Burgess says Honda must win in 2011

Honda will never have a better chance of winning the MotoGP world championship than in 2011, according to Valentino Rossi’s legendary crew chief Jerry Burgess.

The winter addition of Aussie Casey Stoner has injected fresh impetus and belief into HRC as the Japanese giant seeks to end its barren run of winning only one MotoGP title since 2003.

With a four-pronged factory assault in 2011 including Stoner, Dani Pedrosa and Italian duo Andrea Dovizioso and Marco Simoncelli, Honda has its most formidable line-up since Rossi quit HRC at the end of 2003 to join Yamaha.

And Burgess said it was obvious that Honda was going all guns blazing to try and win the final 800cc world title.

“Honda is making a very big push, no question about that. They haven’t won seriously since 2003. I know they won in 2006 but I know the mentality of the people at Honda and if you don’t dominate the races through the year it is not the same feeling.”

“They couldn’t go out every Monday and put an ad in the paper and says Honda wins. They could put an advert saying they were world champions after Valencia but that’s a lot less advertising than pounding it into the paper every Monday morning. They’ve been trying for a number of years but the big expectation is that this has got to be the year, “said Burgess.

Burgess also expects in-form Stoner to be Honda’s best hope of dethroning Jorge Lorenzo in 2011, despite the setback of being taken out of the last race in Jerez by Rossi.

Stoner was in brilliant form to win on his HRC debut in Qatar but didn’t score points in Jerez after the controversial incident with Rossi.

Burgess added: “The Honda group has bounced well off each other. If one rider is having a bad day he’s got all the information of the others to say ‘why am I having a bad day? It must be me rather than the bike.’ Casey is clearly the fastest rider at Honda.”

“Dani will say history shows that he’s more consistent than Casey and less likely to make a mistake but Casey is now on a bike where he doesn’t have to doubt his own judgement. He’s not the leader of the team, he’s just guiding himself and that will give him an enormous amount of confidence to the point where it might take away from Dani.”