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Friday the start of March
I’m just heading out of Toscana, four hours north to Bosisio Parini near Milano for Sunday’s round of what is fast becoming my home championship.
It’s called the Italian Absoluta, a series open to riders from any country. There’s a separate champ run alongside just for the Italians Chioddi looks good there.
We should already be two rounds into it, but the second at Chingoli was lost to fog in mid Feb. So this is number two, with two more to come. Next weekend we go to Castaglione del Lago, which hosted the Italian GP last year and does so again this May. It’s near the Maddii base in Toscana (all right, Tuscany to you English speakers). Then it’s a real long wait till the final round at Asti next October, after the world championship finishes.
Pit (teammate PB) beat me at round one, when I first got here from America. I was second.
This week Pit has taken off to northern France and Belgium to train in the sand, getting dialled in for Valkenswaard’s opening GP. Also getting drenched, as I’ll explain later.
So this weekend it’s up to me and Andrea on his CR450 to keep the flag flying for Berni Honda Racing. The team was real chuffed when Pit and I delivered a one-two at round one, and we received a commendation from high up at Honda. So I guess we’ve set a bit of a standard.
Barto won’t be easy to beat - he cleaned me up in the first two races at Beaucaire last weekend, dicing for the lead with Smets, but I kept him at bay in the third. That 450 really hauls ass and although I’m stoked with the power we are getting out of my 250 GP bike, you really have to carry corner speed to stay with the four-stroke onto an uphill straight.
(I reckon Andrea will be a real threat for the world title this year - the CR is every bit as good as Honda promised when they secretly spoke to me last year about riding it in 2002. And the Berni team are still working on it.)
So anyway under the unique Absoluta points system, Pit has 40 right now and I have 39 then it goes 38, 37 and so on down. So you can see it doesn’t pay to miss a round, score zero and you’re out of the top ten for sure and maybe a lot lower. I need to be right at the front at every event.
Andrea missed round one so he comes off zip.
Unlike last weekend’s big Beaucaire Internat in France, this is a two-day weekend: practice and qual Saturday. Feels more like a GP. Last week felt odd, sitting around doing nothing on Saturday.
I guess you’ve read my media release where we mentioned how important this championship is to the Berni team. I’d love to give them a result, just to show how I appreciate their support. These guys really are the goods.
The team is officially run from Reggio Emilia, a charming town south of Milano. It’s just a few kms from Maranello, home of Ferrari, and the area is big on the motor game generally. Fabrizio Berni himself is based at Reggio, along with the executive staff as you might call them. Aldo, our engine guru, has his dyno there.
I spend most of my Italian time a couple of hours south, with the crew of Carrado Maddii who is our racing manager. Carrado of course needs no introduction to MX people, it’s less than 20 years since he was world champ and he’s been a prominent feature in the pits since he retired. Hell he runs an impressive setup.
Maddii has a big base at Levane, just outside Montevarchi where we raced round one of the Absoluta. I rode a GP there a few years back. This is the heart of Tuscany, even at this time of year a heart-stirring place. In summer it’s just magical.
Carrado makes the most of it. Get this: to go training yesterday, I climbed into my gear including helmet and everything at the special suite alongside the workshop, hopped on the GP bike with mechanic Fabio on the back, and simply rode a couple of minutes up the back onto Carrado’s hillside test track. A bloody big test track I can tell you, in NZ we call this a subdivision site. Boy what would you pay for a hill section with views across the Tuscan landscape?
Can you imagine how good it is to be able to go train like that? After years of having to truck the bike to some track you heard was open … sometimes even then, only if it suited my teammate. This is the kind of stuff that translates to a real advantage come race-time.
Carrado has a big complex here with all the technical stuff you could want. There’s even an apartment where I stay when I’m in Italy … which has been quite a lot over the past few weeks. (I\'m between motorhomes at present. Don\'t ask, it\'s a long story.) And boy do these guys work hard. 12 hour days seem the average. Try that on a kiwi union official.
My new technician (upmarket word for mechanic) is based here. Fabio Santoni is an ex pro racer himself, so he knows what’s going on. In just a few weeks, out in the US for my supercross races plus here in Europe, we have formed a tight bond.
When my trusted and longtime mate Blair Selfe finally pulled the pin and headed back to the family Honda shop in Oamaru NZ at the end of last season I really thought he would be irreplaceable.
Fabio was already with Berni and he speaks good English so we were able to set up a working system quite quickly. Then we got into the thick of it with heavy testing and proper races, and by the day I’ve been coming to appreciate this quiet guy more and more.
Fabio? He should be called Fabuloso.
He comes from Montevarchi and I’ve been around to his parents’ place for a meal. Ah, Italian pasta. I really can’t describe. I just love it.
The other great thing about an Italian base this time of year is the weather. In training yesterday I was kicking up dust. Meanwhile Pit is sloshing around practising at Dunkirk, just about the only place north of Paris you can get onto a circuit (that’s why Kawasaki, KTM and the rest have been down here testing).
The way it was explained to me, in February Belgium had more than 150 litres of rain per square metre … three times the average. Ride a bike? You can’t do anything but swim. Except it’s about zero degrees and blowing winds strong enough to uproot trees from the sodden ground.
Toscana is pretty nice, I tell you.
By the way everyone, thanks for giving me this opportunity to update you. Ian tells me the old laptop has been hot since we floated the idea this week. I\'ll do my best to keep you on the case, between races and training and all that.
Right now I feel I\'m approaching peak form and I should be right there by the first GP. Plus I\'m free of injury. I had a big fitness test with trainer Yves in Belgium the other day and I think it\'s about the best I\'ve ever been.
Plus I\'m carrying no injuries. These pre-season races are essential to get you up to race fitness but the problem is you risk hurting yourself and blowing your championship start. This year there\'s an unusually high number of top guys out, whether because of increased professional pressure these days or just coincidence I\'m not sure.
Federici is out for a long spell, Crockard was still sidelined last time I saw him, I hear Pichon is just back training but his teammate is gone for a spell, Bolley was injured for a while (although back going like hell last week) ... the list goes on. It\'s getting like the States where they go so hard there are guys falling all over the place. By the time I left California, after four rounds in the supercross series, more than a dozen medium to top guys were out. Crazy. You don\'t score points, or even show your face, sitting trackside.
Meanwhile there’s been all sorts of official news this week, with a new timetable for GP weekends, revised MX des Nations, World Supercross Champs and SuperMotard announced. No time now to tell you what I make of all that. Hope to get onto it next week.
But the big news in the camp has been our invitation to Qatar, in the middle east. The whole team is going out, with all three riders (AB, PB and me) for a mid-week race straight after GP one at Valkenswaard.
The deal is that Qatar is down to host a GP next year, and possibly the MX des Nations. This year’s one-off is a kind of practice run, organised by former world champ Georges Jobe, who has also designed the circuit which extends from the beach and encompasses part of the desert.
I’m really looking forward to it. Have to admit though I had to research where and what Qatar is. Turns out to be a peninsula on the Persian Gulf sticking north from Saudi Arabia. Famous in the old days for its pearls, nowadays for its oil and natural gas which seems to have made the nation rich. (So that’s where the GP funding comes from!)
It’s mostly flat and barren desert covered with loose sand and gravel highest point in the entire place is just over 100m above sea level. Natural hazards are listed as haze, dust storms, sandstorms.
The big sport is ……… camel racing! Prize money is rich (how do I get a ride?) Camels are ridden by jockeys, much like horse racing, and they hit incredible speeds. Who needs a bike.
Qatar has three quarters of a million people. They’re called Qataris (natch), mostly Muslim and they have a monarch. In fact it’s a pretty exciting place, politically: the chief of state is Amir HAMAD bin Khalifa Al Thani, since 1995 when, as crown prince, he ousted his father, Amir KHALIFA bin Hamad Al Thani, in a bloodless coup.
The currency is the rial - 3.64 to the US dollar at a fixed rate. For us, nowadays using euro (and hasn’t that been fabulous, as we go back and forth through European countries so often, paying toll roads and trying to buy stuff) we’ll get 315 rial for a hundred euro. Get real!
By the way, it’s not pronounced like guitar, more like cutter.
OK, end of lesson, you can go back to sleep now. That’s what I did at school, only went there to eat my lunch.
I’ll update you after the Absoluta.
Ciao
Josh #6
