SBK Journal v19.03

v19.03 Featuring: WORLDSBK ROUNDS 03 & 04 BSB ROUND 01 MOTOAMERICA PERE RIBA LEON CAMIER SBKink with LEON HASLAM ACCESS ALL AREAS and much more.

SBK Journal | version 19.03 After a long winter break the British Superbike Championship hit the track at Silverstone.

2019 is being viewed as the most open championship season for many years and the frist round didn’t disappoint.

WorldSBK returned to Europe with rounds three and four on consecutive weekends at Motorland Aragon and Assen. Many commentators felt the European circuits would draw the field closer to the rampaging Bautista.

Things were a little closer, but not by much.

In this issue we also have look west and review the the first few rounds from the MotoAmerica Superbike series.

During the Motorland Aragon WorldSBK round we caught up with Jonathan Rea’s crew chief Pere Riba and asked how he and Kawasaki Racing Team were tackling the dominance of Ducati.

In Assen Leon Camier gave us the low down on his first few races with the new Honda WorldSBK squad, his views on his luck with crashes and injuries and his hopes for the future.

Feel free to share, of course, via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Having missed the race in Thailand, Graeme Brown, the driving force behind GeeBee Images, was back on the buttons at Motorland Araogn and Assen capturing the action as well as photographing Leon Haslam for SBKink.

Jamie Morris has been flat out for the last month photographing WorldSBK and BSB. In this issue he brings images from both WorldSBK and exclusive content from the British championship Silverstone.

In the last issue we were grateful for the design wizardry of Corey J Coulter. This month Corey brings us the action from Austin where the MotoAmerica Superbike series supported the MotoGP race weekend.

Sidelined. The dream start to the 2019 British Superbike Championship season didn’t quite materialise for Scott Redding after a crash in race two at Silverstone in the opening round of the championship left him watching the action from trackside.

Assen, Saturday, April 13, 2019: It wasn’t quite the “Beast from the East’ but a cold northerly wind blew accross Assen on the WorldSBK weekend. Saturday’s race was cancelled after a “snow storm”

The weather at Motorland Aragon in the north west of Spain is unpredictable and often cold in early April, and regularly delivers dramatic skies. Heavy clouds rolled in on Friday afternoon with rain coming in the last few minutes the second WorldSBK Free Practice session.

Track temperatures at Assen hovered around 10ËšC each morning, meaning the riders had difficulty keeping heat, and grip, in the tyres. Alex Lowes fell foul in the first Free Practice session at Turn 9, De Bult, on Friday morning. Luckily he was uninjured. The bike less so.

One on the most striking features about Motorland Aragon is ‘the wall’.

It’s a huge stone ediface that provides the elevation change at the track. It provides a cracking view as well.

The MotoAmerica Superbike series also hit the track in April. After the opening round at Road Atlanta on the first weekend of the month the series landed in Austin, Texas the week after as part of the support package for the MotoGP race weekend.

Interview: Pere Riba

‘We will never give up’

Currently Jonathan Rea’s crew chief in the Kawasaki superbike garage, Pere Riba has been a superbike and supersport racer, a development rider and team manager. He should know what’s going on in the World superbike paddock

Pere Riba has been around the racing block. He’s been there, done it and got a drawer full of T-shirts. He raced in 250cc Grands Prix for a couple of seasons, had a few years in World superbikes and ended his racing career with Kawasaki in World supersport. Following his retirement from racing in 2007, he became a development rider for Team Green – or Kawasaki Heavy Industries if you prefer – and was instrumental in the testing that led to the launch of the latest ZX-10R back in 2011. In other words, Riba knows Kawasaki, he knows racing and he knows the latest incarnation of the bike better than most.

For the past four seasons he had witnessed Jonathan Rea triumph aboard a ZX-10R and – naturally – been satisfied with the work of the rider and his team. In 2019 however, Riba, Rea and his hitherto invincible Ninja find themselves playing catch-up with Alvaro Bautista onboard the new Ducati Panigale V4. Three rounds in and Bautista has scored maximum points, looking completely in control of both his bike and the 2019 championship.

You must have been worried after you saw the winter testing and now the season is underway, you are confronted with a serious rival in Bautista. What can you do?

Pere Riba: Well. Honestly. Honestly it’s not going to be easy, but of course this is what racing is about, one day everything is great, the next day, not. Let me say, from the start, that from what I can see Bautista is riding very well combined with a bike that is a little bit...actually, no, not a little bit, actually quite a big step ahead of us at the moment. The only thing we can do at the moment is work even more precisely, to try to get closer to perfection you could say, to get as close as we can to perfection with the package that we have. That’s what we can do today – in the future, in the sense of next year – that will depend on what (series organisers) Dorna wants to do with the rules after they see what has happened this year.

You mean you would hope or expect Dorna to try to maintain the spirit of superbike racing? Racing production bikes rather than – as some say – homologation specials?

PR: I would hope they would keep the spirit of the last few years and try to keep a balance, keep everyone equal, broadly speaking, at a performance level. This is a big question for Dorna and obviously I don’t know what the answer will be.

For now, all we can do is try to get 99 per cent out of Johnny, 99 per cent out of the guys and 99 per cent out of the bike – without making any mistakes! What can I say, you know?

The championship is a long one, of course and I am sure that on other tracks, without long straights like at Thailand or Aragon, we will be closer to Bautista. Australia was a little bit different because we had some difficulties with the tyres. But on those circuits we are closer, then we have to push Ducati hard.

Interview: Pere Riba

Interview: Pere Riba

Do you think that at the moment you are at the maximum you can do? Or close to it?

PR: Well, you can never really say that, in racing, you can never be sure. Part of the problem is that it is difficult to try something really new – say about adjusting the balance of the bike - because the race weekend is so short. If you want to change the geometry of the bike or the centre of gravity of the bike or the head angle or wheelbase, where is the time to test that? You have a really stable bike but you want it to turn a little bit faster? OK, but where is the time?

We have an understanding of the bike – and we are going faster than we were last season – so there are many things we can try, to lose a little bit here, but gain a little bit in this area. I have a lot of ideas and I have spoken to Japan about developing some parts, but how can we test them at a race weekend, which is so short? You have to try out the tyres, you have to set the bike up for the characteristics of the circuit. And it’s not just Bautista we have to think about, there are other guys, you know! And we have to be ready for all of that, which means trying things on a race weekend is very difficult.

Can you find time, the budget and parts to test?

PR: We have a test after the Imola round, at Misano, which will be a good track to make a step and try things.

But to be honest one of the things that makes a big difference to the lap time is the engine and when you are fighting with a bike that has 25 horsepower more than you, there is no way to compensate for that just by adjusting the balance or geometry of your bike. We will never give up, of course!

KP

All Bets Are Off

The Bennetts British Superbike Championship got underway over the Easter weekend. It has been billed as the most open championship for years but one prediction held true - round one was unpredicatable.

All the pre-race predictions for Silverstone’s opening round of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship were wrong.

Neither Josh Brookes nor Scott Redding won a race, neither did Jason O’Halloran while outsider Julian Elliott bagged one and Tarran Mackenzie the second.

No-one saw that coming.

Be Wiser Ducati’s Brookes – the title favourite in many eyes – had a disastrous weekend not of his own making. He lost one engine in qualifying, retired from race one with an electrical fault and lost a second engine in race two.

All from the same manufacturer that has taken 11 WorldSBK wins out of 11 attempts this season without so much as a mis-placed circlip.

Redding inherited an ‘undeserved’ – as he put it – podium when Mackenzie stuck a move on McAMS team-mate O’Halloran into the penultimate corner in race one which sent the Australian out of the lead and into the gravel.

It made Mackenzie and dad Niall the first father and son BSB winners since the modern (1996-onwards) era of the series. Of course, the Haslams and Dixons have also been successful in the domestic series.

He joked a couple of days after that the marshals probably heard several new swearwords in the minutes that followed.

Brookes and Redding were left to spectate in race two after the Australian’s V4R broke down for the third time. Redding was nerfed off by Honda’s Andrew Irwin but apparently suffered no aggravation to the leg he may or may not have broken in February.

Race direction penalized Mackenzie for the move and his sentence meant the win was given to OMG Suzuki’s Elliott, who had been on the pace all weekend.

No-one had given the Irishman a whelk’s chance in a supernova of taking a win but he followed it up in race two with a second place behind Mackenzie and Danny Buchan in third.

Dan Linfoot led the second race at Silverstone but was dogged by brake problems on Sunday which were eventually found to be caused by an overheating quick release bolt that was making the pads glaze. Not much fun into Copse.

Luke Mossey, on the sister OMG Suzuki to Elliott found the form that had deserted him since big crashes at Thruxton and Snetterton over the past couple of seasons. The Royston rider was back with a bang though and sits fourth in the championship challenge.

If the Be Wiser mob suffered shocks, the Oxford Ducati operation were awesome. Tommy Bridewell, in the same team from one season to the next, rode two consistent races to claim third in the chase and Oulton Park this weekend (May 4-6) is a place he has tasted victory in the past.

Brookes dominated last Thursday’s official test by more than a second at the Cheshire circuit – albeit one that was rained off at lunchtme – and the 2015 champion is odds-on for at least one win. But he was at Silverstone too.

DM

The Continuing Trials Of Leon Leon Camier, riding for Moriwaki Althea Honda in 2019, has found himself, once again, fighting mid-pack on a bike in dire need of development. Well, nobody said it was going to be easy.

Before we dive in to the Leon Camier’s current position in the World Superbike championship, it’s worth reminding our younger readers (or those oldsters whose memories are fading) that Camier was an outstanding British superbike champion (on a Yamaha) back in 2009 at the age of 23, having previously won the Supersport class in 2005 on a Honda CBR600RR. He moved to WSBK in 2010 and has been on a succession of bikes which, to be charitable, were unlikely to be contenders. Add to that some ugly injuries and Camier’s career – like so many others – has seemed like a long stop and go penalty.

For 2019, he finds himself on another bike that was never going to win the championship, another bike that needed development, albeit this time with backing from the Honda Racing Corporation, which, when it puts its mind and money to it, can make things go fast around racetracks.

When we spoke to Leon, four races in to the 2019 season, Camier and his team mate Ryuichi Kiyonari’s Honda Fireblades are just not going fast enough, rubbing shoulders back in 10th to fifteenth places, grubbing around for points. For two former British superbike champions, riding HRC-backed Fireblades, this is not where anyone connected with the team wants to be.

So, Leon, what’s going on?

Leon Camier: Well, from a team point of view there’s a mix, there’s a lot of HRC stuff, a lot of mechanics and staff from Althea on the ground and Moriwaki are steering and running the show as well. I think we’ve got a good working relationship, my crew chief is Chris Pike and Deano (Gerardo Acocella) who I worked with last year is the data guy. There are a lot of very good very clever people, top HRC people here overseeing things.

You started on the back foot this season, in terms of time on the bike, would that be fair to say?

LC: From the start of the season, from the first test the bike is what it is, it had come from the Japan championship, developed on different tyres with zero crossover from what I rode last year. So that’s where we started and obviously HRC needed us to get a lot of information for them to start changing and making things.

The hardest thing at the moment is that it is a slow process, a really slow process, so from the first test (in Australia prior to the opening round) to now (in Aragon at round three) there has been nothing new, nothing has changed on the bike.

There haven’t been many opportunities to test since the Australian and Thailand rounds, there’s been no time.

LC: Well, no, but we’re not testing.

Because there is nothing to test.

We’ve got a bike and that’s what it is at the minute. The good thing is that we are getting plenty of data for HRC, so when we make a change I’d expect it to be good. It’s the Japanese way of working, they don’t throw a thousand different bits and pieces at it and see which way to go, they only make a change when they are confident that it is the way to go. From a rider’s point of view, right now, it’s a little bit difficult, because you want something – anything, please! - you want to see a direction. But the HRC plan is to bring some stuff later in the year and hopefully we can make a step forward.

It’s the HRC way of working, they want to be sure before they make a change.

It seems like this is another delicate episode in the career of Leon Camier.

You seem to be on the right track then a skip load of bad luck falls on your head, there’s some hold-up or you get caught up in a crash, like in Thailand.

LC: There’s two ways to look at it, from the outside, yeah, I can see how it might look. But what are we doing fighting for 15th? The front guys don’t normally have those issues because they all know exactly what they are trying to do but when you are in the middle of the pack, battling, one little mistake and - Smack! everyone comes down and its carnage.

You’ve got people who are trying to make up every position they can at every chance they can and it can get a little bit desperate, a little bit crazy with some of them back there.

And it can all go wrong quickly. Very quickly. And when you are in amongst that, you’re just a passenger, there’s nothing you can do. Last year we started off really well, battling for a podium in Thailand and front row and in the front group in Australia and then we changed the electronics package on the bike.

The team switched from Cosworth to Marelli for the Aragon round, after Thailand, right?

LC: Yes. And switching electronics is not a simple thing. It’s like oh my god, it was massive and it is so easy to miss the tiniest detail and at Aragon everything changed. Like, the way the traction control worked in Aragon was different and we just didn’t have the time to set it up right to the point that when the rear tyre lost grip, when it let go, it just kept going, just kept spinning.

And that’s exactly what happened.

And the way the electronics worked with the chassis was different, which is always the case with every bike, the way the electronics work with each bike – chassis and engine characteristics – is different and you need time to work it out.

Speaking of changes and working things out, you’ve just become a dad for the first time, so...?

LC: Ha! It’s amazing. The sleeping through the night thing is sometimes good and sometimes not so good, but in general its an amazing experience.

It’s not changed my outlook, not really, but away from racing, it takes your mind off the bullshit going on in your head, which is a positive thing.

That and coming to a racetrack to get a decent night’s sleep!

KP

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SBKink

This issue, in SBKink, we get together with Leon Haslam to find out the stories, the emotions and the deeper meaning in his tattoos.

It really is a story of my life.

It’s the family, how it all started. My family is racing and it’s really what the family represents, what I represent and where it has all come from.

Starting with the top one, which I first had done, it’s a picture of my mum and dad from the ELF days, wearing the leathers. It’s just an iconic memory from my early childhood travelling around the GP’s with my dad and Serge Rosset and the ELF project and it’s something I remember quite clearly.

Obviously having my parents who have supported me all the way through my career was a key thing for me.

I have my kids on there, a cute picture of them wearing their (Manchester) United shirts so it’s good to have them too.

On the historical side of things on my arm for me are the two pictures of my dad’s brothers who started the Haslams in racing. Phil Haslam who was one of the first guys to break the 100mph lap at Isle of Man TT but sadly he was killed racing at Scarborough.

Then I have also got on there Terry Haslam. He was one of the older brothers who was actually the first to get the Haslams into racing and was killed in Assen racing side cars. So there is a bit of history there from how the racing got started in the family.

I have a few bits I have to get finished on the inside, me and my dad flying planes, something that we do together which again just represents the relationship I have with my parents.

On the back of my arm I have the racing logo of Karl Harris.

Karl and myself were really close and when he got killed at the Isle of Man, to put his logo on my arm I felt was fitting. He lived with me for five or six years and was one of my best friends so to have the logo there means a lot to me as well.

LH

AMERICA CALLING

The MotoAmerica Superbike series kicked off at the beginning of April with round one at Road Atlanta over the first weekend.

There was no respite for the teams and riders as they made the 1000 mile trip from Georgia to Texas in the space of a few days to pitch up at the Circuit of Americas in Austin for round two the following weekend.

Former MotoAmerica champion Toni Elias and reigning champion Cameron Beaubier, riding for Monster Energy Yamaha, have set the early running ahead of Elias’ team-mate Josh Herrin.

At the first round in Atlanta the two favourites shared the spoils with Beaubier taking race one ahead of Elias, whilst the Spaniard won the second race. Beaubier finished third in that second race, behind South African Mathew Scholtz on the Westby Racing Yamaha R1, and it meant that Elias came into round two the following weekend with a slim lead in the overall standings.

One notable mention has to go to Attack Performance Estenson Racing Yamaha rider JD Beach.

The current, and two time MotoAmerican Supersport Champion has moved up to the Superbike class this year riding the YZF-R1. The season got off to a great start for him with a third and a fourth placed finish in Atlanta, and a fifth in race one at COTA. He suffered a DNF in race two but that disappointment was quickly forgotten at the weekend passed when Beach claimed his first premier class American Flat Track victory on the Estenson Yamaha MT07 DT. There are not many riders who split their efforts between to championships in one season, let alone across two racing disciplines. It’s a superb achievement to be spraying the champagne on the Superbike podium in the first race of the season and a few weeks later to be on the top step of the Flat Track podium for your first career win in that class. Good work JD.

Elias managed to strecth that overall lead at COTA with a win and a second place. In race two his Yoshimura team-mate Herrin took the win to elevate him to third on the championship points table.

The series now moves to Virgina International Raceway this coming weekend (May 4-5) where Elias took a double win last year.

Pic: Andrea Wilson

GRID PASS

GRID PASS

GRID PASS

SBK Journal is Published by Slipstream Media Ltd, PO Box 26532, Glasgow, G74 9FB No part of this publication may be reproduced in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Slipstream Media Ltd. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the facts and the data contained in this publication, no responsibility can be accepted by Slipstream Media Ltd or any of the contributors for error or ommissions, or their consequences. ©Slipstream Media Ltd Photography: Graeme Brown Jamie Morris Corey J Coulter Images ©geebeeimages (WorldSBK) ©jamiemorrisphotography (BSB) ©geocrashphotography (MotoAmerica) Contributors Kenny Pryde David Miller Leon Haslam Design and Layout: Graeme Brown Jamie Morris Corey J. Coulter v19.03 | 04.19

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Coming Next......

The WorldSBK season is now in full swing and the teams and riders will arrive at Imola in early May for round five of the championship. The circuit at Imola is shoe-horned into the centre of town and traditionally it is one of the most hectic rounds of the season for the teams and the fans. SBK Journal will bring you all the action from the races but also head out around the track with our photographers Graeme Brown and Jamie Morris to see what it takes to shoot at this unique venue.

We will also be at Oulton Park for round two of the British Superbike Championship to find out if the racing will be as unpredictable at the picturesque Cheshire circuit as it was in round one at Silverstone?

The 2019 Australia Superbike season has reached it’s mid-season break after round three at the Bend Motorsporst Park in South Australia. We asked ASBK snapper Russell Colvin for the lowdown on the season so far.

Alongside our now usual sections of SBKink, Grid Pass and Access All Areas we will take a delve into the archive of Graeme Brown and relive some classic WorldSBK moments.

Thank you as always for your interest in SBK Journal and please feel free to share our content via our social media channels.

See you next month

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