Valentino Rossi's Fiat Yamaha crew chief, Jerry Burgess, has rebuffed
Casey Stoner's claims that some of the Italian's moves were too aggressive - and believes what was seen in Sunday's US Grand Prix was commonplace during the '80s and 90s.
Stoner had dominated practice and qualifying at Laguna Seca, putting him on course for his fourth race victory in a row.
Even world championship leader Rossi had suggested a 30-second head start was needed to beat the young Australian, but some last-minute improvements to his M1 helped fuel an epic battle.
Rossi dived inside Stoner on the run up to the Corkscrew on lap one and, determined not to allow the Australian to unleash his speed advantage, furiously counter-attacked whenever Stoner regained the lead.
The pair were side-by-side for lap after lap, until Stoner made a small mistake under braking for the final turn on lap 24 of 32, running wide and dropping his Ducati in the lose gravel. Stoner remounted to finish a safe second, 13 seconds behind Rossi.
After the race, Stoner - who initially refused to shake hands with Rossi - said that some of the passes were "the most aggressive I've seen in a long time", while his Ducati team boss Livio Suppo added that "they both could have crashed as a result of manoeuvres which, in our opinion, were a bit over the limit on Vale's part."
But Burgess, the man behind 500cc world titles for Wayne Gardner and Mick Doohan before joining forces with Rossi in 2000, brushed off such suggestions.
"I think that if Casey had raced in the '80s and '90s with Kevin Schwantz, Wayne Rainey and Mick Doohan, he'd have seen that every weekend," the Australian told the official
MotoGP website. "It was probably something that he wasn't particularly expecting; [he] probably expected to win the race easily like he'd dominated in the practices."
