looking at incidents, while race direction carries on running the race.
“[There was] a lot more technology involved, more people and separating the jobs of the people so they can concentrate on their own ways.”
Marquez was genuinely shocked by Rossi’s accusation that he was helping Lorenzo, particularly because he ‘didn’t have the best relationship’ with his fellow Spaniard.
In the eyes of Lorenzo, the reality is that Rossi was too slow to win the 2015 title, which makes the Marquez fallout a distraction.
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