The journalist thought it was cool and so do I!!
Go Daniel Day! (Damn fine actor!)

It was from the New York Times:
November 12, 2007, 2:43 pm Daniel Day-Lewis Hearts MotoGP and Valentino Rossi

By Richard S. Chang
Tags: MotoGP, road movies, Valentino Rossi

While reading Lynn Hirschberg’s profile on Daniel Day-Lewis in the Sunday magazine, I was pleasantly surprised to find out he was a Valentino Rossi fan.

Strewn on the floor around him were several motorcycle magazines: one of Day-Lewis’s passions is MotoGP, the competitive bike tournament, which is popular everywhere (although somewhat less so in America). This summer, he borrowed a GSXR 1000 bike and rode at 120 m.p.h. from Los Angeles to Laguna Seca to cheer on his hero, the legendary champion Valentino Rossi. When Day-Lewis spoke about Rossi, it was in the same adulatory tones he reserved for De Niro, Brando and Montgomery Clift. “I’m a groupie,” he said. “Rossi is a genius. There are some parallels between what he does and what those actors do — his work requires both a great deal of discipline and a wildness of spirit. With acting, there is always that intangible aspect that goes beyond the practical framework. Brando had that — the freedom that he had was more the instinctive freedom of an animal at times than a human.

In the same issue, Walter Salles has an essay dissecting the elements that make up a great road movie, which made me think of my all-time favorite road movie — “Midnight Run.”

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com
I love how DDL says he's a groupie... is funny, no?