Marquez reopens wounds: “Tactical to be Rossi’s friend, but I’m not like that”

Perhaps MotoGP’s fiercest feud continues verbally to this day, and new insight is included in the Honda rider’s book ‘Being Marc Marquez: This Is How I Win My Race’.

Marquez looked back at the 2018 Argentina MotoGP when he knocked Rossi off his Yamaha, one of many notorious collisions between them.

Marquez admitted he considered playing nice in a book extract via Marca: "I definitely thought, 'you know what? Forget it'. 

“He has a lot of fans and it meant antagonising them, but what choice did I have? 

“Being unfaithful to myself? Of course not. 

“I hate pretending, being dishonest. 

“For tactical reasons, it would have been better to pretend to be Valentino's friend, but I'm not like that.”

Marquez also mentioned his infamous pass of Rossi at the Corkscrew, at Laguna Seca, in his rookie year of 2013.

He went unpunished for running off track while overtaking, and even Rossi admitted the similarities to his own move against Casey Stoner from 2008.

"I would be lying if I said that I had planned that manoeuvre,” Marquez wrote in his book. 

“There was no intention or genius. I don't care who was in front of me at all. 

“And I didn't want to fight, I just wanted to overtake as fast as possible.”

Surely the nastiest moments between Rossi and Marquez were in 2015.

Rossi was publicly accusing Marquez of trying to assist Jorge Lorenzo in winning the title.

In Malaysia, Marquez fell when they clashed and later accused Rossi of kicking him.

Rossi lost out on the title to Lorenzo at the final round.

"The battle between Valentino and I got so bad that we lost respect for each other,” Marquez wrote. 

“He had been my hero and in a few months he became [a rival] for me, and he remains so to this day. 

“Between Australia and Malaysia in 2015 he accused me of absurd things and in the press conference it went too far. 

“In no case was it a Spanish conspiracy against the Italian.”

Marquez explained his mentality to rivals in MotoGP: "If I have to go through a wall, I go through it. It's that easy. I'm completely unwilling. 

“If someone has been better than me, I respect it. But so the rival is not confused, that's not friendship.”