Livio Suppo: background on Valentino Rossi’s two great rivals

Former Honda team manager reveals, “We wanted Stoner and Marquez together in HRC.”

Former Honda team manager Livio Suppo in an interview with Mowmag revealed a backstory on Marc Marquez and Casey Stoner: “If Stoner had not retired? The plan for 2013 was to have a team with Casey and Marc. As I said before, it’s hard to give an answer. Marc was very strong that year but he also had the injuries of his main title rivals, Jorge and Dani. That said he was still a rider capable of winning at the second race in MotoGP, of those riders one is born every hundred years. Surely it would have been more difficult to do what he did in 2014, with the ten wins in a row, because Casey was Casey. What we can say for sure is that the fans would have enjoyed a good show.”

Regrets about Stoner: “Considering that he retired when he was 27 years old, in my opinion he could have easily stayed competitive for another 4-5 years. There is no telling how many world championships he would have won, because in any case in the meantime Marc came along. Between the two, Marc would have come out on top, because I think Casey would have suffered from this more easygoing approach. (…) In 2008 for example, after Laguna Seca, if he had been calm we would have won that world championship as well, and instead he got a little bit angry because Valentino could do everything and nobody told him anything, or at least that was what he thought and that influenced him for the rest of the season.”