MotoGP Silverstone: ‘MotoGP is now speed not strategy’ - Dovizioso

Andrea Dovizioso came back from the MotoGP summer break to announce his retirement from racing after two decades.

A stalwart of the Grand Prix paddock since his 125cc debut in 2001, Dovizioso is set to round out his career at his home race - the San Marino GP at the Misano World Circuit, Marco Simoncelli - with six races still to run of 2022. The Italian will hand his WithU RNF Yamaha over to the Japanese factory’s test rider Cal Crutchlow to see out the year.

“First of all, I would like to thank Yamaha and the team WithU because they give me a big support and they understood me so that this has been very important for me,” Dovizioso said from the Silverstone paddock on Thursday evening. “I was relaxed to speak with them about my situation and I’m happy to have a good relation with them and be able to take this tough decision because at the end, after 20 years is always tough to take this kind of decisions. But it’s okay and I relax and is the moment to take this decision.

“As a rider, when you are doing the practice, the race and you are not able to be where you want, your mind start thinking about these things and you realise is the moment, so this is the reason why I took the decision.”

When asked why he took the decision to end the season mid-way through, rather than just complete the season, the Italian was honest about his approach.

“It’s not so nice when as a rider you think too much about these things, not just be focused on the racing. When you don’t feel that competitive you start to think too much about that. So I ended up feeling to take this decision. And with that feeling I started thinking about Misano would be the right race, final race, my last home race to do, and finish there with a party and big smile