AGV Backmarker:
Milan: Getting there is half the pain
May 11, 2006
By Mark Gardiner
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If someone calls and asks, “Do you want to fly to Italy next month,” the answer is always “Yes.” If they ask, “Do you want to go in five minutes,” the answer is usually, “Sorry.” This offer came pretty close to my cutoff, which would normally be about six hours but which was pushed back to about 48 hours by the fact that I had the mother of all sinus colds a few days ago in Texas. The whole offer was even better, actually; I was to attend the launch of the new MV Agusta F4 1000 at Misano, and I even figured out a way to also hang out with the top MV team in the FIM Superstock Cup the weekend before at Monza. The problem was, I was so sick I wondered if I could ride at all. (Let alone ride well enough to write about the bike, a dodgy bet at the best of times. Sending me to a test like this is like sending a pig to do restaurant evaluations for the Michelin guide.)

Italians and their motorsport, eh? Mark Gardiner photo

The trip started with a three-hour wait in DFW airport. That’s not really a problem since in my line of work (I use the word loosely, I admit) I can sit and type there as well as at home. Maybe even better since the dog isn’t there to lose his tennis ball under the sofa and bark at it until I retrieve it for him—I thought it was supposed to work the other way—every 10 minutes. I like airports, anyway. Normally defensive suburban women become downright flirtatious when they’re sure I’ll never see them again.

But this thing I’ve got (Bird flu? I knew I shouldn’t have given that sick duck mouth-to-beak resuscitation…) comes in waves. By the time I get on the plane, I’m exhausted, shaking and dazed by my strategy of digging through the medicine chest and taking four of everything with a “don’t drive or use machinery” warning. I transfer uneventfully at Atlanta and until they serve dinner over the Atlantic, I work pretty diligently, hammering out the structure and organizing all the files for a motorcycle trivia book I have to deliver to Potomac Press by June.

After eating, I desperately hope the cocktail I’ve concocted (Benadryl washed down by red wine followed by a Robitussin chaser) will knock me out. It’s to no avail. After years of driving race vans back and forth across the country thinking, “Don’t sleep, must not fall asleep,” I simply cannot doze off in a chair. Deep in my subconscious, there’s a night watchman who’s sure that if I do, this thing’ll crash. My only consolation is that on every long flight, I pick up some germ; on this one, I’m the bastard coughing and sneezing all night into the endlessly re-circulated cabin air. Seriously, I feel so crappy that I wonder if the Italians will notice and throw me in quarantine when they clap eyes on me.

It’s not until we’re pulling up to the gate at Milan Malpensa that I realize Don Canet from Cycle World is sitting in my row. We make small talk—another editor missed the plane, having set out for LAX sans passport—and we get to passport control before either of us realizes we’re here on totally different junkets. After the World Superbike races, he’s going to try some new Pirelli tires at Monza.

Canet drifts away at the luggage carousel, and I hop the train into central Milan. I cannot believe that I pass up a seat across from two sensational German girls (Milan is crawling with runway models) in order to sit where I can watch my duffel bag. That’s the curse of traveling with several-thousand bucks’ worth of leathers, helmet, gloves, and boots.

Since I’m paying my own ground expenses on this portion, I trolled the ‘net for the cheapest hotel in Milan. In this instance, I get what I paid for. Anyway, I drop my riding gear there. Then I begin a wild goose chase in search of Monza, which is just on the outskirts of Milan, but every Metro employee I ask suggests disembarking at a different station. So I come up out of the Metro, blinking in the sun only to be told I’m in the wrong place to catch the right bus.

This is Sharon Bond. She’s Matt Bond’s mum. He’s a fast British kid taking a run at the FIM 600cc Superstock Cup. He needs sponsors, if you’re in the mood to spend. Reach him at www.bondracing.co.uk. Sharon’s a nurse. I looked so ill that she offered to let me sleep in their caravan. “Always room for another biker,” she said. Nice woman. Mark Gardiner photo

Finally, I know I’m in the right place because about six English guys who look like soccer hooligans but who are wearing race-souvenir T-shirts follow me up the escalator. I have an Italian-English dictionary out in my hand, since I’m trying to figure out how I can ask a local bus driver where the track is. One of the hooligans says, “Hey, let’s ask this guy; he’s learning English.”

An Italian boy and girl get on with us and spend their entire 15-minute bus ride engaged in an open-mouthed kiss. When they step out of the bus at their stop, they stop and kiss. The hooligans and I get off at the main entrance to Parco Monza, which is good for them but not me. It turns out that the accreditation center is a two-mile walk away. That’s if you know where it is. If you don’t know and walk three-quarters of the way there, then give up and walk back thinking it couldn’t have been that far, it’s a lot further. Still, it’s kind of charming; the first leg of the walk is on Via Enzo Ferrari. Underneath his name on the street sign, there’s the word ingegnere. In English, the word “engineer” doesn’t usually carry such an impassioned shading.

On my second attempt, I see a guy who’s wearing a pass walking back in my direction. I figure he must know where the “Centro Accrediti” is so I ask him. I must pronounce it okay, since he immediately rattles off a long answer in Italian. I make out “…sempre, sempre diritto…” and I know that must mean “always, always straight” since the Marine Corps slogan, “Semper Fidelis” means “always faithful.” I keep slogging. Every few minutes, I impersonate a cat with a fur ball and cough up a ball of pastel-colored phlegm. When I get my pass, it is number 996. I have to think that’s an auspicious number.

Between the accreditation center and the pass gate, it occurs to me that if I don’t eat right this minute, I am going to faint. In a mile of road with the featureless park wall on one side and postwar apartment buildings and car dealerships on the other, there’s one bar. I stop for a beer and sandwich. As the food settles I feel a fever rising and I break out in a sweat. It’s as though whatever evil disease I’m harboring is gathering strength from the food, before the sustenance reaches my immune system.

As I’m walking down the little road into the “Ingresso Passo,” a car backs out of a blind garage into the path of a motorcycle coming down the road. The rider immediately hits the brakes and pulls in the clutch—which is dry and makes a loud rattling noise that attracts the attention of the driver. His head swivels around, he sees the bike, and stops just in time for the bike to slip through. I guess that validates what Ducati riders have claimed all these years: loud clutches really do save lives.

I’m inside the park before I hear racing engines, a long way off in the distance. I can’t believe the neighbors have complained (yes, here too!) about track noise. Maybe it’s louder on the upper floors of those apartments. The park is sprawling. It’s not manicured, like the surroundings of the Barber track; it’s mostly overgrown and quite wild. Acres of dandelions have gone to seed. Birds are chirping. Besides people walking to and from the circuit, there are guys in Lycra tights riding bicycles along the shaded road and someone walking a huge mastiff, with the wrinkled face of Shar-pei and the body of a Rottweiler. Even after passing through the tunnel leading to the Monza infield, I’m still in a forest.

There are birds chirping. Bees buzzing. And off in the distance a mad Italian is bouncing a sport bike off the rev limiter in neutral, just to hear it backfire. There’s work for me in the paddock but now I must sleep. Mark Gardiner photo

I look for the fastest MV Agusta rider (a 19-year-old kid named Ayrton Baldovini, who I came to realize has the heart of a lion; remember that name). To find his team, Unionbike/Gi Motorsports, in the jammed paddock, I probably first need to find the Media Center but instead of turning toward it, I walk into the woods.

The old Parabolica banking is still here, even though it’s no longer used. There was an art movement called futurism that got its start here in northern Italy, and they must have loved this place. I don’t know how steep the banking is at the top, but I can barely walk up to the barrier (and I’m wearing sticky shoes). For the rider, it must have been less about skill than simple will. It is a futurist monument—all about the machine not slowing down to change direction. As a species, our future is inextricably linked to our machines—the futurists were right about that; it’s just that right now, I can’t quite share their optimism.