MotoGP: Should Ducati and Yamaha Have Been More Patient with Jorge Lorenzo?

The five-time world champion has spoken again about some specific moments from the end of his MotoGP career.

Jorge Lorenzo is a legend of the World Championship with his five titles split between the 250 class (two) and MotoGP (three). He had major rivalries with Valentino Rossi, Dani Pedrosa, Casey Stoner, and Marc Marquez. His career ended in 2019, after a very complicated year with the Repsol Honda team. Between struggles to adapt to the RC213V and injuries, it was a real nightmare; the decision to retire was difficult, but at that moment he couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. He was 32, so he could have raced a few more seasons in MotoGP, but he preferred to stop.

Interviewed by the podcast Fast & Curious, the five-time world champion spoke about what happened in his final year as a MotoGP rider: "2019 was very difficult, and without that decision to go to Honda, if Ducati had been a bit more patient and renewed my contract, I would definitely have continued racing for another three years. And maybe with a few more titles".

Lorenzo believes Ducati should have been more patient with him, instead of writing him off prematurely and choosing to bet on Danilo Petrucci for 2019. At a certain point in 2018 the results started to come, but a little late compared to what the Borgo Panigale factory expected. And the Majorcan had also experienced difficult moments mentally: "Maybe it was the first time in my life I came close to depression - he explains - because I didn’t feel appreciated by the top teams. Ducati, which had given me the best contract in MotoGP history, didn’t even offer me one ten times lower. To return to Yamaha I would have had to join the new Petronas satellite team, and I didn’t want to do that. I was sad, I just wanted to go to the hotel to sleep, I didn’t want to train."

Despite a complicated situation, Jorge managed to pull through: "Then I went from that sort of depression to finishing second in the Montmelò test and winning at Mugello. Days earlier I had signed with Honda. I went from depression to euphoria in five days". Unfortunately, at the time he didn’t imagine that going to Honda would be the grave of his MotoGP career.

As a five-time world champion, Lorenzo joined the Repsol Honda team confident he could also be competitive with the RC213V. The adaptation was complicated, and trying to copy what his teammate Marc Marquez was doing is almost impossible. In the first seven Grands Prix, no top 10 finishes, then at Assen a very bad crash at Turn 7 in Free Practice 1: fracture of the sixth thoracic vertebra. A serious injury that also made him miss the GPs at Sachsenring, Brno, and Spielberg.

The Majorcan revealed what he thought after the crash at the TT Circuit: "When I got up I couldn’t breathe and I realized I was really hurt. I thought that if I managed to walk again and be okay, I would quit. I made a total shift in mindset". He returned at Silverstone, but the Assen smash had made him lose confidence in the possibility of being competitive with Honda. Retiring at the end of the 2019 MotoGP season was a natural decision, almost a relief, because he no longer wanted to put his body and life at risk.

On January 30, 2020, his return to Yamaha as a MotoGP test rider was announced, without ruling out the possibility of racing again as a wild card. But that was the year of the Covid-19 emergency, with MotoGP plans upended and wild cards canceled. Lorenzo did few tests, then the experience with the Iwata manufacturer ended for good: "As soon as I retired - he recalls - Yamaha called me to be a test rider, but at that moment I was living a completely relaxed lifestyle. I’ve always been a perfectionist and I had 18 years of stress and crashes behind me; I was very demanding with myself. I wasn’t really focused on my role as a Yamaha tester. It was a mistake on their part not to keep me, because I think I could have given a valuable contribution to the bike’s development. But they made that decision and I accepted it".

Yamaha hired Cal Crutchlow from 2021. Surely someone like Lorenzo had the experience to be a major asset for the Japanese manufacturer, which, however, made a different choice. We cannot know how it would have gone if they had kept the Spaniard in their test team. There was a moment when a move to Aprilia was also discussed, again as a test rider, but the deal did not materialize.