It must be hard to be Filippo Preziosi these days.
Your brainchild, that unique machine that you’ve nutured from drawing board up (okay, a CAD/CAM) is being massacred by fans this year with everyone becoming a wannabe motorcyle engineer who believes that they know how to fix your love child.
Go back to steel, stay with the carbon fibre, switch to aluminum, change the engine configuration, shorten this, make that longer, everything under the sun has been suggested all because Valentino Rossi can’t wrap his head, nor adjust his riding style around the quirky Desmosedici GP machine and to ride it to its full potential, but as matter of fact neither has anyone else, sans one rider.
Last season Casey Stoner was blamed for Ducati’s results (they’d commit matricide to have the same this year); no one actually believed that the Ducati could have some sort of basic structural defect, but this year the Italian manufacturer is taking the fall and are not enjoying it, and it looks like they’re beginning to sorely miss their former rider.
So when Preziosi says to an Italian sports daily that “absurdly I’d like to see Stoner ride our new machine (2012) and see what he thinks” you’re bound to get some sort of backlash, and it didn’t take long for a piqued Rossi, who has basically kept his cool under the difficult circumstances retort with “I’d also be happy if Stoner tried it, but then I’d like to try the Honda.
”The hyped ‘marketing marriage of the decade’ has become a dysfunctional family and while they’re still not along the lines of irreconcilable differences, they’re going to need marriage counseling pretty soon.