Although he has two MotoGP titles, Casey Stoner’s story feels unfinished. His retirement at such a young age always left that feeling that he could have given more of himself, that he could have marked an era that, perhaps, could have given us duels that we never saw against Marc Márquez, and taken those he had with Lorenzo, Rossi or Pedrosa to another level… But that is something we will never know.
What we do know is that since he retired, Stoner has not felt the need to return and that, furthermore, his physical conditions with that medical problem that has not yet been determined have not made him really want to do so either. Even so, he has remained linked to motorcycles and MotoGP, and that is why he was at Goodwood where he was able to talk with his GPOne colleagues and leave some pearls.
The most striking thing is the way in which the Australian speaks clearly about what MotoGP is and what each person is worth within the championship, which, in reality, is nothing more than a meat grinder. A place where they use you and squeeze you and when you no longer provide them with what they expect, they simply push you away.
So much so that Stoner himself feels that way, and that is why when asked about the gratitude he received from Pecco Bagnaia at the last WDW and whether or not he wants to return, he did not hold back in the slightest:
“It’s my fault, but I put in too much effort and often didn’t get the answers I expected in return. There seems to be no reward when you do things like this. It was a great honor for me to hear Pecco thank me for this and I did it for no other reason than to help him. But I won’t do anything else for anything in the future. I won’t give away my knowledge for anything. Unfortunately I’ve done it too many times in the past and they just send you away when they’ve had your knowledge and make you disappear. I will not make the same mistake again, I will not go to help for no reason and I will not do it for nothing. This is the main reason for me.”
This response, however, was the appetizer to the messages he continued to leave during the talk, in which he also commented on how difficult it is right now for an Australian driver to find what is necessary to reach the World Championship, and how little he wants to give up his home life in exchange for nothing:
“Motorcycling in Australia is really difficult now, there is nothing. There is no budget to do anything, it is all very complicated, including wanting to help someone. And the problem is always the same, it takes a lot of time and I don’t want to continue taking up my time and energy for nothing when I have my family to dedicate myself to. I will wait for the right opportunity and then maybe I will dedicate myself to helping. But I will not give my knowledge for free to people who then turn their backs on me and think it’s fine that way. Now things are different for me.”
Stoner doesn’t like the idea of a street circuit
The finishing touch to Stoner’s words came with the disappearance of Phillip Island from the championship and the problems, which Marc Márquez has also recently made clear, regarding aerodynamics: “The direction that MotoGP is taking is to make the same mistakes that were made in F1. We are having the same problems with aerodynamics, which is becoming more and more invasive, there are more and more devices on the bikes that we don’t need. F1 realized these things a few years ago and, in any case, it is still very technologically advanced, but it is not even comparable to the way in which in MotoGP they keep adding things. There has to be some limitation.”
To top it all off, our colleagues asked him about the urban circuit. Far from political correctness, he said it very clearly, there is no urban circuit that is safe for a MotoGP: “It seems that they will try to do the race on a street circuit. And in my opinion there is no way to make a street circuit safe enough. We have seen what happened to Bezzecchi in Assen, when he almost reached the wall. Even if we have tracks with huge loopholes, you still reach the wall. How is it possible that it would not happen on a street circuit?”
Stoner was a breath of fresh air when he arrived and remains so now, almost 15 years after leaving racing. He still has the same character, the one that almost no one has in MotoGP anymore to raise their voice.
