Valentino Rossi's Honda NSR500
in clinching his debut 500cc world
crown this year, Rossi equaled Giacomo Agostini's previous 1972 record of
winning eleven GP races in a single
year - but in a 16-race season against
far more competitive opposition than
Ago ever had to contend with in his
MV Agusta days. The Doctor's dominance seems set for the long run -
By
ALAN CATHCART
PHOTOS BY KEL EDGE
,£l, fter four
,ffiJ, courtesy
years of apprenticeship
of Aprilia, for whom he
won the 125cc and 250cc world
titles, and a debut 500cc learning
season for Honda in 2000, when he
merely managed to finish runner-up
in the 500cc World Championship,
Italian nice-guy and so-sharp shooting star Valentino Rossi graduated
with honors in the 2001 racing season - not as a doctor of medicine or
engineering, as the self-styled nickname emblazoned on his NSR500's
windscreen might infer, but as the
duly crowned king of Grand Prix
motorcycle racing's premier class,
Rossi reigns,
Rossi's vault to omnipotence over
his rivals has happened at recordbreaking pace - in more ways than
one, In a total of 92 race starts over
the past six seasons, he's scored 39
, GP victories out of a total of 59 visits
to the rostrum, as well as 14 pole
positions and 35 fastest race laps - an
incredible 42-percent race-winning
average, At just 22 years of age, he's
the youngest of the only three riders
to have emulated his achievement of
becoming world champion in three
different capacity classes - Mike Hailwood (250, 350 and 500) and Phil
Read (125, 250 and 500 - same as
Valentino) were both older when they
completed the hat trick of titles. And
14
JANUARY
9. 2002·
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albeit with the added ingredient of
uncertainty posed by the switch to
four-stroke MotoGP racing in 2002,
But if 2001 may well have marked
the beginning of the Rossi reign in
Grand Prix racing, in another sense it
was the end of an era, with the season-ending Brazilian GP in Rio de
Janeiro marking the last-ever 500cc
Grand Prix race in 53 years of World
Championship road racing. Appropriately enough, it was Rossi who won
that final race on his Honda NSR500,
in so doing not only marking the
endgame for the half-liter class as
such, but for four-cylinder blue riband
two-stroke racing as well - all
achieved with the ultimate evolution
