Ever wondered what it’s like to go on a true MotoGP pilgrimage? Well we* sent Arjen from his home land in Belgium on a one-in-a-lifetime trip to visit the homeland of his hero Valentino Rossi and to watch the Misano race.
Was it what he expected? And more importantly how much did it cost?
*We: He paid, booked and arranged for it all himself…we did the rest.
Misano 2021
Main reason:
So I wanted to pay homage to the GOAT of motorcycle racing by seeing him for one last time, and what better place to see Valentino Rossi ride than in his literal Home GP.
(Tavullia, Rossi’s hometown is 15-20 minutes up the road from the Misano circuit)
I also found a friend to go along with me, this was easy to share some costs and it was his first GP so a nice experience for him as well.
Travel:
The plan was to take a plane from Brussels to the Bologna airport and so we did, with a small stop in Vienna, Austria for half an hour where we were told to wear real FFP2 type masks because our surgical type masks weren’t safe enough for the country that Hitler originated from. Quite ironic.
So after the one hour flight we got off the plane from Vienna, and after being resuscitated because you couldn’t breathe in the replacement masks they gave us we attempted to find our car rental company. Sadly in Bologna they do it ‘the Italian’ way which is just ‘figure it out, it’ll be in that general direction… or not’.
After searching three different car parks (because the only car rental company office not in the Bologna airport hall was ours..) we finally found the tin can that was somehow the car rental office of Ecovia.
We had originally signed up for a FIAT 500 because at the end of the day it’s an Italian experience. When we finally got the papers that everything was okay and I’d ignored the 7 different insurance packages’ proposals we got the key of the car and we headed to the parking spot.
The guy at the counter said it had ‘mild damage’ which, translated from Italian, meant the car was Cat-A borderline write-off (gotta give credit though, it rode good and we had no problems with the car).
When we arrived at the parking spot we didn’t find a FIAT 500 there but we got a KIA Picanto, small letters apparently said ‘Fiat 500 or car of equal class’. It was like the Italian experience had been halved, like Franco Morbidelli, half Italian half Brazilian except in our case the Brazilian part was South Korea.. yey..
Unlike their lofty neighbours from North Korea, no missiles were fired that day (or the rest of the trip) because the car was slow as f*ck… Jokes aside, it got us where we wanted to go, we never had any problems with the car and it brought us to the small city called Misano Adriatico in about a 1h30min drive.
Now, if you’ve never driven a car or any vehicle in Italy for that matter, be prepared.
I believed that a quarter of the Belgian population got their license with a pack of Doritos or something but the Italians were on another level. I think you just have to survive to the age of 5 and you’ll just get a license for free.
Some guys flash their headlights at you, some drive kamikaze style between 2 lanes, some do emergency stops for no apparent reason in the middle of the highway whilst others just drive a section of their journey on the emergency lane… pretty great if you’re not expecting all of that. Hence the ‘be prepared’.
If you survive the road to Misano you can see it’s a nice small community, they were very friendly and are just as nuts about motorcycles as we are.
We checked ourselves into our hotel (hotel Norma) and we given a nice room with 2 balconies, a small bathroom where the water was actually consistently warm in the shower, and a view on our Italian-inspired KIA Picanto parked across the street. The hotel receptionists were nice and friendly, the room got cleaned every day with fresh towels waiting for us when we returned from the circuit.
There was a small train (theme park style) that rode frequently to the circuit and back for free but we decided to walk to see some of the surroundings, the walk was about 30-40 minutes from our hotel
The track:
QP day
The track itself was very nice, the runoff areas were coloured by the famous Aldo Drudi which was nicer than seeing just a plain grey asphalt so a lust for the eyes.
On the QP day we sat in the ‘brutapela gold’ stand: here you have a nice overview from the first corner until after turn 6 where you can see the motorcycles blast onto the straight,
The view itself was very good as we sat on the top row of the stand, the only ‘negative’ thing with the view was that the track was far away so that was a pity but still worth to see nonetheless.
The facilities were a disappointment as there were only 10 toilets (the ones you see on a construction sites) for the whole stand. I praised myself I didn’t need to use them but I can imagine they weren’t cleaned every hour. Then there was only one stand to drink/eat which was creating huge queues in between the sessions. So if you go for the Brutapela Gold stand make sure you have some drinks or food with you to bridge upcoming thirst until the end of the day.
Also: no merch stands behind this stand. This was sad as you have to buy a nice memento to remember the event…before losing it in the airport.
Now maybe a little off topic – but a note about the people in the stands. Most of them wore yellow and I myself am a huge Valentino fan but when Marquez crashed in QP everybody cheered. As a motorcycle fan it bothers me because all these guys are doing marvellous things, they dedicate their whole life to get to GP level. So please if you go to a race and some rider falls off don’t cheer, clap if you see they’re okay because they all deserve respect. I’m pretty sure that everyone who’s booing can’t ride within seconds of the guy who’s in last place or Bradley smith, so show some respect.
The saddest story I heard was of two children wearing Marquez jerseys and literally being booed off the stand… sad. This should happen – even if they were Lorezno fans.
Next time: Race day, the weather, costs and things to do!