Ezpeleta candid about Valentino Rossi and Ducati’s dominance: ‘I never would have thought so’

Carmelo Ezpeleta speaks out on Valentino Rossi and Ducati’s dominance

Dorna chief and MotoGP patron Carmelo Ezpeleta took stock of the situation in an interview with Motorcycle News. Ezpeleta returned to the decline in ratings and visibility after Valentino Rossi’s farewell and Marc Marquez’s troubles: “Even when people say F1 is boring and MotoGP is incredible, we are still second. The reality is that F1 has a huge audience and the public is interested. Our show is very good, so we have to sell it better. We can copy some things from F1, but some things we can’t.”

“Our goal is to be at the pinnacle, we have to adapt to attract new audiences as much as possible, but without losing our philosophy. Is there a lack of champions? After Valentino we had Stoner, Pedrosa and Lorenzo, who were young and therefore would be his successors. However, because he was here for so long, they retired early. They left and Marc Márquez arrived, but during the pandemic Rossi retired and Márquez got injured.”

“These years are very balanced, we’ve had eight different race winners, but I don’t know if it’s better this way, or it’s better to have an outlier, which has pros and cons.”

The last two years have seen the dominance of Ducati and the collapse of once-dominant Honda and Yamaha: “I never thought that would happen. The Europeans looked at the Japanese and said, ‘We want to beat them.’ They took an incredible step, and the Japanese have realized now that they have to change their system to get back to winning.”