#unless you are Casey Stoner

[lastonthebrakes]

I’m watching old press conferences as a way to catch up on what has happened in MotoGP. Since you are a long suffering Yamaha fan, I wonder what your thoughts were when Jorge Lorenzo signed with Ducati. Jarvis mentions in the press conference that Lorenzo and Yamaha and the M1 is a winning machine and from a high level understanding of what happened (having not watched the races and know that anyone that challenged Marc for the title was Dovi) it seemed like a misstep to go away from Yamaha. Just want to know some opinions!! I always hear about opinions on his stint with Yamaha and not really much with Ducati or even Honda

hii! i'm gonna put my answer under the cut in case i go off on too much of a rant haha

i think a huge factor in this whole thing was the 2015 season (idk what your level of knowledge on it is but it was, to put it lightly, a flaming hot Mess lmao). the relationship between between vale and jorge certainly wasn't great before (hell, they had a wall in between their sides of the garage), and the 2015 season certainly didn't make it any better. not to go off on too much of a tangent, but yamaha were always going to slightly favour rossi (if my memory serves me, there was a thing about them canceling lorenzo's 2015 title celebration lol), and ultimately lorenzo had had enough of it. i've just went through some old interviews (it was a long time ago okay lmao i needed some refreshing of my memory) and lorenzo went with the old and trusty "time for a new challenge" tagline to explain the switch and tbf the ducati was a decent bike, just hard to take the reins of right off the bat unless your name is casey stoner.

me personally, as a die-hard vale fan, i wasn't too sad to see lorenzo go, but it really was an end of an era, and ultimately he was never able to replicate the success that he had at yamaha. much like rossi, he really struggled on the ducati at first, which wasn't a surprise tbh and then he started winning immediately after he got fired lmao, again not uncommon for ducati, if i remember correctly dovi also won the race right after he announced he wouldn't be continuing with them. have i mentioned people management isn't ducati's strongest suit? yeah

so was it a mistake for him to leave yamaha? possibly, but at the end of the day, barring 2017, marquez was so insanely dominant that i don't think lorenzo would've been able to contend either way

okay this was A Lot lmao and i hope i managed to get my point across haha, but i wanna thank you so much for this ask cause it was very fun to kinda go on a little trip down motogp memory lane while we wait for our beloved bikes to return <3