Rossi to re-sign with Yamaha before season opener

Valentino Rossi

“It’s only the first day, so it’s nothing," said Valentino Rossi, on the first day of his 23rd season of Grand Prix racing.

True, lap times from the first of three days of testing here at Sepang – topped by Repsol Honda’s Dani Pedrosa – don’t necessarily mean anything when it comes to predicting what will happen during the 2018 MotoGP world championship. But in fact today wasn’t nothing at all, for the MotoGP championship as a whole, because something very big happened during Rossi’s media debrief.

The nine-time world champion had been hanging around at the top of the times throughout the afternoon, suggesting that he wasn’t in the same hellhole in which he found himself this time last year.

He didn’t even need to speak to tell us what he felt. He looked happy, upbeat, but more than anything relieved, confident that the worst season of his MotoGP career (apart from those two years at Ducati) is well and truly behind him. And you know what that means.

“I have the motivation, I want to try to continue," he said.

So, will Rossi sign a new contract with Yamaha? “First, I want to do all the preseason tests, because I want to understand if I’m competitive, if the bike is competitive and also if I have enough power to do all the tests, then I will sign."

So there you have it, Rossi looks 99.9 per cent certain to continue into 2019, when he will be 40 years old. What’s that sound? It’s the sound of champagne corks popping inside Dorna HQ.

At speed in Malaysia

Rossi’s problems last year were due to mistakes made by Yamaha, mostly in chassis design, but also in electronics set-up. The factory has learned its lesson and created a chassis that owes much to the 2016 design, which Rossi loved.

“I can ride the bike more naturally," he said. “I can feel the front better and when I push hard, the lap times come."

Rossi ended the day sixth fastest, about nine tenths down on Pedrosa, but that didn’t worry him, because he stopped early, when many other riders were putting in their fastest laps.

“The first day of testing is always a disaster, physically, so I wanted to save my energy for the next two days," he said. Max Oxley/MotorsportMagazine