The recently deceased Mirko Giansanti, who suffered a hand injury while leading the World Championship, would have been 47 today. However, as team leader, he managed to reach the top in the World Super Sports Championship.
Mirko Giansanti could have celebrated his 47th birthday on this day, but unfortunately he can no longer do so, as he passed away at the beginning of August. As a pilot, he competed in the World Speedway Championship for ten seasons, and although he did not win, he still finished at the top of the overall standings once. Later he became really successful as a team leader.
Giansanti started riding motorcycles at the age of seven and made his debut in the 125cc class at the Italian Grand Prix in 1996. He competed at Mugello with a free card, but did not finish, but in the last three races of the season he also got the chance to ride for a Honda With his fourteenth place in Barcelona, he scored his first points.
In 1997 he switched to Aprilia and increased his number of units ten times in fifteen races. He finished fourth in the season-opening Malaysian and Catalan Grand Prix, and finished the season ninth overall. He returned to Honda a year later and managed to stand on the podium in the second race of the season. He repeated this three more times, and his result was enough for sixth place in the table. As it turned out, this was the most successful season of his career in this regard.
The following year he raced again in Aprilia, but did not reach the podium, and then in 2000 Honda returned again. Giansanti got off to a great start, with one exit in the first six races and four second and third places, and led the championship with 96 points even without winning a race. But then he suffered a hand injury, as a result of which he missed two races, and then he also did not start in the last two races, so he passed him in seven.
Sad news yesterday about the passing of GRT Yamaha founder Mirko Giansanti. Useful 125 racer in the late 1990s. He liked his skins so he asked Spike to make a replica suit. pic.twitter.com/QCzhBAKL2p
– Simon Hargreaves (@SimonHbikes) August 8, 2023
In the next three years, he won the podium. In 2002 and 2003, this happened at the season-opening Japanese Grand Prix, but he was unable to repeat this result on any of the subsequent occasions, finishing 15th and 10th overall. The latter has already happened with Aprilia, with which it never finished in the top three in 2004, but still improved by one place on the previous year.
This was his final year in the 125cc class, competing with Gábor Talmacchi for five years and with Emre Toth for three years. In 2005, he was already among the 250 players, scoring nine out of sixteen goals. He finished the season in fifteenth place, and his best result was ninth place in Barcelona.
This marked the end of his MotoGP World Championship career. Later, he started in smaller categories, and also visited the Supersport World Cup several times. In 2008, he had the opportunity to compete in the first five races on a Honda bike, in 2011 he was able to compete in three races, and in 2012 he was able to compete in one race with Kawasaki. He finished the 2011 Monza race in 12th place, so he didn’t miss any points in that category either. As in the European Moto2 Championship, where he finished 12th at Jerez in 2014, he was eliminated in the other two races.
Shortly after his retirement, he founded a team called Giansanti Racing Team, abbreviated as GRT. He did all this with Filippo Conte, and the roles were split between them as well. Giansanti became sporting director, while his compatriot became team president. The team made its debut in the Supersport World Cup in 2016, with Gino Rea winning three podium finishes with Kawasaki.
They switched to Yamaha the following year and became the Japanese manufacturer’s official team in the series. It paid off, as Federico Caricasolo gave them their first win in Buriram. Moreover, at the end of the year, the championship title was also won, but it was not the Italian driver who took the lead, but his teammate Lukas Mahias. The following year, they also achieved four victories, but the title defense was unsuccessful for the French competitor, as he lost to Sandro Cortes.
the #WorldSBK The circuit gathered at Magny-Cours to honor Mirko Giansanti💙
The much-loved GYTR GRT Yamaha sports director was remembered with a moment of silence in the pitlane pic.twitter.com/J5iDH2hqcr
— WorldSBK (@WorldSBK) September 7, 2023
Another big step came in 2019, as this year they participated in the World Superbike Championship. The team made its debut at Phillip Island, where Marco Melandri finished third in the first race. He managed to repeat this twice more in the rest of the season, with the team also reaching three podium finishes a year later, and only then thanks to Garrett Gerloff. This number then decreased by one from season to season, meaning that during the first nine rounds of this year, neither Dominik Egerter nor Remy Gardner finished in the top three. If this happens, Giansanti will not be able to afford it anymore, since he died on August 7th. The exact details of the incurable disease have not been known since then.
