AGV Rossi Mugello 2006 Helmet (Manara)

Location: Grand Prix of Italy (Gran Premio d’Italia Alice ), Mugello

Date: Sunday, June 4, 2006

Race position: 1st

AGV Rossi Mugello 2006 Helmet by Milo Manara

Mugello was round 6 of the 2006 MotoGP season and turned out to be one of the most exciting races in years as Rossi eventually took the win, but not after a huge battle with Loris Capirossi, Marco Melandri, and both the Repsol Hondas of Nicky Hayden and Dani Pedrosa. The race was also Valentino Rossi’s 5th consecutive win at his home Grand Prix.

As has become tradition, Rossi had a specially designed helmet created for the event. The helmet for 2006 was designed by Milo Manara, an Italian artist and writer best known for his graphic novels, comic books, and distinctive erotic art. Manara has a reputation for writing and illustrating comics that feature elegantly drawn, beautiful, and semi-dressed women exploring erotic and fantasy storylines.

The helmet design was not dominated by the sun and the moon, as past Rossi helmets have been, but instead featured significant symbols from Rossi’s life in a comic storyboard format. The righthand side of the helmet featured Enzo Ferrari, and the lefthand side featured Steve McQueen – two men that Rossi counts as his heros. The top of the helmet is plit into 4 storyboard panels and features Manara’s drawings of Rossi, his dog Guido, Osvaldo the chicken (an early sponsor of Rossi that featured notably in one of Rossi’s on-track celebrations), and one of the topless girls that Manara is famous for in his artwork. The back of the helmet featured the number 74 in tribute to the late Daijiro Kato (Kato died in 2003 after a crash, 74 was his racing number) and the word “Quarantasei” – the Italian for ‘46′.

Rossi said:

“My new helmet design is by a famous Italian cartoonist called Milo Manara. He has drawn a kind of mythical story of my life, with some of my heroes like Steve McQueen, Enzo Ferrari and Jim Morrison, with other characters like my dog Guido, Osvaldo the chicken and lots of beautiful women! I really like it and Milo is somebody I have admired for a long time.”

Milo Manara also worked with Rossi on an actual comic book called Quarantasei in July 2006 that was created by Manara as a fantasy work on the life of Rossi. It doesn’t seem to be readily available online at the outlets that you would expect (Amazon etc..) but we managed to find a link to it here: http://www.leopoldobloom.it/dett.asp?id=1

Some pages and artwork from it can be seen in the image gallery below.