Marco Bezzecchi remembers the moment he first met the heads of the VR46 Academy – They didn’t know his face, but…
The upcoming 2025 MotoGP season will be the first for Marco Bezzecchi that he will not be competing in for the VR46 team. In June, Bezzecchi signed a two-year contract with Aprilia that will see him ride as the teammate of world champion Jorge Martin in the factory team there until the end of 2026.
Bezzecchi has said goodbye to the VR46 team, for which he raced in Moto2 for two years and MotoGP for three years, after the 2024 MotoGP season finale in Barcelona, but not to the VR46 academy. He will continue to train with them in the future, whether it’s at the fitness center or at the VR46 ranch in Tavullia.
But how did Bezzecchi manage to get the attention of Valentino Rossi and Co. to get him into the academy? The story behind it is typical of Bezzecchi, namely both funny and unusual.
Bezzecchi made his first wildcard appearances in the MotoGP World Championship in the 2015 Moto3 season at Lusail and Mugello, but not as a member of the VR46 Academy. “The academy has been around since 2013. When I started, it was already a big organization,” Bezzecchi recalls in the official MotoGP podcast.
“When I was in the Italian Championship with my team in Mugello in 2015 to compete in a wildcard race, I was already a racer. But above all, I was a huge fan. I walked around the track to meet all the MotoGP riders. I wanted to meet ‘Vale’ and all those guys,” Bezzecchi says, referring to Valentino Rossi and Co.
Bezzecchi, who was 16 at the time, came to the Mugello Circuit with a Piaggio Ciao. “It’s basically a bike with an engine,” he describes the vehicle and adds with a grin: “The thing was really old. It was, so to speak, the scooter for teenagers at a time when my mom was a teenager.”
Bezzecchi had “modified a lot of things, like the exhaust pipe,” on his own version of that old Ciao when he was a teenager, he recalls. “And I was riding this scooter on the service road on the grounds of the circuit when the MotoGP race was just starting. That’s when I met Carlo, ‘Vale’s’ fitness trainer, and ‘Albi’.”
With this, Bezzecchi refers to Carlo Casabianca and Alberto Tebaldi from the VR46 Academy, whom he first met during the Mugello weekend in May 2015. “So I met them at the track and they already knew that I was Marco ‘Bez’. They knew me even though we had never had the opportunity to talk before.”
“They knew me because of my scooter. Yes, I know, the story is crazy. Carlo told it to me a few years later,” Bezzecchi grins and continues: ”He was looking for my scooter because he wanted to see the exhaust and everything. When I stood in front of him with the scooter, he didn’t recognize my face. But when he saw the Ciao and realized that I was standing next to it, it was clear to him that I must be Marco Bezzecchi.”
And what was the first conversation between Casiabianca and Bezzecchi, which took place at the side of the track in Mugello, about? “He said, ‘We have to take this thing to the ranch,’” the current MotoGP rider recalls of the words of Valentino Rossi’s fitness trainer, and he still remembers: ‘From that moment on, we stayed in contact. And just before Christmas 2015, I was officially accepted into the academy.’
