Fabio Quartararo, the champion who spent 100,000 kilometers sleeping in a van

• JAVIER SÁNCHEZ

  @javisanchez

Updated Sunday, October 24, 2021-19: 58

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At the age of eight or nine,

lived through the same scene Sunday after Sunday: he would take out a map, show one of his rivals where Nice was and they would hallucinate. "From so far you come?" In the Promovelocidad Cup organized by the Catalan Motorcycling Federation he never failed, he competed three consecutive seasons - he won two - and that is why the local riders, who knew he was French, thought he came from the border, from Perpignan, at most from Toulouse. But in reality his home was four steps from Italy.

On Fridays Quartararo and his father

got into the van and traveled some 700 kilometers so that the boy could race against opponents of his level on the circuits of Vic, Alcarràs or Mora d'Ebre.

Then it was the turn.

Each year they totaled almost 100,000 kilometers.

"When I win a World Cup I will remember the times I slept on the floor of the van and my father drove," he said a while ago and now is that moment.

DAVIDE GENNARIEFE

The story of the new MotoGP champion is the story of a rider from nowhere.

In France there is a motorcycle tradition, yes there is, but this one focuses on endurance, motocross, enduro, almost everything except speed.

Until the arrival of the new benchmark, the French country barely added three victories in the premier category, one by

(1954), another by

(1985) and a last by

(1999), a Pyrrhic background.

Etienne, biker dad

If Quartararo is a pioneer today, it is thanks to his father Etienne, a locksmith by profession, an amateur biker, and

, also a biker, who gave him his first pocket bike at the age of three. Then the already champion got hooked on adrenaline and continues like this despite the obstacles. Because it was difficult to spend all my childhood traveling through the south of France from one place to another to compete in Catalonia, but it was even more difficult to move to Alicante when I was only 13 years old.

When he began to emerge in the lower categories, a financial advisor who was a fan of motoring,

, offered the Quartararo family a strong investment and even a house to live in in exchange for directing his career and there, while still a child, he became professional . From Alfás del Pi, where he already had a team around him, where he already had to control his weight a lot, he swept the Spanish Speed ​​Championship (CEV) with two consecutive titles and appeared in the Moto3 World Championship with a label: the 'new Marc Márquez'.

The teams raffled it and it ended in the best, the Estrella Galicia 0,0 of

, but the union did not work.

Absolutely.

In his second race, in Austin, he got on the podium, but for reasons that vary a lot depending on who lists them, his career was twisted.

Then many so-called experts, too many, began to offer him advice and he entered a spiral from which he only emerged when he got to MotoGP.

Yamaha

How did you get up despite everything? Even today it seems like a miracle. After two very gray seasons in Moto3 and two other irregular seasons in Moto2, in 2019 Yamaha called him up for the premier class. The romantic version of what happened points out that

, director of the Japanese brand, fell in love with Quartararo's style when he won at the CEV and always wanted to hire him. The less romantic version explains that the company had almost closed the signing of

, that at the last minute he backed down and that a replacement had to be improvised among the few pilots left in the market.

Be that as it may, since his arrival in MotoGP, Quartararo was once again the one of his adolescence, with seven podiums in his first season, and from there to the title.

Last year he escaped because the pressure of knowing he was a favorite could, due to lack of maturity, but this 2021, with the help of a psychologist, from the beginning has been his year.

With two victories in the first three races he placed himself as the leader and no longer abandoned that position thanks to an exaggerated regularity.

He has scored in every race and not even the final streak of Italian

has been able to

him.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

• France

• Marc Márquez

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