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Battered by injuries and lacking confidence in his ability to mesh with the Honda RC213V race bike, five-time world champion Jorge Lorenzo announced his retirement from racing today.
"This will be my last race in MotoGP," Lorenzo said today at a news conference prior to this weekend's final round of the season in Valencia, Spain.
Lorenzo won two championships in the 250 class before the four-stroke era and then won MotoGP world championships on the Yamaha factory team in 2010, 2012 and 2015. He switched to Ducati, where it took him more than a year to adapt to the different bike. By the time he was winning races on the Ducati, his relationship with the company had already soured. For 2019, he signed a two-year deal to ride for Repsol Honda, creating what appeared to be a dream team for Honda, with him and Marc Márquez together. But it became a bad dream for Lorenzo.
Things started poorly and got worse. He was injured in the off season and even suffered a rare mechanical DNF. But a disappointing season turned to something much darker at Assen, where he crashed and fractured two vertebrae. It was one of those crashes where a difference of a millimeter could have meant not just a career-ending injury, but a life-changing one. Some of the photos of him tumbling through the gravel in Assen were eerily similar to photos of the crash that ended Wayne Rainey's career.
Lorenzo recently confided in an interview with Mat Oxley that he was still in pain from the Assen injury, and he could not ride to his full potential with that feeling, because it prevented him from having the confidence he needed. While Lorenzo struggled with the Honda before Assen, the crash changed everything and he was never the same after Assen.
My blog with a few thoughts on Lorenzo's retirement and how riders are undone by one or two moments that wake them up to the fact that they're not immortalhttps://t.co/yYIAQlnncC
— Mat Oxley (@matoxley) November 14, 2019
Many of Lorenzo's wins were races where he got out in front and set a metronomic pace, turning in lap after lap within a couple of tenths of a second that no one could match. His precise, high-corner-speed style of riding requires supreme confidence in the front end of the motorcycle. He was lacking that confidence before Assen and totally without afterwards. In the second half of the season, he struggled to finish in the top 15 to earn points while his teammate won race after race and another world championship on the RC213V.
Of course in the competitive world of MotoGP, before one body is cold, another is thinking of taking his leathers. The opening at Repsol Honda may be a great opportunity for Johann Zarco, who left the KTM team before the season ended and has filled in for the injured Taka Nakagami on the LCR Honda team. Despite doubts about how his riding style would mesh with the Honda, Zarco finished ahead of Lorenzo in Australia, his first race on the bike.
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