By Mike Nicks
Valentino: 'I Will Fight with the Knife!'
It’s five o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and
Valentino Rossi has already had to relate the circumstances of his frustrating day to TV and radio and to Italian newspapers and magazines. Now he flops onto a metal chair at a table in the Fiat Yamaha hospitality centre where the English-speaking journalists are gathered to go through the same tiresome details – but this time in a different language.
So you’d expect the guy to be a bit tetchy and to want to piss off somewhere else where he could punch the wall and burn photos of
Casey Stoner, the Ducati Desmosedici GP7 motorcycle and Bridgestone tyres. Rossi had led the French grand prix from the second row, but finished sixth after Michelin had advised him to fit what turned out to be the wrong grade of rain tyre.
But this is Valentino Rossi: the street-fighter, the showman, the entertainer. "So, unfortunately we lose the bet," he begins. "We start with a hard rear, but the rain arrived harder and the bike became very difficult to control. F*ck! Impossible! No way! Big difference! Especially on the rear - from braking to the entry to the corner we don’t have enough grip like the
Bridgestone."
But then he changes the tone: "On the good side, I am happy about the setting for the race. If it’s dry I am able to go fast. In a normal race I can fight for the win."
And he concludes the performance with this: "We are in the shit, but the championship is long. Mugello [the next race] will be difficult because of the long straight. But we will fight there with a knife between the teeth!"
