On Sunday, 1st May 2005, Max Biaggi will be running his two hundredth Grand Prix Motorcycle Championship race at Shanghai. The Rome-born racer will celebrate this achievement together with Dainese which has been his technical sponsor ever since faraway 1992 when Max made his debut in the world of International Motorcycle Racing.
Biaggi has had a great deal of satisfaction during these thirteen years of racing. After going into motorcycling relatively late (a friend invited him to try out a motorbike on a race track when he was 17 and from then on Max has hardly got off the saddle…), Max has showed off his exceptional talent, first in the Italian 125 cc championship and then in the European 250 cc championship which he won in 1991.
A year later, he entered the 250 cc World Championship and began his fruitful partnership with Dainese, which has been giving him leather suits, boots, gloves and back protectors. At the end of the season, Max won fifth place after winning the South African Grand Prix. In 1994, the “gladiator” took his rightful place in the history of motorcycling by winning 29 grand prixes and four would championships in a row from 1994 to 1997 (the first three on Aprilia and the last on Honda), a feat that no other rider in this class had ever achieved before.
In 1998, Max Biaggi entered the 500 cc class and at the end of the first year he won second place, just behind Mick Doohan. After 4 seasons with Yamaha, Biaggi returned to Honda in 2003 and in the following two years he fought Valentino Rossi and Sete Gibernau for the world title, finishing in third place in both years.
2005 is a fundamental turning point for Max: riding an official Honda for the first time, he has all it takes to wrestle the title away from Valentino Rossi. After a false start at Jerez, Max got onto the winner's podium at Estoril, the 108th time in his long career, and he is now in the running again.
And the adventure continues, always alongside Dainese…