Carlo Pernat makes an admission about Valentino Rossi

Carlo Pernat makes an admission about Valentino Rossi

MotoGp manager Carlo Pernat in an interview with Il Giornale spoke about the current moment in MotoGP starting from the past: “If I think about where we started and where we have arrived today, I say to myself, where the hell have we ended up? It’s a whole other world than the one I found in the early days, where the desire to have fun prevailed, the rider was transgressive, rather than healthy and perfectionist as today; and then everyone knew each other, there were great rivalries and great friendships but we were often all together. For the first good half of these thousand GPs the World Championship was a circus of gypsies, each dressed in his own way, a bit improvised if you will but full of personality.”

“Everything changed with the Valentino Rossi era, which gave great popularity to motorcycle racing,” Pernat continued. “People who knew nothing about motorcycles came to the circuit, fascinated by the champion-character. In the end it was good but it brought great transformations, the era of bread and salami sport where everyone was friends is over and those who experienced it remember it with nostalgia. It was a romantic motorcycling where after the race everyone got together for a beer. Not anymore today.”

On the riders who made history: “Valentino Rossi of course, then Randy Mamola who did ballots with everyone and was always in a good mood; he never won the title but he was a dragger. And Kevin Schwantz, a kind of Rossi made in the USA. Agostini is the prince figure of motorcycling. He was the forerunner and remained the real character, the real enthusiast.”