“May God rot his testicoli with rat-plague…”

Dear Gigi,

I write this letter on behalf of the Ducati Corse mechanics in the hope we can find a better way to interpret George’s demands.

And because our lives are like a pile of merda with flies buzzing around and feeding off the juices.

We have now changed the seat 28 times and it is Round Seven. Rossi was a pain in the arse, but the biggest problem there was finding space on the bike for him put his stupid dog stickers.

This seat business for George is some next level shit. I’m at the stage where I’m going to duct tape a sponge to the frame, smash my knee to pieces with a hammer and go and live on Ibiza while I recover.

It’s bad enough he has been asking us to show him where the octopus lives for the last three rounds.

Why did you tell him we’d fitted an octopus, Gigi?

You remember how he drove us insane at Qatar demanding to see all the ‘telemetry’ you told him we had ‘installed’ laid out on a cloth so he could check it for ‘butter-integrity’ with my verniers, and how Massimo managed to scrounge some broken fairing mounts from Crutchlow’s rubbish bin? Saved us all a lot of grief that did.

But where the fuck am I supposed to get an octopus from?

And no, don’t tell me to go see one of the Japanese. Those bastardos are like angry bonsai-sized ninjas each time they see someone in Ducati red.

Then there was last night’s performance after he came second in FP2. Someone – and may God rot his testicoli with rat-plague – gave him Mat Oxley’s recent article about our anti-jerk system to read. The one where Mat says the problem is with our Desmodromic valve arrangement.

So George turns up after FP2 in his Spartan outfit and we all do the “Hail Spartan!” fist salute he demands, and then he tells us to take out the Desmodromic valves and replace them with Mambadromic valves.

“It is how I will win, putas!” he screamed and pointed his spear at Tommaso’s left eye. “No more sabotage. No more desmodromic valves! No more Desmo Dovi! He will now be Mamba Dovi! I have already told him.”

Then he says the anti-jerk system is like a donkey with cancer in its tongue, and he wants his anti-jerk system to be like a hammer with butter in its heart.

Gigi, I do not even know what that means.

And there is no way we are carrying George in a sedan-chair to the grid on Sunday. He says he’s hired Moors to beat us with whips so it looks authentic for his fans.

Gigi, I love and respect you, as do all the men working in my team. We do long hours, we tolerate tantrums, we offer tissues for tears, and we dodge thrown helmets like gazelles. We have put up with Stoner’s lack of Italian, Rossi’s hatred of our frame, and Dovi’s general sad-eyed inferiority complex, but we are reaching the ends of human tolerance with George.

Please talk to him. Tell him we’re all on the same team. Tell him to stop threatening to send us to Persia to fight the hordes of Xerxes, and explain to him we aren’t there to peel his grapes and slice his prosciutto.

We are the mechanics. We do mechanical stuff. We do not do octopus, Mambadromic valves, and sedan-chairs.

Oh, and you need to buy some more seats. George doesn’t like the current unit and said: “This one is not right. It makes me look like a Madrid puta selling her culo”.

So we need at least 34 new seats that don’t do that. And another fucken octopus.

Fuck our shitty lives, Gigi.

Marco, Tommaso, Ivan, Massimo, Lorenzo, Juan Llansa, and Giacomo.

Tags: Dear George

About the Author

Boris is a writer who has contributed to many magazines and websites over the years, edited a couple of those things as well, and written a few books. But his most important contribution is pissing people off. He feels this is his calling in life and something he takes seriously. He also enjoys whiskey, whisky and the way girls dance on tables. And riding motorcycles. He's pretty keen on that, too.