The World Championship leader with Aprilia races at home: “Being there is already magic. From the grass to see my idols to victories in MotoGP: unthinkable”
Forget that it’s just a race. We’re not here just to put in first gear, do the prescribed number of laps and at the end hope to be in the best possible position. Mugello is a wash of self-awareness, it is the place where adrenaline and nostalgia, mixing, give an energy that is difficult to find anywhere else in the world. “You can’t sleep at Mugello”, right? That’s what the fans sing. For pilots, however, the dates change, perhaps the myths with which to measure themselves, but the mechanism is always the same. In the case of Marco Bezzecchi we have to go back to 2004, to the first time that his father and mother brought him there together with his little sister Silvia. “We were all huge Vale fans. I saw the little riders like that and I dreamed of being like them one day.” Or 2009, when in the meantime the other sister, Laura, also arrived to sit on the grass. “The Paso and the Sic had their duel right there, in front of us. What a spectacle…”. Bez talked about his Mugello yesterday at the Auditorium of the Piaggio Museum in Pontedera full of students. “In which I saw myself,” he smiled. In front of them, together with his teammate Jorge Martin and the CEO of Aprilia Racing, Massimo Rivola, he was not afraid of being banal: “Believe in your dreams”, they told them. Marco did it, he believed in it, and now he is the leader of those heroes he saw as tiny and imagined as giants. He’s the one who takes the lead in the World Championship at Mugello.
“A lot. But not so much because I’m at the top of the rankings, in fact I hadn’t even thought about this. It’s just being there, seeing that I’m one of those I used to come to see when I was little. That’s why I keep telling myself that I have to try to face it like the other races, but it’s impossible. It’s because of all the affection you receive. For those who pat you on the back. Who tell you that you have to win. For when, on Sunday morning, you get out of the motorhome, you look at the hills and you don’t even see a little dot of green from all the people there.”
“But no. Not much more than there always is.”
What do you like most about Mugello?
“When you arrive, at the entrance, you see that big red helmet under the arch. You already have the feeling of entering something grandiose, with all the hills around. And then the track, which is all beautiful. With that section, the Casanova, the Savelli, Arrabbiata 1: it is the most iconic of the entire World Championship”.
Best memory as a fan?
“The noise. I didn’t have time to see the 500. But I remember the 125 and 250, the two-stroke motorbikes that have a different noise. A roar that echoes among these hills. You feel it more afterwards. The motorbike passed and you heard it there, in real time, but when it moved away it became even louder. Absurd. And then that Paso-Sic duel”.
It is very evocative to think back to 2018. To the last lap of Moto3. Three competing riders who constantly pass each other: Fabio Di Giannantonio, Jorge Martin and Marco Bezzecchi. Exactly the current MotoGP ranking…
“What a race. It’s just that all the gurus at Mugello, all those who know about it, repeat a legend to you. A nonsense which however contains a grain of truth: especially in small displacements, to win in a tight duel you have to enter third at Bucine. And so I did… But I didn’t win. The truth is that I came out third because I hadn’t managed to put myself better. But in the end it had gone well, come on. I had arrived second, even though I was the slowest (Bez was on a Ktm, the other two on Honda, ed.). Jorge managed to fool me in the end. And I fooled Diggia.”
If they had told her then that eight years later that duel would have been for the MotoGP World Championship…
“It was in dreams. But dreaming is one thing, doing it is another. Honestly, I don’t know if I ever expected it. It’s those things that you struggle to even imagine.”
She likes Mugello a lot. Even before Jerez she had said that in reality she likes all the tracks. Yet one wouldn’t have said anything about Montmelò…
“But no. I actually like the circuit.”
So what happened?
“That I struggled more than the previous weekends. Nothing sensational. Nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. Unfortunately, even while working, I continued to do a little worse than what I had managed so far.”
So far, what were you happiest, most proud of?
“About Brazil. Because the weekend had started in a very difficult way. They were bad days: at the beginning of that week a friend of mine had a car accident. A friend who is no longer here. I arrived at the track and nothing seemed to be working. I always work hard, but on those days, if it’s possible, I did it even harder. On Sunday everything we tried put things right. I won. And it was an explosion of emotions so different from each other that I can’t even describe them.”
We arrive at Mugello coming from one of the scariest and most distressing GPs of recent years, due to the accidents of Alex Marquez and Johann Zarco. Are you ever afraid?
“Well, maybe I’m a bit strange. Usually I realized I was scared only after a while. It happened to me several times that I had a bad fall and maybe I wasn’t particularly impressed at the time. As if I hadn’t understood what had happened. Then, when I got home, thinking about it again, or seeing the images again, I thought: ‘Oh, what a scare I got!’ But then the next day I still went the same way. The truth is that the fear is there, but you manage to never think about it. You go to the track, and you accelerate.”
Was Montmelò an episode then? Can his fans, at Mugello, with the mysterious new livery of the new sponsor, expect the Bez of the first GPs?
“They don’t have to worry. I’m starting with the aim of doing my best. As always. I always give everything, here if possible even more.”
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