“To me, as much as I wouldn’t have made such a call, the fact that the call has been made leaves me very much at ease,” Burgess says. “Having the one-year contract continue is not a bad thing. The more I get used to it (a year on full pay with no immediate responsibility) the more comfortable I become about it all.”
MotoGP’s final round at Valencia caught the motorcycle world’s imagination. Spanish teenager Marc Marquez was poised to become an unlikely world champion in his rookie year. Wily defending champion Jorge Lorenzo was planning a desperate last-ditch defence. But the big news was MotoGP folk hero Valentino Rossi’s very public divorce from “JB”, the straight-shooting crew chief who had guided him to seven of his nine world championship titles.
From the outside it seemed like a spur-of-the-moment decision handled in an embarrassingly clumsy way – Burgess sees it differently.
“Certainly I was blindsided by the timing of the decision, as I said at the time, but there was a basic difference between the way Valentino and I intended to continue on in MotoGP,” he says.
“He was keen to continue to perhaps 2016-2017 and we discussed this but I was not prepared to commit so far ahead.
“I was more than happy with a year-by-year contract so he probably felt a lack of commitment. I thought that, for me, it was the honest way to go forward.”
Rumours had been swirling around the Italian media in the lead-up to Valencia, forcing Rossi into making the announcement nobody wanted to believe on the Thursday before the race. Surely that made the last MotoGP a bitter-sweet occasion for Burgess?
“Not at all,” he says. “It would have been terrible to have run that last race and then had Valentino call me aside and say, ‘thanks, but I’ll see you later’.”
Burgess says he called the press conference after Rossi’s Thursday’s statement to clear the air.
“I didn’t want a trail of reporters tapping on the back of the shed all weekend to get my side of things,” he says.
That left Burgess free to concentrate on his last race with Rossi. Sadly, it pretty much summed up the season.
“When Lorenzo slowed the race down I hoped Valentino would be able to seize the chance and add another dimension by providing Marquez with a challenge he wasn’t expecting,” says Burgess.
But Rossi was unable to help his team-mate defend his points tally and remained stuck in a tight little group of Honda Gresini’s Alvaro Bautista and Marquez’s Honda team-mate Dani Pedrosa.
When Pedrosa dispatched Rossi and Bautista, Lorenzo realised he was on his own and no-one could stop Marquez cruising to a world title as the youngest-ever champion and the first rookie winner since Kenny Roberts in 1978.
