Rossi's overtake at Argentina wasn't actually clean.
He made contact with MM in the middle of the corner. In fact, it looked almost as if he threw himself against the side of MM's RCV.
Rossi did a similar think to Nicky Hayden at Phillip Island in 2010 I believe it was coming out of Lukey Heights.
My point is VR deliberately engages in contact at times to make an overtake because nothing will unsettle another rider more than contact. It's happened far too many times with Rossi for it to simply be just a racing incident.
Going back to Argentina, go to 1:22 on the following video.
You will see Rossi overtake going into the corner, MM cuts to the inside to try and retake the position. All of a sudden you see Rossi bang into MM..he sort of lunges up slightly off of the right footpeg. Once he made contact, even if he somehow didn't know MM was there, he would have been aware of it. As soon as he exits the turn, he immediately chops over to the right across MM's front wheel taking MM out.
Sorry, the Rossi apologists can .... off with the claims that it wasn't intentional. It got claimed he was on the racing line and he was setting up for the next corner, blah, blah. No, that move was as intentional as the Sepang incident.
I said it months ago, well before all of the late season ........, that it was a dirty ....... move.
Just watch the initial contact of Rossi LUNGING towards MM. There was no reason to even make that kind of a movement.
I can't watch your video here in Australia, so I'm not sure what angle it's from.
The ones Gaz posted show Rossi pass on the brakes as MM was lining up for the right hander at Turn 5, then in the second half of the hairpin MM tries to come inside Rossi, and his fairing hits VRs body/knee at the apex of the corner. This causes Rossi's Yam to twitch and drift away from the apex allowing MM to get alongside on the short run down to turn 6, but not past. This is the initial contact and you are saying VR instigated it?!
JPSLotus said:
All of a sudden you see Rossi bang into MM..he sort of lunges up slightly off of the right footpeg
Really? Maybe your video shows a different angle, but watching Gaz's, especially frame by frame, I cannot see how you think VR instigated that. Firstly VR was cleanly and completely past into the first part of the hairpin. That is the clean pass I was referring to.
MM then tries to come back up the inside. MM's bike hitting VR causes the lunge you describe - you can see VR's foot on the left footpeg bounce at the point of contact and then the Yamaha's trajectory changes, drifting away from the racing line as it would if pushed wide by the contact. No-one at the time analysed this part of the incident and said it was VR's intiation of contact, because the evidence simply isn't there.
You say MM had enough corner speed to pass without the contact, but he was on the outside for the next corner - he have needed to have
huge amounts more corner speed to pull that one off from where he was, cleanly, and the videos do not bear this out.
After that VR casts a very rapid glance to the side where he had just felt the impact from Márquez, and sees MM drifting back behind him. I would guess that he assumed MM would tuck in behind from there, but instead MM doesn't. For VR to have planned the 2nd contact he needed MM to do something unusual, ie leave his front wheel level with Rossi's rear, in VRs blind spot, knowing Rossi needed to drift right in order to follow the racing line and aim for the apex of Turn6.
According to David Emmett on MotoMatters at the time :
Was Rossi's line out of Turn 5 unusual? Not particularly. In the early laps, Jorge Lorenzo had taken the exact same line, jinking left at the exact same spot to set up for Turn 6. On the lap before the crash, Rossi does exactly the same thing, taking the same, slightly wider line on the approach to Turn 6. What's more, Rossi had just had his bike unsettled by the first collision with Márquez, and so was perhaps not as free to choose his line as if he was riding on his own.
If you are basing your whole argument of VR being a dirty rider and hence planning on taking MM down in Sepang, on VR causing the initial contact in Argentina, I think your agrument is, at the very least, flawed. If you are referring to the 2nd contact, then there is no real way of knowing if VR deliberately moved into the space MM was in, but it's a risk that VR didn't need to take as the ensuing tangle could have taken both bikes down. I think both were racing incidents, TBH.
Deliberately causing a rider to crash is very rare as AntG says, and there is no evidence that VR has done, or tried to do, this before, so it's a hard argument to make for either Sepang or Argentina IMO.
Finally, you state making contact during an overtake is something that has "happened far too many times with Rossi for it to simply be just a racing incident." with a reference to him doing so with Hayden in Australia, 2010. I can find nothing on the net about that - I remember the battle for 3rd in the final laps, but nothing about any incident, contact or controversy.
If it really has happened so many times, as you state, surely the evidence would be easy to present. It does happen as "rubbing is racing", but personally I don't recall VR being any more likely to cause contact on an overtake than any other rider out there, now, or in the last 30 years
