This just in, via e-mail from Desiree Crossman, detailing her latest adventures with John “Hopper” Hopkins:

It’s 9:45 p.m. on a Saturday night and I can’t even describe to ANYONE HOW LOUD IT IS IN MUGELLO! I thought in Jerez they go nuts, I thought at Le Mans they go nuts, but nobody can out-do the Italians! For anyone who ever goes to Glamis during the desert season and they know Comp Hill Saturday night? This is just as bad!

We’ve been hearing Mugello is the worse for noise, the worse to sleep at, the craziest die hards I have ever seen for a motorcycle sport. From what we heard from everyone is that the fans bring fully modified engines just to rev the crap out of all night long and they are dead on! All night long we hear engines, fire crackers, engines, fire crackers, engines getting blown up, fireworks around the track and did I mention engines getting rev to the point of no return? They also pour oil on the engines for some sort of special effects. The sky is filled with smoke like it’s a complete war zone and they don’t stop until the racing starts the next day! It’s incredible! I can’t even BEGAN TO DESCRIBE THE ATMOSPHERE!

They have keg parties at each camp, we’ve heard somebody put up a disco with full lighting, dance floor, amplifier and it’s not put on by the
track. AND, we were told the engine revving was BANNED this year! Do you think the Italians care? Hell no. Crazy! Just like Competition Hill at
Glamis on Thanksgiving weekend.

John and I were chased by security, too! They obviously take their job seriously. We rode all around the track doing wheelies for the fans (who
were loving it, I may add) and we had a security guard yell at us, but we just rode right past. Then another security guard in a car started chasing us and screaming in Italian as we were doing wheelies, but we just kept going. They chased us halfway around the track until she sped up and got out of the car.

We nearly knocked her over and kept going, laughing our bums off, and then this guard in a car going around 100 kph, maybe more, comes from the opposite direction with lights flashing, honking the horn, swerves out in front of us, jumps out of the car with a K9 in the back, screaming for us to get off the track. So we get off the track onto the service road and started doing more wheelies for the crowd! They were going nuts. Around the last corner we got back on the track and did another wheelie just to piss him off some more. It was so fun! They have all this chaos around the track with a bunch of drunks partying like they never partied, before blowing up engines, lighting fire works BUT we can’t do wheelies on the track? Question…Do you think it stopped us? GO TO MUGELLO, ITALY IN 2003!