“Why are we doing this?”
“You have to do something, don’t you?”
That laconic exchange between Jim (James Dean) and sums (Corey Allen), in ‘Rebel for no reason’ sets the scene for the famous “Chicken Run” scene in the film.
That old movie came to mind when we saw Maverick Vinales jump off his Yamaha at the Red Bull Ring; It wasn’t for a stupid challenge, however, but it was in a Grand Prix that shouldn’t be a proof of courage, but rather a proof of skill.
And we asked ourselvesafter experiencing two absurd and happy accidents in just over a week, whether despite all the improvements in active and passive safety, Grands Prix don’t miss their goal: to let us see a sporting challenge and no show for its own sake where the winner is the one who jumps out of a racing car first before it falls off the cliff.
Because in the dynamic of an accident there is always the lapel of a jacket that can get caught in a door handle. Sometimes it is happiness that leads us to take the path that leads to a happy ending rather than the path of tragedy.
So while the number of stupid rules multiplies: ‘he went into the green zone’, no the tire edge was still in contact; ‘He passed the green’, yes, but he didn’t gain an advantage, on the contrary, he lost, the show is unfortunately devalued. We regret the time when there was only one set of tires for the heroes of the 500: the Dunlop KR 76 and KR 73 ‘pear’, and the rest was left to the drivers.
Nobody bothered to “create” the show, make life difficult for designers by changing the structure of a tire design every year.
They just tried to improve and sometimes they succeeded and sometimes they didn’t …
It was A simple technique: four Parker screws in a Borrani aluminum rim to prevent the tire from spinning and the tube from tearing. It can happen that you forgot and crashed. However, this seems less serious to us than the decision not to mount a brake caliper that can withstand certain temperatures and risks killing or killing the innocent competitor who lies ahead of us because suddenly the “maximum of the technology” (up to that moment ) is unable to withstand the force.
Then Always on the lookout for the limit is and has always been associated with accidents. Sometimes serious and sometimes less. And luckily when we rode motorcycles we had men like Lino Dainese and Gino Amisano and Sante Mazzarolo, Dreamers and creators of modern security, because without them there would be far fewer of us, we speed lovers.
Loving the challenge of recognizing yourself 111 years later in Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism: “Until now, literature has glorified reflective silence, ecstasy and sleep. We want to intensify the aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the running step, the somersault, the slap and the blow ‘does not mean losing sight of the meaning. And the goal is not the show as an end in itself, but the challenge.
and the challenge contains the concept of rule in the word itselfthat must not change in order to artfully bring the challengers closer, but on the contrary allow excellence to emerge so that it is a reference for all of us as to where people can go.
Because if you brake 50 meters later, knowing that you only have to widen the track and at most land “on the green”, that is not at all exciting for us. Just as moving on with an anomaly in the brake doesn’t seem like having courage. No more than taking part in a “Chicken Run” …