Valentino Rossi is now a father, a race car driver, a team director with his VR46 label, and above all he is a retired Grand Prix driver. A world that he marked by the freshness of his beginnings and his period of domination that he liked to make felt by adversaries who were often seen as enemies. Among his works remaining in the paddock are victory celebrations. The majority still laugh about it but there is one who has never been amused. It is Casey Stoner who remains unmoved by the evocation of these events marking the victorious moment. And for good reason since, according to him, they didn’t just mark that…
With time passing and comments pouring out, we are not at the point of unraveling the fleece of a Valentino Rossi imperial but its gilding is losing shine. On InSella.it, Casey Stoner thus remembers these post-race sketches of the victorious Doctor, subsequently imitated by the European drivers, and which he never understood as a neutral and gratuitous approach.
He says thus about the actions of Valentino Rossi : " everything had to be planned, starting with the outfit. There was really a lot of preparation to be just a small party ". Behind this celebration of success there was a message that the Australian outsider deciphered: “ the goal was to show the opponent whether or not they had lost the match. It affected me a little, but not so much for the celebrations as such but for the way things went down on the podium. It felt like the winner won the world championship and not just a race ».
Casey Stoner was not like Valentino Rossi and it disturbed Lorenzo and Pedrosa
These things were not part of his psychology. So much so that he took the exact opposite view: “ These mind games surprised me because they were unusual, but I learned a lot from them ". And he adds: “ I was happy for my opponents when they won, even if they couldn't understand ».
Two of them in particular did not understand his point of view, as Stoner himself reported: “ I remember Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa asking me why I was so sincerely happy with their victories. They were suspicious. He believed in a psychological game. But I was happy for my opponents ". Quite simply.
