NINE-TIME GP winner Sete Gibernau’s MotoGP return was confirmed at Valencia, with a lavish announcement of the new Grupo Francisco Hernando Onde 2000 team on the eve of the race. The mainly black-and-white Ducati was on display, as well as the rider, looking fit and tanned.
The team is to be managed by brothers Gelete and Pablo Nieto, sons of the legendary 13-times champion Angel; with race engineer Luca Gasbarro in charge of the pit. Gibernau, grandson of Bultaco founder Don Paco Bulto, explained his return, after retirement was triggered at the end of 2006 after a salary dispute with Ducati: he was replaced for 2007 by Casey Stoner, who won the title forthwith.
“I take things as they come,” said Gibernau, who returned to the tracks in a testing role for Ducati during 2008. “I was enjoying racing and it was the centre of my life. I raced and I did my best, and when it was no longer the centre of my life I stopped.
“Now it there is an opportunity to come back, and it could make me happy, and it seems on the correct line for me,” he said. “I have always been a big fighter for being happy.”
Gibernau was involved a well-publicised divorce from his bride of barely one year in the middle of 2008. The man behind the team, Francisco Hernando, is one of the richest in Spain, having worked his way up from the slums of Madrid, where he first worked in the sewers as a “pocero”.
Given Sete’s reputation for posing, hair care and dress consciousness, there was an unfortunate translation in the official press release. It described how Onde, after a year in 125s, was moving “up to the queen category” of racing. In Spanish, this makes sense; in English it is quite different.
Let's hope Gibernau will not be nicknamed “the Queen of MotoGP”.
