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“Why do we do this?”
“You gotta do something, don’t you?”
This laconic exchange of words between Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen), in 'Rebel Without A Cause', sets the scene for the famous scene of the 'chicken run' in the film.
This old movie occurred to us, after seeing Maverick Vinales leap off his Yamaha at the Red Bull Ring; it was not however for a stupid challenge, but it was in a Grand Prix that shouldn't be a show of courage but, more simply one of skill.
And we wondered, after seeing two absurd and lucky accidents in just over a week whether, despite all the improvements in active and passive safety, Grands Prix are not missing their target: that of letting us see a sporting challenge and not a show for its own sake in which the winner is the one who is the first to jump out of a racing car before it falls off the cliff.
And this is because, in the dynamics of an accident, there is always the lapel of a jacket that can remain caught in a door handle. Sometimes it is luck that makes us take the road that leads to a happy ending, instead of the path of tragedy.
So while the number of stupid rules multiply: 'he went into the green zone', no the edge of the tyre was still in contact; 'He passed on the green', yes but he did not gain an advantage, on the contrary he lost, the show sadly becomes devalued. We regret the period when there was only one set of tyres available for the heroes of the 500: the Dunlop KR 76 and KR 73 'pear', and all the rest was left to the riders.
Nobody bothered to 'create' the show, making life difficult for designers by changing the structure of a tyre construction every year.
They simply tried to improve and sometimes they succeeded and other times they didn't…
It was a simple technology: four Parker screws in a Borrani aluminium wheel rim to prevent the tyre from spinning and tearing the inner tube. It could happen that you forgot and you crashed. But this seems less serious to us than deciding not to mount a caliper designed to withstand certain temperatures and risk killing or killing the innocent competitor who is ahead of us because suddenly the 'maximum of technology' (up to that moment) is unable to withstand the force.
Because always going in search of the limit involves and has always involved accidents. Sometimes serious and sometimes less. And luckily in motorcycling we have had men like Lino Dainese and Gino Amisano and Sante Mazzarolo, dreamers and creators of modern safety, because without them there would be a lot fewer of us, we lovers of speed.
Loving the challenge, recognizing oneself 111 years later in Tommaso Marinetti's futurism manifesto: 'Until now, literature has exalted pensive stillness, ecstasy and sleep. We want to enhance the aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the running step, the somersault, the slap and the punch' does not mean losing sight of the purpose. And the purpose is not the show as an end to itself, but the challenge.
And the challenge contains in the word itself the concept of the rule, which must not change to artfully make the challengers closer, but on the contrary allow excellence to emerge so that it is, for all of us, a reference of where man can go.
Because if you brake 50 meters later, knowing that you just need to widen the trajectory and at most you end up 'on the green', it is not intriguing for us at all. Just as continuing to take part with an anomaly in the brakes does not seem synonymous with courage. No more than participating in a ‘chicken run’…
