TEST
Thirty years ago, on July 12, 1992, a modern two-wheeled fairytale came true. In a brave and tactically brilliant display of wet-weather riding on a drying track, four-time World champion (three with Yamaha, one with Honda) Eddie Lawson won the 500cc Hungarian GP on a Cagiva, to give the Italian marque its first road racing Grand Prix victory in 12 years of trying.
After the race was halted after the first lap by a thunderstorm, the restart saw all riders on full wets – except Lawson, who fitted a front intermediate and rear cut slick. The first few laps on a sodden track tested Eddie’s skills to the limit, with no rear grip and carbon brake discs that barely worked. But he soldiered on in 7th place, over a minute behind leader Randy Mamola, until halfway through the race it started to dry. Just four laps from the end, Lawson sliced past Doug Chandler’s Suzuki to take the lead and win the race, scoring Cagiva’s first ever GP victory.
You didn’t have to be Italian to savour this event as Lawson’s win represented an overdue reward for all the billions of lire, millions of man hours and immeasurable enthusiasm poured into the Cagiva 500GP project over those dozen years by the Castiglioni brothers, Gianfranco and Claudio. When Eddie Lawson took the chequered flag first in Hungary aboard the fiery red Cagiva, it was the fulfilment of a decade-long dream for the two brothers who, 15 years earlier, as bike-mad tifosi, had tried to purchase the remains of the MV Agusta race team when Count Corrado Agusta pulled out of racing at the end of 1976.
The upstarts were turned down, for Agusta preferred to see MV die in peace rather than let a couple of rich kids take over the glorious four-cylinder four-stroke ‘fire engines’. In a supreme irony, the Castiglionis later acquired the rights to the MV Agusta motorcycle name, and brought it back to the marketplace in a modern-day history that’s still unfolding, now under Russian ownership. Undaunted, the Castiglionis bought an RG500 Suzuki, painted it in the MV race colours of red and silver, and entered Marco Lucchinelli on it in 1978
