So far, Motegi has been my total 10th appearance at a MotoGP Event, but riding shows at this series is always a very cool challenge for me.  No show is like any show before: not only due to the different locations, also because of the different people, creating some sort of a different atmosphere at any of the events I was allowed to attend so far. Of course, this was also true for the Japan Moto GP.

As the official name „Motegi Twin Cirquit” already states, the facility consists of two partly integrated tracks. The one used by the Moto GP guys, plus an oval ring for Nascar-like events and tests. This leads to the fact that the tracks are crossing each other two times, in our case, the MotoGP riders had to go through underpasses two times per lap. For the riders, this means that it’ll get very dark under the visors and it looks scary to see them disappear and being almost “spat out” at the end of those short tunnels. Not even mentioning the noise-amplification by this sort of concrete pipe of those unsilenced 1000 cc monster engines.

BMW has officially launched the F800 Model (which I also use for Streetbike-Freestyle riding) in the exhibition-area for the Japanese market, and even though the entire track facilities are owned by Honda Engineering Corporation, BMW and Red Bull have managed to supply me with this show-appearance there. Many of the total 60.000 spectators could experience my riding right after prize-giving in Moto GP, I could perform directly in front of the grand stands and the track-management even broadcasted my show live to all the (many) video-walls which were set up for the race.

The atmosphere has been simply great, the crowd was very thankful form y entertainment. Given the top-standaards of this series, the GP race before did not offer too much action and the local hero, Shinja Nakano, dropped out in the last lap, too. So it was up to me to care for some more action. I enjoyed sufficient space and grip on the straight of the oval-course, parallel to the start.finish line straight and I could really go hard. The awarded feedback from the Japanese crowd on my Streetbike-Freestyle has been enormous. Arigato Goseimas!