Sepang 2015: The sad reality still haunting Valentino Rossi from MotoGP’s biggest fallout

The one thing that is most striking about rewatching the 2015 MotoGP Malaysian Grand Prix is just how nervous Valentino Rossi looked on his Yamaha on those early laps. Really, it didn’t look like the Rossi that had reshaped an entire championship in his preceding years as the undisputed GOAT of MotoGP.

25 October 2015 marked Rossi’s first opportunity to win that year’s world championship, something he hadn’t done since 2009. Since then, he’d suffered an effectively season-ending leg break in 2010, made an ill-fated move to Ducati, and then returned to Yamaha as not the same dominator he was.

The landscape was changing against Rossi in the late 2000s. And as he struggled at Ducati, the likes of Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa only got stronger, while a new threat in the form of Marc Marquez sprang onto the grid in 2013.

Lost in the maelstrom of 2015’s bitter finale is the fact that Rossi strung together a genuinely brilliant campaign. He scored four victories, including a vintage ride in the wet at Silverstone. He was on the podium at every round up until Misano, 13 races in, and was only ever off the rostrum three times - all of them top fives.

And that was against a Yamaha team-mate in Lorenzo, who was, unquestionably, the faster of the pair. After a slow start in the first three rounds, Lorenzo won four on the bounce and scored seven victories in total. When he led races, he was almost impossible to reckon with. Losing against an opponent like that, to this day, really shouldn’t be a point of shame for Rossi. Far from it.

After his dominant second title-winning year in 2014, Marquez had to battle against a Honda that wouldn’t accept his bombastic riding style. He ultimately learned much from that campaign, particularly when to wave the white flag in a race you can’t win. The fact he went unbeaten to the title between 2016 and 2019 is a testament to those lessons.

Rossi and Marquez had their on-track battles in the first half of the 2015 campaign. There was the clash at the end of the Argentine Grand Prix, as a faster Rossi came through on better tyres to win. Then there was the last-corner Assen debacle, as Rossi cut the final chicane to take victory after Marquez tried to squeeze up his inside.

The latter rankled Marquez, but there is a lot to suggest that Rossi was irked more by events from the previous year. Marquez got an invite to the VR46 ranch in 2014 and is said to have turned up with a factory HRC crew to ensure a competitive edge over Rossi. By all accounts, what followed on track would have sent respective Yamaha and Honda management into fits.

The path to Sepang 2015 very likely starts there, with a fairly petty incident. But ego is a powerful mind manipulator.

After Assen 2015, things simmered. Then came Australia, three rounds from the finish, and the beginning of the Rossi conspiracy theory that many - himself included - still buy into.

In what was a thrilling lead battle at the Australian Grand Prix, there was a lot of chopping and changing. But four laps near the end, where Marquez’s pace drops, became the focus of Rossi’s claims. These were findings he presented on Thursday at the Malaysian Grand Prix just a few days later, in the pre-event press conference as a bemused Marquez watches on.

“Mainly, I think his target was not just to win the race, but also to help Lorenzo to go far and try to take more points from me,” he claimed. “So, I think from Phillip Island it’s very clear that Jorge has a new supporter, that is Marc, so this changes a lot because Marc had the potential to go away alone and that would have made it another type of race.”

Marquez and Lorenzo half-laughed off the accusations of their collusion to deny Rossi his title in the moment. Not many people with even a shred of understanding of motorcycle racing believe Rossi’s Phillip Island conspiracy. What he saw - or, whoever fed this thought into his head saw - was Marquez cooling off his front tyre to go for a final push on the lead, which he did successfully.

This has very much become MotoGP’s ‘Christ on a piece of toast’ moment. But what those who wish to believe saw was simply racing. If anything, as tyre pressure has become a recurring talking point in MotoGP today, it makes Marquez’s actions in Australia make even more sense.

Had it been left at that in that press conference, it’s likely things wouldn’t have escalated as they did. But Rossi wasn’t content with his first poke at the bear. Later, he questioned Marquez’s childhood admiration of him - something that cut the Spaniard deeply.

Marquez got his revenge, though. Rossi’s nervous start in the grand prix put him in the firing line of a Marquez who very much disregarded his status within the title fight to ensure the Yamaha rider reaped what he sowed. Watching Marquez’s overtakes in what was a brilliant scrap between the pair, his Honda is making shapes that would have sent pretty much everyone else on the grid into the gravel trap.

Read more: Inside MotoGP's craziest weekend

The battle succeeded in upsetting Rossi, who could see Pedrosa and Lorenzo escaping up the road. There would be no title victory that day, but Rossi ensured on Thursday at Sepang that he would never get a chance at one again.

Rossi’s frustrations boiled over at the seventh lap. The pair ran side-by-side through to the penultimate corner: Marquez on the outside, Rossi on his inside. Rossi runs Marquez out of room, looking over at the Honda rider as he does so, before some kind of contact results in the latter crashing out.

What has become known as ‘the kick’ stunned the fervent crowd at Sepang into silence. Honda claims it had data to prove Rossi kicked Marquez. Even Marquez still believes that is what happened. Honestly, to this day, it’s impossible (indeed, libellous) to say for certain that Marquez was kicked. There is a jerking of Rossi’s left leg at the moment Marquez goes down, but Marquez also visibly leans his body on Rossi’s leg.

Rossi admitted later that he did intentionally want to run Marquez out of room to stop his attacks, but causing a collision was not his aim. The stewards awarded him three penalty points, which brought his total for the season up to four and earned him - under the old penalty points system - a back-of-the-grid start for the Valencia finale.

This only heightened claims from the Rossi camp and his wider fanbase that he was truly a marked man. And that Dorna was also in on the whole thing. Official global tinfoil sales reports are, unfortunately, not available for this period.

The reality is, Rossi again harmed himself. He earned his first penalty point at Misano for slow riding in qualifying in front of team-mate Lorenzo. Without that, the Sepang penalty points would have been inconsequential.

Backlash on the run-up to Valencia from all sides involved was nasty. Tensions within Yamaha were at their worst after Lorenzo tried to get Rossi thrown out of the Sepang results. Riders had to be warned by Dorna to be even more cautious when battling the championship duo at Valencia. Fans were even reaching out to riders further down the grid to move out of Rossi’s way as he came from 26th.

Lorenzo, ultimately, won the race and the championship. Rossi fought to fourth, but didn’t have the pace to do much better than that even without his grid penalty. Yamaha’s muted title celebrations alienated Lorenzo, ultimately leading him down the path to leaving the brand in 2017 for Ducati. Rossi didn’t turn up at the awards gala and maintained his position that he was ‘robbed’. To this day, he hasn’t let it go.

MotoGP’s stewarding was overhauled in the aftermath, with the FIM stewards panel formed to leave race direction to its primary function. Marquez, meanwhile, has just won his seventh title, six years on from his last and five removed from serious injury problems. He now matches Rossi’s career haul of championships across all classes.

Rossi won his last grand prix in 2017 and retired at the end of 2021 to take up car racing full-time.

The further away from Sepang 2015 we get, the more Rossi’s public perception appears to be shifting, too. MotoGP is constantly gaining new fans, and social media these days is showing a general dislike for Rossi based entirely on what happened 10 years ago.

And Rossi has done himself no favours there, either. Appearing on Andrea Migno’s podcast last year, he said, “Never has any world-class rider battled in a race to make another rider lose. Never has anyone been so dirty.”

Rossi has achieved so much in his career. Not only are his on-track statistics something forever to be admired, but his work off-track in raising a new generation of Italian talents has given rise to the likes of Pecco Bagnaia and Marco Bezzecchi. In car racing, Rossi has a genuine ability to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans if he can maintain his current level. And as a person, Rossi has generally erred on the more liberal side of life.

But his inability to let the past lie continues to damage his reputation irreparably. With Marquez mounting one of the greatest comebacks in sporting history, Rossi’s insistence on continuing to stoke this feud just makes him look more and more like a bitter old man. And Valentino Rossi is so much better than that.

Ten years on from Sepang 2015, the question that persists now is: just how much did he actually believe in his own claims? Was this something he believes with all honesty, or a gamble that backfired so spectacularly that there has been no option but to stand by his position?

It’s unlikely we’ll ever truly know the answer to that. Nor why he actually said all of those things in the first place. Rossi is famed for using the media to his advantage to sting his rivals: Casey Stoner, Max Biaggi, Sete Gibernau, and Jorge Lorenzo can all attest to this.

After all this time, perhaps there is only one genuine conclusion to draw: The pressure of the title fight got to Rossi. After all, the only time he’d taken a MotoGP title fight down to the wire before 2015 was 2006 against Nicky Hayden - and he lost that one due to a crash in Valencia.

Perhaps, then, these conspiracy claims were those made by a legend - 36 at the time - drowning in his own self-doubt because he knew that the opportunity to win an eighth MotoGP world title was unlikely to come again.

Regardless, time continues to look unfavourably upon Rossi the further from 25 October 2015 we get. And that is a bitter shame…