Rushing through the paddock, team owner Hervé Poncharal manages to smile at friends, pose for fan photos, and trade barbs with rival team personnel—all without breaking stride. He wears many hats, stays pleasant, and keeps moving.

Until he sees a man talking on an iPhone.

Poncharal stops dead. His eyes fix not on the device itself—it’s an ordinary, well-worn iPhone 5—but on the sticker on its back: an old Honda racing decal featuring Miguel Duhamel aboard his RC45 Superbike, wearing his signature number 17.

“Did you know,” Poncharal asks the phone’s owner, “that when I was just a boy, the number 17—the rider and his green Kawasaki—meant very much to me?”

Poncharal smiles, reeling in the years.

“It’s a little difficult for me to say, because I’ve been a (company) man for many, many years,” he admits. “But I have to confess, when I was a student, when I first started riding, I fell in love with the Kawasaki two-stroke triple. That was the bike for me. The one that made me dream.”

As a teen, Poncharal followed Yvon Duhamel’s racing career obsessively. He even tried to make his own street motorcycle look like the famed green machine that Yvon rode in the 1970s.

“There were posters of the triple everywhere in my room. And of course, back then, Kawasaki’s icon—their Valentino Rossi—was Yvon DuHamel. I painted my bike to look like his. I found a Bell helmet with a 17 on it. I bought stickers with the green ‘K’ and the number 17. For me, everything was 17.”

He admits that, in his youth, he even came close to getting a tattoo of the number.

Like DuHamel, Poncharal didn’t believe in an off-season. When motorcycles went quiet, he followed Yvon to the snow, watching him race Ski-Doo snowmobiles in the winter months.

Years later, in the 1990s, Poncharal finally crossed paths with the DuHamel family in the World Endurance Championship, where all of them—Yvon, Mario, and Miguel—competed. He briefly worked alongside them on the same team.

“It was like I was living my childhood dream,” he says, eyes still lit with nostalgia.