GRAEME BROWN/GEE BEE IMAG...
GRAEME BROWN/GEE BEE IMAGES/2SNAP
By Henny Ray Abrams
On a beautifully sun-kissed Utah afternoon, Max Biaggi is holding court, something he is very good at after having perfected it over a 17-year career that includes four world championships. Seated at a folding table between two modest motor homes, hours before he would practice for the seventh round of the World Superbike at Miller Motorsports Park, the Italian is charming, speaking only slightly accented English. It helps that he lives in Monaco, a world where English is the common language. And it also helps that he spends two months of the off-season training in the Los Angeles area.
Monaco is about wealth and glamour, and Los Angeles is often perceived as being similarly shallow. Perception trumps reality, and the perception is that Biaggi is a difficult rider. He's aware of this and there's little he can do. He can only control his image to a point. After that it's out of his hands. And if he is difficult it's because, as much as anything, he wants to win. He's always wanted to win, ever since he discovered racing at an age later than most.
Biaggi didn't come from a racing family. His father didn't support his racing aspirations. If he wanted to buy racing gear, he'd have to earn the money. If he bought the gear, his father would let him on the track, but only once. He started by riding a moped as a messenger in his hometown of Rome. He was 17 at the time and had never worked a day in his life. What follows is one of Biaggi's many mysteries; the details of how long he worked are a bit muddy. He said in Utah, "So I went like three months working, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Never stopped." On his official website, which he doesn't write but surely approves, there's a slightly different take. "Five weeks working as a Pony Express, ten hours per day in the roman (sic) traffic."
And that's Biaggi in a nutshell, one of the most enigmatic racers of the past 20 years. An unnecessary embellishment of a minor detail, a slight burnishing of a racing career that began much later than most and rose with meteoric efficiency, the pinnacle of which was four consecutive 250cc World Championship from 1993 through 1997. "Mine was completely unusual start to career," he said. Of that he's correct.
Biaggi's website points out that he fell down in his first race in 1989. There is no dispute over what came next; in 1990, he won six of seven races in the Italian championship.
The next year he raced at an international event in Vallelunga, outside of Rome. The competition included reigning 125cc World Champion Loris Capirossi, along with a number of other world championship contenders. The machine, a production Honda 125 he'd never ridden, was so small that he cramped up. He finished third. "This was my best business card. And then everybody try to 'Come with me, come with me, test this bike.' I have so many options. But then Aprilia, they smelled that there was something good and they give me a contract."
Biaggi scored three of his...
Biaggi scored three of his World 250cc Championship titles during consecutive years from '94 to '96 on factory Aprilias. He's now come full circle.
GOLD & GOOSE
When Biaggi won the South African Grand Prix at Welkom in his first year, Erv Kanemoto took notice. "He was impressive," Kanemoto recalls. "He was kind of a standout in his enthusiasm." Biaggi rode a Honda for a year before returning to Aprilia, where he won three 250cc World Championships before going to Kanemoto and Honda in '97 for his final title. That earned him a promotion to the Marlboro Honda NSR500 for the '98 season.
Having spent so long on a 250, many wondered how Biaggi would adapt to a 500. The answer came in his very first race.
"It was nice and great day, I remember," he recalls of his debut in the premier class at Suzuka in the 1998 curtain raiser. The story of Suzuka was tires. Biaggi would prove throughout his career the ability to use a softer tire, softer than Mick Doohan or the other Honda riders. Biaggi recorded the race on his VCR and remembers listening to Randy Mamola question his tire choice.