Rossi believes that Casey Stoner already deserves the World Championship title.

Engine failure early in the race on the Adriatic coast of Italy delivered a hammer blow to Rossi's lingering championship dream.

"I was running at 1'35.2s pace, and I could have done a bit better but then the engine went off. At the first turn braking point the engine just shut down," Rossi told Italian television company Mediaset. "Now the engineers have to see what happened. The problem is our bike is not as fast and that's why we need to risk a bit on the technical side. We tried to use a new engine which had never given us any problems, either in Brno or here. The bike wasn't doing so bad but in the end it just broke."