Rossi furious with Yamaha

This third retirement of the season meant that the Fiat-sponsored rider, who raced with a broken hand after a crash in qualifying yesterday, lost second place in the championship by one point to today's race winner Daniel Pedrosa on Repsol Honda.

Rossi felt his engine sizing on lap 17, while he was running in 14th place after starting from 17th. He only needed to finish 15th to keep second in the standings behind new world champion Casey Stoner.

"The luck is so bad it's almost comical," Rossi told Italia1 television. "Unfortunately the engine broke down. I was doing a quiet, intelligent race, as I only needed one point. I was going pretty quick too, I need to thank Claudio Costa and the Clinica Mobile as the hand was OK, even though now it's swollen like a football.

"But I worked my arse off to race, I went through injections and that's no fun. So I raced with three fractures and the engine broke down again today."

Besides the disappointment with yet another engine failure, the Italian claims his Yamaha M1 was among the slowest bikes in the race, even slower than the customer Yamaha of Tech 3's Makoto Tamada.

"The situation is disastrous here, because my bike was extremely slow," said Rossi. "Not only Anthony West's Kawasaki was quicker, but even Tamada's Yamaha was quicker on the straight.

"And then it broke down, I don't know what else to say. If someone put some bad luck on us I would like to know who it is, because for sure he did well. I have to congratulate him..."

Rossi, who is afraid that his team's reliability problems may carry on into next year, urged Yamaha to work harder.

"What else? Our objective for the last races was to get second so I decided to work hard and suffer by racing with a broken hand today," he said. "It was OK, I felt well, so the engine breaking once more is a very sad situation for next year too, because if someone doesn't make a move, it's a problem to race like this."

With his stature as a seven-time world champion, Rossi reckons his team should give him a faster and more reliable bike, and fully blamed the Japanese manufacturer for losing second place in the championship.

"I will speak to the (Yamaha) Japanese guys, but I'm Valentino Rossi so it doesn't feel right that I should race with the slowest bike that breaks down too. We've seen today Pedrosa and Honda, so if we don't make a move the tyres are not enough.

"We could have done without this, because I deserved to get three or four points and get second. For sure it wasn't me losing second place but it was lost by Yamaha."