40 years have passed since the last Triumph podium in a world championship, an event that repeated itself thanks to “The King of Slide” Garry McCoy with Team ParkinGO Triumph BE1 Racing on Sunday. The Australian rider finished third at Donington Park and made history for the English brand. It was 1969 when the test rider Percy Tait finished behind Giacomo Agostini on a MV in the 500 class at the Grand Prix of Belgium. This was the last round of the factory team in the World Grand Prix. However, it was not the only great result of those years, as the Hinckley-based manufacturer can boast an impressive record in other competitions which at that time were not world championships. Paul Smart and Tom Dickie won the Bol D’or in 1970 followed by Percy Tait and Ray Pickrell who did the same the year after, just before the racing division had to be shut down because the factory went into crisis as most European motorcycle brands did in the 70’s and 80’s. Team ParkinGO Triumph BE1 Racing received the great honour to continue the brand’s history as Giuliano Rovelli’s squad, who only 8 months before had become official factory team, reached their objective, that of getting on the podium with a Daytona 675 in World Supersport. “We’ve made it six months ahead of what we hoped for”, team owner Giuliano Rovelli said. “We kicked things off with the Italian Championship in 2007, where the Daytona 675 made its debut. After six races only, Ivan Clementi scored our first podium result at Mugello. That boosted our morale and we decided to participate in the world championship as a private team. Our performance convinced the manufacturer to promote us to factory team status at the end of 2008”. All this probably would not have been possible without the talent of a passionate and experienced rider such as Garry McCoy, famous for “inventing” skid racing. “When I first met the team members, I knew right away that they were doing things seriously and good results would come sooner or later. The crew works hard on every detail and situation. The staff who works alongside me is made up of very prepared people. I could compare them to the Red Bull Yamaha team with whom I won a lot of races in the 500 world championship”, the Aussie rider explained. Giuliano Rovelli’s method of programming and analyzing has been employed by the team’s owner in all his businesses where he works with hundreds of employees in airport parking (ParkinGO, the team’s main sponsor), customer care for such companies as the Hotelplan group and Virgin Holidays (Oasi Handling), renting of sailing boats with skipper (Barcheavela.com) and high-quality olive oil production in Sardinia with his green agricultural company. “Having so many businesses, I know how important the project phase is and that’s why I deal with it myself. However, all this would not be possible if I didn’t have a team of enthusiastic and competent collaborators. And, to top it all, we improved so much this year thanks to our very experienced head technician Fiorenzo Fanali, who is a symbol of world motorcycling”, Giuliano Rovelli said. Using his method, Rovelli has built up a team of highly motivated young professionals who embraced his project. “The team’s structure is almost the same it was at the beginning. The technical briefing after practice is probably the most important event of the day. It’s hard work, which enables us nonetheless to understand every single part of the bike. We got to know each other very well and we know that in order to improve, we have to keep it up”. “They don’t eat lunch or dinner if a problem is not fixed, none of the technicians leaves the pit. At the end of last season, I wanted badly to be part of this team, I knew they were the right ones for me. Giuliano has infected all of us with his mindset. He’s a great team manager, sponsor, businessman but, most of all, a great motivator. Working with him means always giving it all which makes an aggressive rider like myself feel at ease”, the other rider of the team, Gianluca Nannelli explained. Thanks to McCoy’s and Nannelli’s results, the Daytona 675 has more and more admirers among the other riders. In fact, “starting last week Westmoreland participated at Donigton. He is a rider in the English championship and I’d like to congratulate him for his eleventh place in England. But he is not the only good rider, others are too in the Italian, French and German championships. I think we managed to prove on the track that the machine has a great potential”, Rovelli said. Now that we reached our goal, the team aims higher. “Our next objective is to improve and, maybe next year, win our first race. I’m confident we can reach our goal especially if we keep getting the support we need from our partners who believe in us: ParkinGO, BC Technologies, Bitubo, Hotelplan and Motorex. Big thanks to them as well!”, Rovelli concluded. Triumph’s racing coordinator, Paul Taylor also commented on the team’s historic result: “We are delighted to have scored a podium finish so early in the project and to have achieved this at our home race made it even more special. This is only the second time in the history that a Triumph has appeared on the podium of a full world championship race and our first in the modern era. From my first meetings with Giuliano it was clear that he had the skills and determination to allow Triumph to compete with the big budget teams from the Japanese manufacturers on the world stage. We are also very fortunate to have the talent of Garry McCoy, who had a tough 2008 season but has never stopped believing in the Daytona 675. This is a great reward for his efforts and I hope that he will continue to collect the silverware between now and the end of the season”.