MotoGP: Schwantz slams lack of respect among riders

1993 MotoGP world champion Kevin Schwantz has hit out at the current world championship grid, branding them as disrespectful and dangerous after a series of high-profile incidents that has seen on-track clashes between racer.

In the Suzuki garage at the German Grand Prix when Alex Rins was knocked off by Pol Espargaro on the first lap of the race at the Sachsenring, the Texan says that unless serious action is taken by series bosses, someone is going to get seriously hurt sooner rather than later.

“They need to stop thinking about making the next pass and start thinking about what’s going to happen if they can’t make it. How many people are going to be affected? The scary part of it all is the look on Alex Rins’ face after Sachsenring, because he was that fucking close to running over Espargaro’s head. It’s that close all the time, it’s dangerous all the time, and if you’re not 100% certain that you’re going to make a move stick, then wait. It won’t be the last race in the world if you don’t make the pass, but it could well be if you do something stupid.”

And while he too was both the victim and the deliverer of plenty of harsh moves during the glory days of the late 80s and early 90s, the former Suzuki reckons that back in the day there was a very different approach to making an overtake.

“Everything is so close now that you can see the guys coming off the corners thinking ‘I’m coming off this corner wide open and I am not going to shut off if I see you coming in on me – I’m going to hook your handlebar and dump you on the ground first.’ Back in the day, you’d just give them some room. Maybe you’d show someone coming out of a corner that you planned to slowly run them out of race track if they didn’t back off, but not contact and locking handlebars and falling down while going fast.”

And while race control has tried to implement stricter penalties in the aftermath of Valentino Rossi and Marc Marc Marquez’ high-profile clash in Argentina earlier this year, Schwantz says he sees what’s causing the current wave of dangerous riding – and knows how to fix it.

“There’s no real communication between riders now apart from the Thursday press conference and then the few guys who are on the front row, and even then, they’re just in the same room as each other answering questions. When we raced, on a Sunday night after the race most of us ended up in the same bar as each other having a beer! You’d settle your differences there, stick a finger in their chest and tell them that they’d regret it if they did it again. Riders don’t have the same respect for each other anymore because they don’t have the same communication.”