MotoGP veteran Andrea Dovizioso says he’s prepared to call time on his career at the end of this season after a painfully uncompetitive campaign with RNF Yamaha.
The three-time championship runner-up has returned just four points finishes this season and is 22nd in the riders standings. He’s tied on 10 points with straight-from-Moto3 teammate Darryn Binder and is ahead of only rookies Remy Gardner and Raúl Fernandez among his full-time rivals.
It’s a dramatic comedown from being the next-best rider to Marc Márquez in 2017–19 and his fourth-place finish in 2020 before cutting ties with Ducati at the end of that year for a half-season sabbatical in 2021.
Returning full-time with backmarker RNF this year and struggling for motivation in the twilight of his career, Dovizioso told the MotoGP website that he’s ready to call it a day more than 21 years after first joining the grand prix circuit.
“For sure I will not race,” he said. “There is no reason to.
“I always say that if I cannot be competitive, I don’t want to be here, because you really don’t enjoy to stay there and struggle.
“At the end you have to push, and if you don’t feel you are good on some things, there is no reason, especially after 20 years.
“I never tried to have a place for next year, because I think you have to be in the middle of a project and have a big push because everybody’s so competitive in this moment.
“I’m completely relaxed about that — I already did half a year last year out of racing, so I already tested [it]. I’m okay about that.
“For sure I didn’t want to finish the season like this, because it’s so nice to be competitive — when you feel you can make a great lap time, fight for a good position, as always I did — but nobody has everything under control, and this can happen.”
Dovizioso is on track to record the least competitive full-time season in his two-decade international career He’s never scored fewer than 42 points — his current trajectory would have him end the season with around 20 points — and only in his rookie year did he finish a campaign lower than eighth in the standings.
“It is a completely different story for my career, so that’s the difficult thing,” he said. “To really not be there, it’s the first time for me.
“It’s difficult to manage, especially as practice by practice, race by race, it becomes more the reality.
“Every race is a really difficult race because every time we start on the back and everything becomes even more difficult.
“In practice already we struggle a bit to be in the middle of the group, and when you start from the back in the race, everything is worse.”
But the Italian has been vocal all season about the role the bike has played in his sudden demise.
While Fabio Quartararo is using the same M1 to lead the championship standings, the other three Yamaha riders have struggled to score even minor points.
Factory teammate Franco Morbidelli is 19th with just 25 points, while Biner and Dovizioso are 21st and 22nd.
“I think the Yamaha in this moment is quite unusual,” he said. “If you have a really good feeling, you can turn the bike and brake very well, but there are some other parts that are not that good.
“If you don’t ride like Fabio, it’s very difficult to be competitive.
“If Fabio is winning, there is a reason, so this means there is a possibility to be fast. But if the other riders are complaining — like in the last years, with other teammates — it means there are not many ways to be competitive like in the past.
“For example, the way [Morbidelli and I] ride is completely opposite. Franco uses more angle every time and for a longer time, he’s not braking hard — he’s completely the opposite of me, but the results are very similar.
“When there is just one bike [winning], this means there is maybe only one way to be competitive.”
While Quartararo has complained the bike’s main deficiency is power, Dovizioso has protested that grip is the problem, even insisting the Frenchman might feel the same had he ridden for any other manufacturer in his MotoGP career.
He pointed to his competitive season racing for Tech3 Yamaha — between stints racing for Honda and Ducati — as proof his riding style wasn’t unadaptable.
“Fortunately I raced [for Yamaha] in 2012, because if I didn’t race in 2012 with Yamaha, everybody could say, ‘Ah, with Yamaha you can’t be competitive’. But it’s not the truth; it’s just for a different reason.
“It’s because MotoGP has changed. The bike has changed, the competitors have changed, the way you have to ride the bike is different — there are a lot of big and small reasons, and if you put everything together, it happens what is happening to me now.
“MotoGP has changed a lot — a lot. In the past, 10 years ago normally always the same riders were on top. It didn’t matter the bike, more or less they were able to stay there.
“Now it’s different because the mechanical parts are a bit more important than in the past. Everybody is at a good level, and small things can affect a lot.”
Dovizioso said the struggles of Yamaha’s three riders should serve as a warning to the Iwata manufacturer.
It would be the first team to fall into the trap of developing too strongly in the direction of one superstar rider. Honda got itself far further up that road before Marc Márquez broke his arm in 2020, and it was only when no other rider was able to adequately hold the fort in his absence that the depth of its bike problems became clear.
Dovizioso predicted Yamaha was on track to meet the same fate if it didn’t act quickly.
“If you look now, all the Japanese [manufacturers] are struggling,” he said.
“For sure Yamaha won last year. If you look at who won the title, again we’re speaking just about one [rider].
“It’s always related to the match between the rider and the bike, but if you look at the second riders, they are very far. That means that the base of the bike is a bit difficult and particular.
“It was Honda in the last eight years, and I think it is Yamaha now.”
RNF will switch from Yamaha to Aprilia bikes next season but is yet to confirm its rider line-up.
Rumours have linked Miguel Oliveira to Dovizioso’s seat, while Darryn Binder’s fate on the second bike rests on whether Raúl Fernandez can be extracted from Tech3 KTM, the Spaniard known to be of keen interest to RNF principal Razlan Razali.
Binder, who came straight from Moto3 to MotoGP, has spoken about being open to dropping down to Moto2 if the premier class silly season locks him out of the market.
MotoGP returns from the mid-season break with the British Grand Prix on 5–7 August.
