In the last hours of Tuesday, a piece of news shook the automotive field: Gabriel Adamoli He died at the age of 57 after fighting cancer and sparked interest in reviewing that story that he recalled two years ago in an interview with Clarion. “Before me there was a lot, it was the most normal thing because there were a lot of people who really didn’t want them to find out who they were because of their work. But later it stopped using it and nobody ran under a pseudonym at that time,” recalled who until recently a decade ago, when he retired, he was known on the road courses as Rexname taken from Meteor, the Japanese anime that at the end of the ’70s I watched every morning before going to school.
The information was confirmed by the TC 2000, one of the categories in which he competed throughout his career, through his official Twitter account.
When Juan Gálvez debuted in motorsports, he did it as Quickly, a pseudonym that responded to his nickname and that allowed him to run unnoticed. Especially in the first stage, many pilots hid his real name behind a fictitious one, often taken from history or literature: thus Juan Manuel Fangio was rivadavia; Angel LoValvo, Hypomenes; Enrique Diaz Saenz Valiente, Patoruzu; or Nestor Marincovich, Sandoka. Today, running with a pseudonym implies an expense equal to obtaining a license for a national category such as Track Tourism: 23.400 pesos.
Why Rex and not Speed? “Because it was the same story as mine, apart from Meteoro he was the idol of the story but he was the boludo. Rex was a secret agent. Because of my old lady, I already knew that when I ran it was going to be Rex. She knew it since he was 15 years old. And I enjoyed being Rex twice as much because I’m a fan, I have the whole collection on DVD,” he revealed.
Although his connection with motorsports had not begun on the screen but at home, with a father preparing competition cars -like Don Fox, the father of Rex, Speed and Sparky-, his mother never wanted him to race.
“In fact, when I was 14 years old, my dad bought me a Formula 5, he brought it to my house and my mom told him: ‘This is leaving here, I did not bring children into the world to kill themselves and if it does not leave, you leave’. My home was a normal home: my mother was in charge”, jokes who for three years has been doing theater in Timbre 4 and studies “Direction, Script and Editing” -he is preparing his fourth short film-, as well as being a musician and lawyer.
The car left home but to his uncle’s workshop, in Tandil, where Formula 5 was experiencing a boom in the ’80s. Although the illusion of racing ended when his uncle died of a sudden heart attack a few months later, it resurfaced a few years later when he and his brother set up a racing car parts store on Avenida San Martín and Beiró -Adamoli Competición- and He reconnected with motorsport. “This is my opportunity to get closer to motorsports, to see if I can race”he thought and moved on with his dream.
“A year after having the premises, when I was 19, I convinced my mother that she had to buy a Fiat 600 for a driver in the category to run and thus show the irons that my old man made. A lie, it was all a lie. My mother, who was the one who kept the accounts even though my brother and I were the owners, agrees. We make her buy the car, I take it to a workshop so they can prepare it for me and finish it again. update to the category and I start running alone with the pseudonym Rex, named after Meteoro’s brother, so that my old lady wouldn’t find out that I was running“, he remarked.
Between the band, the car, and the plans to marry his girlfriend, he didn’t have enough money to run often, but at least he did it and he won. But doing it behind her mother’s back only lasted a while, until the neighborhood butcher -thinking she already knew- congratulated her on Gabriel’s victory one day when he supposedly had gone to play ball. .
“The butcher didn’t know that my old lady didn’t know, he thought that after a long time he already knew. He sent me to the front. And my old lady waited for her to come home from college and kicked me out of my house. And when my brother came, he also threw him out accomplice. I went to my girlfriend’s house for two or three days and then she came looking for me and she told me: ‘Your father wants you back’. she never told me ‘volved’. When I came back he made me promise and swear on the Holy Gospels that he was not going to run anymore. Of course I swore to him. I swore to him again knowing that he was not going to fulfill it. I kept running in the Zonals, I came out champion and when I went from the Fiat 600 to the National Tourism there was no other choice, because I already lived more elsewhere than there, “he explains.
Over time, Rex He says that his mother ended up “accompanying him to the races.” “But she had a bad time, she suffered a lot. She started the race and started crying, I made the promoters take her away. She never got over it because she didn’t want to but she accompanied me and even stayed in the motorhome with me. And like all the mothers told me ‘I ran slowly’. But there were three or four years that my mother did not find out that she was running, now she would have found out after three minutes “, she compares.
-If your mom already knew, why stay behind the pseudonym Rex?
-When I went to national motorsports, I could have used my name. But I studied Marketing as well as Law and I wondered why sponsors would give me money if no one knew me. I came from being champion in the Zonals but no one knew me. If I wear Rex I will surely be a marketing attraction until I have some results. Already the first race in National Tourism people wondered: ‘Who is Rex, why doesn’t he use his name?’. Nobody ran with a pseudonym at that time and the marketing part was good, because people looked for me at the racetracks with the intrigue of knowing who I was, on TV they focused a lot on me and my way of being looked for that because I needed publicity. But if you don’t win, you can’t sustain it, and in the first year that I ran in Turismo Nacional I won, that helped me and later it became a registered trademark.
-Did you enjoy being Rex and not Gabriel Adamoli?
–I enjoyed being Rex twice as much. From my mother, I already knew that when I ran it was going to be Rex. I knew it since he was 15 years old. And it was a beautiful time in my life. I really enjoyed running at the national level. The dream of my whole life was to race in Turismo Carretera and when I achieved it, in 2002, I couldn’t believe it. It took me five years from a Fiat 600 to a Turismo Carretera and nobody gave me anything or gave me a hitchhiker. I came out runner-up in the TC Track -I lost by half a point for not going to two races due to not having the budget- to be able to go to the TC. They screwed me up but I was able to run there and in TC2000, where I was among the three best individuals and got into the top 10. I went through Turismo Nacional, TC Pista, where I fought for championships, and Top Race, which got me into the top 10. I had a good time, it was a beautiful stage of my life. Now I am in another, although I continue to go karting, where I often go with my son, who runs the Argentino de Karting. And watch out that I’m back there and this year I run two races.
The X-Pilot
Meteoro marked a generation, mainly the one that grew up in the ’70s and ’80s in Argentina, both for the careers of the incredible (and futuristic for the time) Mach 5 as for those secret missions that the masked pilot carried out. As well as Gabriel Adamoli was Rex in national motorsportthere was another person who chose the another self of Meteoro’s brother to carry his driver’s education message: pilot x.
Although his real name remains confidential so as not to ruin the mystery, Piloto X emerged in 2010, during a visit by pilots from the Top Race category to a special education school in Río Hondo that only Marcos Vázquez from Santiago attended. . Whoever was in charge of the activity, then, proposed to the school director to wear a helmet and a flame retardant overall that he had in the car. The reaction was so positive that she tried it again at the autodrome museum with a contingent from a kindergarten, who when she saw it she ran to greet him. “Hey, this is something”, felt. “No, you are crazy, who is going to know you, who are you, people are not going to give you a ball,” they replied.
“I started out very resistant. But it seemed to me that motorsports could leave something more in the cities where I traveled. I also saw that in Argentina we were world champions in solidarity but that could be continued, other than for a specific event. And in the careers we could see what the need was in each city but I didn’t want it to be done on behalf of someone or something. And I thought of the Masked Runner, Speed Racer’s brother, and the X-Pilot came up.. There are very few who really know who I am, I try to respect it to the letter because it is the essence of Pilot X”, emphasizes who in 2018 received the Road Education Award granted by the Secretary of Transportation of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires.
The mission that had begun in motorsports was transferred in 2019 to the initial education of schools: “For the first time I live from Pilot X, as if I were a singer. It wasn’t the same as winning as a marketing manager but I wanted to fight it. I thought that 2020 was going to be a good year, especially with the ten-year anniversary, but the pandemic arrived: no trips, no massive events.”
After a 2020 without a job but in which he continued to collaborate with talks at schools via Zoom, Piloto X was summoned by the government of the Province of Buenos Aires to tour the main spas on the Atlantic Coast with his message of driver education. He gives four talks a day to groups of up to ten boys and girls, who learn the basics of pedestrians, passengers and drivers. “They liked it a lot and they want to do it in schools during the year, but in the future, when everything returns to normal because now the priority is another”he hoped, at that moment, facing a future that was truncated.
