10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Two-Seater GP Bike.
1. People who have never been on a bike usually make the best pillions.
So Randy Mamola told us, anyway. “Think about it,” he said. “If you’re a skier and I say to you right we’re going to ski down that and you say no, no, no we’re not. But if you’ve never skied before and I point to the same hill and I say you can do this, you’ll go okay. But if you’ve skied before, you’ll say, I know I can’t do that.”
2. The two-seater bike has been allocated three hours track time at the Valencia test.
Not because they’re trying to get more speed out of it, but because the bike is also switching to Michelin control tyres. “Because it’s very critical, when we’re carrying extra weight, how the front tyre feels and fits and that sort of thing,” Mamola explains.
3. It doesn’t get a run at every round.
And it’s mostly to do with tobacco laws in various markets. Though Mamola doesn’t go to the German round simply because it’s “too hard”. He says from his home in Barcelona there’s too many planes and stopovers and “I could be halfway to Australia in the time it takes me, so I don’t go.”
4. You can’t pay to get on the two-seater Ducati.
Well, you can, but only at the Silverstone round in the UK. And that’s only because the money goes towards the Riders for Health charity work.
5. A 71-year-old Bernie Eccelstone did it 14 years ago.
Formula One’s big boss on the back of a MotoGP prototype should have been headline grabbing news, and it was, but it got lost because Bernie’s ride was just a few days after the 9/11 attacks.
“But prior to Bernie coming on,” Mamola recalls, “Frank Williams and people at Ferrari were calling up and saying, ‘Are you nuts?’
“So when I finished — then we used to do two laps, at the moment we only do one. And it was on the Yamaha 500 — and as I passed, Carmelo Ezpeleta said, ‘Why did I let this happen?!’. And you know I came in with a stoppie and everything with him. He was definitely the most iconic.”
6. Randy Mamola would rather take you over Tiger Woods.
“It is very satisfying to take a top athlete,” Mamola concedes. “But for me it’s equally gratifying, if not more gratifying, to take someone off the street because those people tend to appreciate the opportunity. VIPs generally already have these sorts of opportunities.”
7. There’s a 90kg weight limit.
Which isn’t very big. We would have thought Ross Noble weighed more than 90kg.
8. Two-seater pillions go the fastest at Silverstone.
The two-seater ride is scheduled during the lunch break at the British Grand Prix and therefore is allowed a little more time. What that means is because it’s allowed to do two laps, it gets a flyer down the straight. All other circuits, like Phillip Island, he enters the circuit at turn one and comes in between turns 11 and 12. Mamola says he goes well over 300km/h at Silverstone.
9. Mamola never tries to scare anybody.
Or so he reckons. “We never use it with disrespect to scare anybody,” he says. “There are men and women who say, ‘I’m really scared’. I say okay, let me take you at a level that you’re willing to go and you’ll be blown away. And then they get off the bike and say, ‘I’m so sorry, can we do it again?!’”
10. Even 13-time Grand Prix winners make mistakes.
It was bound to happen and it did. It was at the Spanish Grand Prix at Catalunya in 2013 when Randy Mamola and his pillion went barreling through the gravel leaving Mamola red-faced and with a dislocated shoulder. It was reported the unnamed pillion suffered a fractured hand and minor bruises. Now that’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
