I’ve been following racing for 40 years. The circuits are my home and I’ve always felt comfortable there. However, every time I walk into a racetrack, I always think of Odysseus and the Cyclops. And from the cave where the monster can devour anyone who enters it.
There is no contradiction in this thought/nightmare: motorcycle racing is a dangerous sport and over the years, starting with those of production-based racing, through the early years of the World Championship, I have lost several friends: Tommaso Piccirilli, Sauro Pazzaglia The former showed me the lines in Vallelunga, with the latter I shared a caravan at the races, in the sense that he accommodated me when it happened.
Those were the days Ezio Pirazzinia colleague from the old days, one of those who didn’t ride a bike, wore a scarf, but had witnessed the even more heroic days of motorcycling, told me: “Either we stop running or we stop crying”.
He was right, of course, and yet if we take away Michel Rougerie and Patrick Ponswho died as a result of being run over (and tragically reconciled that fate), I don’t recall many other instances of fatal accidents from driver overruns. The case of Reinhold Roth in Rijeka belongs to a different fate.
Yes that is true, there was Tomizawa in Misano, but just this year we lost three youngsters from the smaller categories in accidents too similar to be a coincidence as defined by my friend Franco Uncini as “inevitable tragedies”.
Also Franco. He is right as he himself was the victim of a similar incident – it was 1983 in Assen and it was Wayne Gardner who beat him – but miraculously he escaped alive.
I don’t blame age, although I don’t quite appreciate that desire to hasten entry into racing at all costs. Increasingly young champions add nothing to my passion.
The fact is that today the rules are made more to boost the show than for anything else. And that explains why in every category, from production to MotoGP, all classes have shockingly similar performances.
This, of course, serves as a prelude to hard-fought races, with long trains of riders forming in each other’s slipstreams. All with their nose in the tachometer for a loss of one km/h top speed, both bikes are powered by single cylinder 50 hp and four cylinder 300 hp engines.
Of course, the more the speed increases, the more talent counts, but that’s not the only problem. The fact is that today with 4-stroke engines, small errors from the line, from engine use, are no longer lost.
Remember those sizzling 2-stroke races? Even if Schwantz, Rainey or Uncini himself rode, Missing a line, braking, driving into a curve meant the loss of the group in addition to a few seconds. The engine didn’t push under torque and you were left behind.
With the small 50s, 80s or 125s, clean driving was an absolute must: if you made a mistake, you paid according to the time. Oh, mind you, there were trains back then, but not 40 wagons!
Banning two-strokes was an unforgivable mistake: they taught you how to drive. I would reintroduce them for the very young. They also cost less than four-strokes and are less consistent in performance. Maybe no one cares now, but they also trained the mechanics.
And then there’s the weight. Today an SS300 weighs almost 160 kg, and since performance is what it is, the throttle never closes so much so that I’m surprised there are so few collisions between the “cars”.
And with 40 riders on the grid it’s just a wild bunch, from which of course emerge those who have talent, but also those who have more guts to get through from disguise to disguise on the straights. In any case, the friendly four-stroke engine somehow pulls you through the curves, even if you enter next to or next to the line.
And then, the inevitable consequence of the pro show rules I already mentioned that the bikes are all the same. Be sure to: it also takes place in the most competitive category, MotoGP. Years ago, before you earned a factory bike, you had to finish in the top five in the world championship, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough. There was a performance difference between Barry Sheene’s official Suzuki and the one bought from Uncini’s dealer.
And this rule also applied in all other displacement classes, because you bought a Yamaha 250 and 350 from the dealer and with the 50 and 125 we are talking about almost hand-made motorcycles. While young drivers (not very young yet) were trained at the School of Production Derivatives. Bikes that, when they ran well, had about ninety horsepower.
So it’s true that accidents are inevitable, but it’s also true that we do nothing to avoid the dumbest. I spoke to you months ago Emanuele Pirro, Ex-F1, 5-time Le Mans winner, across the famous or infamous green that risked a penalty for being run over when exiting the corner.
“What I don’t like, apart from having to play by the rules – Pirro told me – is that this new situation comes at the expense of clean driving”.
Because years ago if you veered off a line you would land on the “big teeth” of the high curbs and if you were in a car you would smash the floor, on a bike you had to roll off the gas… you learned to ride, you learned that the throttle doesn’t always have to be fully open, so who cares if I drive far! Like hell! You landed in the gravel and if you were good you stayed upright Otherwise you would fall, but the bike rarely returned to the track.
These innovations, let’s face it, weren’t introduced for safety reasons, but for the show, like flexible sticks when skiing. It is clear that in sport you adapt to the possibilities and change: Tomba just drove in with the best line on the pole, the motorcyclist always keeps everything open, because at most, whatever happens, he lands on the green.
That’s the wrong approach to racing.
We’re tired of creating single-make championships where the same bikes excel, where you have to learn to race in a different way. Let’s take Moto3: The fifth and sixth gears are shifted depending on the circuit due to the slipstream to take advantage of the higher speed, so that there is even a 35 km/h difference between one gear and the other. Because of the slipstream, the drivers are always glued to the opponent’s rear end. Let’s try to write rules that reward the best. And who cares if instead of one long train, there are four or five groups of just a few drivers.
And let’s invest more in security. It took the genius of Lino Dainese, closely followed by Alpinestars to give us leather with airbags. Let’s not stop here. And then, if we don’t want to deal with the question of age/participation/bicycle, We don’t do the latest race in wild bunches, but in heats. Two starts with 20 riders, even fewer. Three incidents with the same dynamics in six months is a wake-up call that is madness to ignore or underestimate. Look at the photo that illustrates this article and try to count the starters. There is nothing to add.