Before Giacomo Agostini won his 15 world championship titles on a motorcycle, he was offered a move to Formula 1 by Enzo Ferrari – Agostini remembers
Before Giacomo Agostini became a 15-time motorcycle world champion, he was confronted with an unusual offer: Enzo Ferrari wanted to sign him up for Formula 1. The offer was tempting, but after careful consideration, Agostini’s passion for motorcycling tipped the scales in his favor.
What if Agostini had followed in the footsteps of John Surtees to accomplish the feat that still seems to surpass all other achievements today, namely becoming world champion both on a motorcycle and in a Formula 1 car?
Agostini was already a star when he was given the opportunity to switch categories and compete in the premier class on four wheels. That was in the period 1966 and 1967, and the idea as such was not that unusual at the time.
A few years earlier, Mike Hailwood – Agostini’s first major rival – had taken the risk and contested a few Grands Prix in Formula 1 for Reg Parnell Racing. The Briton did this in the middle of three seasons in which he won the 500cc title (1963, 1964, 1965).
Later, “Mike The Bike” entered Formula 1 once again and even finished on the podium twice (Monza 1972 and Kyalami 1974). Apart from that, he also competed in other automobile racing series. He even became Formula 2 champion with the Surtees team in 1972.
Giacomo Agostini, on the other hand, was not yet 25 years old when he got his chance. His motorcycle career had just taken off and his first 500cc title at his favorite manufacturer MV Agusta rewarded his pure talent with successes
“Huge” offer from Enzo Ferrari, but …
But Enzo Ferrari had also noticed “Ago” and tried to get him into Formula 1 for the Scuderia. The “Commendatore” had Agostini test a Ferrari Dino 206 S Berlinetta and, convinced of his potential, wanted to lure him into Grand Prix racing.
“Ferrari let me test a car,” says Giacomo Agostini for the French-language edition of Motorsport.com. “I often met him in Modena because Ferrari was testing on the same track as me. He suggested it to me, I did a test and thought about it for a few days. The thought of Ferrari offering me a car was tremendous!”
However, doubts also arose in Agostini’s mind. In the end, his first passion took over again. “Since I was a child, I thought about racing motorcycles, not cars. So why should I cheat myself now when I’m so successful, winning every Sunday or standing on the podium? Why should I give up something that made me dream from the very beginning?” the now 81-year-old Italian thinks back.
“I didn’t dream about cars, I dreamed about motorcycles. So I said no. I had to make do with what I had. I had to stay where I was,” said Agostini, who at that time was only at the beginning of the greatest career ever written in motorcycle Grand Prix racing, in which he would win a total of 15 world championship titles in the 500cc, 350cc and 250cc classes between 1966 and 1975.
Agostini would have felt he was betraying his true love if he had started a new career in Formula 1. So he listened to his heart, but it was also a decision based on common sense.
Leaving the sport in which he had just reached the top would have been a risk he probably didn’t want to take. “Exactly,” he confirms. “Over there, I didn’t know what it would be like. Yes, I saw that I was good, but …”
Agostini assures that Enzo Ferrari accepted this decision without difficulty: “Yes. When I met him, he appreciated it and said: ‘I understand you’. He understood that I was serious. “
Like Agostini, like Rossi: F1 tested for Ferrari
It would be another ten years before Agostini finally entered motor racing. As soon as his motorcycle career was over, he tried his hand at Formula 2 and then Formula Aurora AFX, a national championship for Formula 1 cars held in Great Britain.
In Formula Aurora AFX, Agostini contested more than 20 races in a Williams FW06 in 1979 and 1980. Although he did not win, he finished on the podium seven times, so he had nothing to be ashamed of behind the wheel.
But that was not enough for Agostini. He had become accustomed to the top step of the podium. The 1980s finally led him into a new chapter of his career in motorcycle racing, namely that of team owner.
For Ferrari, however, history repeated itself with the next big star of motorcycle racing: Valentino Rossi. The rider with the starting number 46 was also courted to switch to Formula 1. Rossi completed several test drives, sometimes even sharing the track with Ferrari’s Formula 1 drivers, including Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso. In direct comparison, Rossi was anything but ashamed of his lap times.
But like Agostini before him, Rossi remained loyal to the motorcycle for a long time. “The Doctor” only really concentrated on his career on four wheels after his retirement from the motorcycle world championship. Today, he drives endurance races, has won the GT3 classification in the Le Mans Cup and also achieved his first victory in the GT World Challenge Europe (GTWC) in July of this year. In 2024, Rossi will race the full season of the World Endurance Championship (WEC) and thus also in the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the first time
