Happy 24th MotoGP birthday to Valentino Rossi!

Rossi first stood on a podium at Austria’s A1-Ring – now Red Bull Ring – on August 4, chasing Honda riders Ivan Goi and Dirk Raudies over the finish line. The following weekend he took his first pole position and first victory, after a ferocious duel with Jorge Martinez at Brno. The veteran Spaniard – winner of 37 GPs and four world championships – was stunned by his teenager rival’s aggression

“After my win Martinez gave me his hand and said, ‘F**k, you were strong!’,” remembers Rossi.

In fact, Martinez wasn’t happy with Rossi’s riding, and not for the first time. Five months earlier the pair had been fighting for position in the closing stages of the Shah Alam race when Martinez clipped Rossi’s rear wheel and crashed. The old-timer had no doubt who was to blame.

“After the race Martinez came to see me in my box with a lot of anger,” Rossi remembers. “He wanted to kill me!”

Martinez was 33 years old at the time, more than twice the age of 16-year-old Rossi. He had made his grand prix debut in 1982, when he shared the paddock with the Rossi family: father Graziano, contesting his final GP season, mother Stefania and three-year-old Valentino, no doubt already making a nuisance of himself among the tents, caravans and campervans of the Continental Circus.

Following his defeat at Brno, Martinez muttered to a journalist friend, “I wish I’d taken my chance and run him over then!”.

Thankfully he didn’t.

In more normal times Rossi would be spending his 24th GP birthday on an aeroplane, flying to Austin, USA, where he would contest his 405th grand prix this coming Sunday.

No one in the history of motor sport has contested so many grand prix races, not even in Formula 1, where drivers are looked after like kings and go to work inside survival cells, protected by deformable crash-protection structures, carbon/Zylon armour and much else. Despite all the advances in bike racing safety Rossi still goes to work wearing a helmet and a suit fashioned out of several dead kangaroos.

Brazilian F1 driver Rubens Barrichello holds the record for the most F1 starts – 322 races between 1993 and 2011 – which at the end of this year would’ve put him one hundred races behind Rossi, if the 2020 season had gone ahead as usual. No other bike racer comes close – Loris Capirossi rode 328 GPs before he quit at the end of 2011 and Andrea Dovizioso has so far contested 313 GPs.

But these aren’t normal times. Rossi is locked down at his home on a hillside outside Tavullia, waiting for life to return to normal, while a few miles up the road Italy has become a warzone.

It’s not easy to imagine how someone who has possibly pumped more adrenaline through his veins than any other human being is coping with life under lockdown.

He’s not the only one, of course. “This stop is making me understand so much about life,” fellow Italian Dovizioso told GPone.com a few days ago. “I like the busy life of a rider, but sometimes it’s too much, and I am realising that you risk losing other important things.”

All racers are junkies, to a greater or lesser extent. They live for that heady cocktail of adrenaline, noradrenaline and endorphins that floods through their bodies each time they go racing, each time they ride a bike and each time they even think about riding a bike. It’s like you turbocharged your brain and your heart, and it feels good; most of all when you get a good result, for which you are rewarded with a hit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that looks after pleasure and happiness.

If racers miss one fix, they’re burning up inside, like they’re going cold turkey. But what happens if they (it’s the older riders we’re talking about here) stay at home for longer and drift into the rhythm of their everyday lives, made comfortable by millions in the bank, a career well ridden and a towering reputation to lean back on?

As Dovizioso said: given time to think, you may realise that the racer’s buzzing, peripatetic lifestyle isn’t all you thought it was. Once you stand far enough back you see that it’s a kind of madness – a hamster running in a wheel, an engine bouncing off the rev-limiter.

In more normal times, Rossi would be looking forward to racing at Austin, while also pondering his future: should he continue racing into 2021 or pack it in this November?

Riders who have recently decided to pack it in usually fall into one of two categories. They’re either crawling up the wall, still a slave to their biochemistry, or they can’t believe how it sweet it is to live without that constant trickle of nervous energy dribbling through your system.

We don’t yet know how Rossi will be when he eases out of the fast lane and into the slow lane of life. But I do know how former World Superbike champions Colin Edwards and Troy Bayliss felt when they pulled in the clutch and snuck themselves into cruise mode.

A few weeks after Edwards had retired, halfway through the 2014 MotoGP season, I had a chat with him during the British GP at Silverstone. While his former rivals were getting ready for morning practice Edwards was sat in a hospitality unit, slowly supping on a cappuccino, already looking forward to a long and lazy lunch.

“I don’t feel any of the usual nervousness,” he told me. “There’s no pressure – just show up, relax, have a glass of wine with lunch. It’s cool.”