Stoner<\/a> said, speaking to Crash.net in an interview organised to highlight his role in the new\u00a0Ride 6\u00a0videogame in which he stars as a kind of \u2018boss character\u2019.<\/p>\n\u201cPeople love to talk about \u2018defending a championship\u2019, but it\u2019s not \u2013 we\u2019re all going from zero points again. Everybody is basically in a race to get to the most amount of points first before the end of the season, if you look at it that way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cSo, I sort of took things race-by-race, I didn\u2019t ever see that somebody was a \u2018final boss\u2019, somebody was there to overcome. I think, on the weekend, or if they had some fantastic form\u2013 if a certain rider had been like that, they had more of a target on their back, they were the person to beat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I don\u2019t think necessarily [that] you went into a new championship sort of thinking like that. Everyone was different, bikes would change during the off-season, people would change bikes through the off-season, so you never knew what to expect going into the next season and that\u2019s the beauty of the sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why even though I\u2019m, let\u2019s say, the \u2018final boss\u2019 in this game, I never saw myself as that \u2013 it\u2019s just another challenge to overcome, and I suppose this should be seen as a similar sort of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stoner added that not only did he not see himself as the main protagonist of a series, he never viewed any one of his opponents like that, either.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never had this sort of emotion, I suppose, that many other riders do, that they\u2019re racing their heroes, or they\u2019re doing things that are seemingly different from the others,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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\u201cFor me, my biggest challenge was myself, so there\u2019s always more to get out of yourself, your bike et cetera. Yes, we have to race against other people, so you have to understand the dynamic between you and your biggest rivals, but I never really saw them as [above me].<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a few points that I definitely think I could\u2019ve handled much better, but it all came down to me and decisions that I made and what I did.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, my biggest competitor was myself, it was me trying to overcome certain issues, the way that I rode; and I needed to adapt to do something different, to be similar to the other guys, wondering how they were able to do things that I wasn\u2019t at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I think, because I didn\u2019t really focus on any particular rider or particular rival, then that allowed me to keep adapting and keep getting stronger, and keep learning from my rivals. I felt that that really pushed me further in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ride 6 releases for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on 12 February.<\/p>\n
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Subscribe to our MotoGP Newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two-time MotoGP World Champion says he never \u201cdefended\u201d a MotoGP title, despite winning two. Of course, neither Stoner\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,21588,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-475775","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-casey-stoner","11":"tag-motor","12":"tag-motor-sports","13":"tag-motosport","14":"tag-motosports","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}