Fernandez, certainly, took the gloves off last time out and showed he’s more than willing to fight for this Championship; aggressive and leaving everything on the track. And he remains consistently impressive but now he has to remain consistently ahead of Marquez and by some margin, as does Binder, who is 44 points off the leader. The South African seems to have more been sneaking his way up the table as he’s gained some serious traction in the latter half of the season, and if 40 points doesn’t put Fernandez out of contention, a few more doesn’t do the same for Binder. Will Marquez crack? Does he need to? A maximum 100 points remain on the table…
Tony Arbolino (VNE Snipers), meanwhile, needs even more. After suffering from an issue with his arm in Thailand and, like Canet, losing ground, it’s fast approaching crunch time for the Italian if he’s to stay in with a shout. Arbolino needs to start winning races and could need the likes of Albert Arenas (Gaviota Angel Nieto Team), Marcos Ramirez (Leopard Racing) and John McPhee (Petronas Yamaha SRT) to come into play…
In the ETC, Junior Team Estrella Galicia 0.0 teammates José Antonio Rueda, Diogo Moreira and Adrián Cruces took the podium together after a race which was interrupted on the first lap by a multiple fall. In the new race, set at 12 laps, José Antonio Rueda and Diogo Moreira placed themselves in front of poleman Izan Guevara, who was riding injured after suffering a fall in the qualifying session on Saturday. The new champion began to fall back while Fermín Aldeguer (Bester Capital Dubai), despite also riding with an injury, moved up to the Junior Team Estrella Galicia 0.0 riders. Behind, Daijiro Sako (Cuna de Campeones) reeled in the chasing group which included Adrián Cruces (Junior Team Estrella Galicia 0.0) – and it was Cruces who ended up taking third place after Fermín Aldeguer and Daijiro Sako were penalised. The winner of the race, José Antonio Rueda, taking his first win of the season, received the Repsol free fuel cheque. Second place went to Diogo Moreira. Finally, the injured Izan Guevara, champion and winner of six races this year, crossed the finish line in ninth position.
Fabio Quartararo will arrive in Melbourne later this month for the Pramac Generac Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix 2019 held over the October 26-27 weekend as one of the men to watch for this year’s main event at Phillip Island. Given his CV before he even made it to the world championship, that’s no surprise.
Fabio Quartararo
But progression in top-line sport, no matter how prodigious your talent, is rarely linear, and the fast Frenchman has taken a circuitous path before arriving at a place towards the top of MotoGP he always seemed destined for.
Rewind six years, and a 14-year-old Quartararo was doing things never before seen in the Spanish CEV championship, the national series that’s proven to be a springboard into Moto3 for so many of the sport’s current stars.
Quartararo and his family had their sights on the Spanish title for years – they moved from France when he was seven after he’d begun racing at age four – and with three wins from pole in the final three races of 2013, he took the title at the age of just 14 years and 218 days.
The following season, 2014, was even more impressive; nine wins and two second places from the 11 races saw him repeat as champion, a run of success that broke all records, saw him mentioned in the same breath as Marc Marquez, and demanded a re-write of the rules.
Fabio Quartararo claimed his maiden Moto3 pole position in a two-way battle with Danny Kent during Qualifying at the Circuito de Jerez in 2015
Signed to compete in the Moto3 World Championship for 2015, Quartararo had to receive special dispensation just to compete in the first round in Qatar as he wasn’t yet 16-years-old, the minimum age for the series.
One race later, in Austin, Quartararo finished a stunning second, taking his first podium eight days before his 16th birthday. His march to the top was, surely, only a matter of time.
All of which begs the question, why has it taken this long for the 20-year-old to make his way to, let alone his name in, MotoGP?
Injury, instability and circumstance conspired against Quartararo for several seasons before one standout result in 2018 set him on the path to put things right.
2015 Dutch TT Assen – Fabio Quartararo – Injury put the brakes on Quartararo’s ascension in 2015
Quartararo’s 2015 debut season, which featured two podiums and two pole positions, came to a screeching halt after a nasty spill at Misano left him with a broken ankle, while a second year in Moto3 on a KTM produced only occasional flashes, and a 13th-place championship finish, which he repeated in 2017 after moving up to Moto2 on a Kalex.
A 10th-place Moto2 championship finish in 2018 on Speed Up machinery wasn’t the stuff of headlines, but on one magical weekend at Montmelo in Spain, Quartararo reminded the world of his prodigious, yet unfulfilled, talent.
Fabio Quartararo in Moto2 in 2018
A first pole position in 50 world championship starts came on the Saturday at Catalunya, which he converted the next day for his maiden victory. The relief – and the lifting of the weight off his shoulders – was obvious.
“In 2015, a lot of people were comparing me to Marc,” he reminisced after that breakthrough victory. “That was a lot of pressure, and especially at that age I didn’t really realise. I don’t think I could take it anymore.”
Fabio Quartararo – Image AJRN
The result heralded the beginning of Fabio 2.0, the rebooted Frenchman finding new consistency as he finished inside the top 10 in all but one race for the remainder of the season.
It was then that new-found momentum combined with a smattering of luck to create an opening; the new Petronas Yamaha SRT MotoGP team for 2019 came calling in August after failed attempts to woo Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa, signing Quartararo to partner 2018 MotoGP rookie Franco Morbidelli for its first season in the premier class. He wasn’t the team’s first choice, far from it, but the big opportunity on a bigger bike was all Quartararo needed.
Fabio Quartararo testing for the Petronas Yamaha SRT MotoGP team
Under the floodlights in Qatar – the same Losail International Circuit where he’d made his World Championship debut as a pimply-faced kid four years earlier – Quartararo stunned the MotoGP establishment in March this year when he qualified fifth for his top-flight debut.
Better looked set to come, and it came quickly; by round four in Spain he was on pole for the first time, and he took his first podium at Catalunya in June, qualifying on pole again and beaten only by Marquez just a week after arm pump surgery. By mid-season, he was comfortably the fastest – if not the most consistent – of the quartet of Yamaha riders on the grid, a succession of front-row starts on a 2018-spec bike leaving factory stablemates Maverick Vinales and Valentino Rossi in his wake.
And then came the first of what seems destined to be many head-to-head battles with Marquez at Misano, Quartararo taking the lead on lap three and staying there for 23 laps with Marquez breathing all over him before the world champion bullied his way by on the final lap.
Why has Quartararo been so fast so quickly on a MotoGP bike after a so-so career in the junior classes? It’s a combination of environment and machinery, he feels.
“To be fast in this category you don’t only need a good bike, you need a good bike and good people around you: good mechanics, a good crew chief, everyone must be a family,” he told Motorsport Magazine in July.
“Also, the Yamaha suits my riding style – it’s the bike that needs to be ridden really smoothly. I remember Jorge Lorenzo rode the Yamaha really smoothly and that’s why he won a lot of races. I think I’m quite a smooth rider, so that’s why it’s all going well.”
Far from being crestfallen with seeing a maiden victory slip through his fingers at Misano, Quartararo was thrilled to be mixing it with the modern-day master’s of MotoGP, and a rider mentioned in the same sentence as him for so long. A bold re-pass of Marquez on the final lap before the Honda rider reasserted his authority gave him belief for the future, and, for seasoned paddock observers, was something of a line in the sand.
“I’m really happy about what we did … (it’s) the best moment not only of my career, but of my life,” Quartararo said. “When you have a seven-time world champion behind you for 20 laps and he overtake you at the first corner, you overtake him back on corner four, I was so happy to have a fight with him. The good thing was I could overtake him back, and this gives me a lot of confidence, to say ‘he’s a seven-time world champion, but we can overtake him’. He’s a human like us.”
The stats would seem to suggest otherwise with Marquez, but of all the riders on the grid, perhaps it’s Quartararo who can give the Spaniard the sternest test as he attempts to re-write the sport’s records. Especially as despite Phillip Island being a fast track it is not a circuit where outright horsepower decides the victor, and the Frenchman’s smooth flowing style could be key around the back of the circuit.
Whoever emerges victorious in their head-to head battles in the years to come, the winners will be MotoGP fans the world over if Quartararo’s star continues to ascend as it has so rapidly in 2019.
A motorcycle insurance scheme where policy holders install a tracking system in their bike in return for cheap premiums as low as $A11 a month has started in Europe.
Now they have invented a telematic product called a Vigobox that sits under your seat and tracks your motorcycle.
It informs the owner via a phone app if your motorcycle has been moved and even sends an emergency call for help if it senses you have crashed.
Vigobox is installed under your bike seat when you buy their Vigo Insurance policy and comes with an online portal to track your riding.
Cheaper policy
Some may say this is the thin edge of the wedge of privacy invasion with insurance companies able to cancel your insurance if you speed or ride at night.
Others may find it a safety device that can track a stolen vehicle and also reduce your insurance premium.
The monthly costs of the insurance (with monitoring) are from €7 (about $A11) a month.
As usual, the price depends on the motorcycle brand and type.
Market chief Petra Zagmajster says Vigo Insurance has only been available in Slovenia and Croatia a few months but is valid in all parts of Europe. It has already reached 4.6% of the market share.
“Soon we’ll enter to other EU markets,” Petra says.
C-founder Rok Upelj says the motorcycle they use to test their products was stolen from a locked garage.
“In that moment we activated the police and hoped for the best, but we had no luck,” Rok says.
“Back then the vehicle wasn’t insured, because the insurance premiums were too high. We interviewed many motorcyclists, what the most important thing in owning a motorcycle was. The end result was, that safety and theft prevention come first – and that’s when the idea for VIGO was born.”
Would you install a tracker if you got cheaper motorcycle insurance? Leave your comments below.
(Sponsored post on safety priorities for our North American readers – Image: Pexels)
No motorist wants to cause harm to other people because of their driving. But, despite the best intentions and the best efforts at avoiding accidents, they still happen. Barring the factor of negligence, this could already be the makings of an awful accident.
While the inherent danger applies to all motorists on the road, the dangers are much more amplified in the case of motorcyclists. Whether it’s due to motorcycles having lighter frames, less protection compared to cars, or being smaller and more difficult to see, the dangers that motorcycle riders face are much more significant.
While motorcycle manufacturers do their best to create motorcycles that are as safe as possible, the numbers speak to the uphill battle they face. There is still a significant number of motorcycle rider deaths and, as of now, the only true guarantee of a safe journey is the total avoidance of an accident. A lot of accidents can be averted by remaining extremely aware of all other cars and people around you so you can react to avoid an accident before it happens. And even when you have professionals like the lawyers at Tario & Associates who specialize in handling cases involving vehicular accidents, accidents are events that you’re best avoiding.
As a motorcycle rider, it’s important to be seen by other motorists on the road as it allows them to make the correct driving decisions that would prevent untoward accidents. So, what are some measures that we can take in order to make our presence of the road known to other motorists?
Daytime Running Lights
While a lot of sources will suggest using a high beam during the day time, this is counterintuitive as instead of making your presence felt to other motorists, you could end up blinding them. Daylight running lights are designed specifically for the purpose of making sure that your vehicle is visible without being too bright for other drivers.
Use Reflective Tape
You can also opt to use reflective tape on various parts of your motorcycle so that you motorcycle is more easily seen at night when drivers rely heavily on the illumination provided by the headlights of their car. This is even more important because vision at night is limited.
Wear Brightly Colored Gear
Sometimes reflective tape may not be enough to catch the attention of other motorists especially when reflective tape will almost always come in a single color. Resolve this issue by wearing brightly colored gear in order to make yourself visible.
Use Your Turn Signals
Finally, being visible isn’t going to mean much if the other motorists are unable to predict your movements. While the use of turn signals is a basic habit that all riders should have, it is one that is so easily overlooked. Many accidents can be so easily avoided just by indicating your intentions while on the road. This allows other motorists to make adjustments to their path if necessary.
The issue of safety should always be among your priorities. Vehicular accidents should never be taken lightly and as motorcycle riders, it’s important to minimize the risks involved.
Blose salvages Brisbane podium despite costly first turn pile-up
Section: Competition
Penrite Honda Racing entry recovers for third in Queensland.
Image: Foremost Media.
Penrite Honda Racing’s Chris Blose drew upon his arenacross experience on Saturday night at Brisbane Entertainment Centre for round one of the 2019 Australian Supercross Championship, when he was forced to recover from a costly first turn pile-up in the opening SX2 main event.
The tight confines of the venue delivered a number of on-track clashes, with the start proving even more important than ever.
Blose had to come back from near last in main event one after tangling with Jay Wilson (Yamalube Yamaha Racing) in the first turn, remounting before slicing his way through the field for P4.
He returned strongly in the second and final main, pressing on to finish second behind compatriot Jacob Hayes (Serco Yamaha), granting him the final step on the podium.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Blose stated. “A rider ran in way too hot and caused a pile-up – I was along for the ride. I got up as quickly as I could and charged back to fourth.
“This is not what I came here to do. It’s a short championship so every point is valuable – I want to win! I will take away the positives – the bike was strong and we are fast so I’ll use that more to my advantage in Adelaide this coming weekend.”
Blose is a title favourite in the SX2 category, and his third place finish has established a strong base for his campaign to the crown in 2019. The Australian Supercross Championship heads to Port Adelaide this Saturday for round two.
Bautista faced ‘unexpected drop of grip’ during race two in Argentina
Race one winner salvages P5 in the final outing.
Image: Supplied.
Alvaro Bautista says he experienced a sudden drop of grip during race two at the penultimate round of the 2019 Motul FIM Superbike World Championship (WorldSBK) in Argentina, which ultimately saw him salvage fifth position.
The Aruba.it Racing – Ducati contender, who won race one and was second in the Superpole race, challenged for the lead in the early stages, however 10 laps in, the Spaniard faced a battle with grip that would push him out of podium contention.
“In race two on the other hand, I started quite well,” Bautista explained. “Jonathan gained a few metres on me but because of his error I was able to catch him and we had quite a duel. After about 10 laps I began to feel an unexpected drop of grip at the rear which made me lose a few places.
“We still don’t know what happened, I was struggling to brake in the corner turn-in while on the exit, as soon as I opened the throttle I felt the bike spinning. It was a very difficult race and I’m disappointed because I think that today we could have fought for the win.”
Bautista has secured second in the championship standings ahead of the season-finale in Qatar, scheduled for 26 October.
Edgar Pons crowned Moto2 European Champion in Albacete
Circuito de Albacete staged Round Seven of the FIM CEV Repsol series over the weekend. Edgar Pons claimed the Moto2 European Championship while Jeremy Alcoba extended his lead in the Moto3 Junior class, and now requires only five-points to claim the title.
Edgar Pons – 2019 FIM CEV Repsole – Round 7, Circuito de Albacete
The result mirrored Edgar Pons’ domination of the Moto2 class at the previous Jerez round. Carlos Tatay couldn’t maintain his winning streak from Jerez which had brought him closer to leader Alcoba in the Moto3 class.
For Aussie Asia Talent Team rider Billy Van Eerde in the Moto3 class the misfortune continued at Albacete, with another DNF result and only three laps completed. The previous round in Jerez saw Van Eerde card a P18 finish in Race 1, but a DNF in Race 2.
Billy Van Eerde – 2019 FIM CEV Repsol – Round 7, Circuito de Albacete
In the European Talent Cup José Antonio took his first win of the season, while Australian Joel Kelso (Leopard Impala) finished seventh. Kelso sat just outside the top 10 at the previous round in Jerez – which marked his entry to the championship, taking P12 and P11 in the two races held there. He now holds 18 championship points and is 19th in the standings.
The eighth and final round of the FIM CEV Repsol season will take place at the Ricardo Tormo Circuit in Valencia on November 10.
CEV Moto3 Junior
FIM Moto3 Junior World Championship leader Jeremy Alcoba took his second victory of the season in the single hotly disputed Moto3 race over the weekend. The Laglisse Academy rider had his first shot at the title and initially led the race closely trailed by a large group which included Barry Baltus, Carlos Tatay, Ryusei Yamanaka, Deniz Öncü and Daniel Holgado.
FIM Moto3 Juniors – 2019 FIM CEV Repsole – Round 7, Circuito de Albacete
Carlos Tatay, Jeremy Alcoba and Ryusei Yamanaka took turns at the head of the race. Behind, Xavier Artigas made a superb comeback, starting off second to last and somehow getting in touch with the chasing group.
On the last lap, Carlos Tatay overshot trying to take the lead from Jeremy Alcoba; in doing so he put himself out of the running and left Daniel Holgado to finish second ahead of Barry Baltus.
However, Carlos Tatay was finally judged third after a one-position penalty against Barry Baltus. Ryusei Yamanaka came in fifth and Xavier Artigas sixth, followed by Deniz Öncü.
Mario Suryo – 2019 FIM CEV Repsole – Round 7, Circuito de Albacete
Jeremy Alcoba will go to the final round of the season in Valencia 46 points ahead of Carlos Tatay with 50 points at stake; in other words, five points is all he needs to take the title. The race winner was also awarded the Repsol free fuel cheque.
Aussie Billy Van Eerde recorded a DNF result, only completing three laps, with the rider originally sharing his frustration after qualifying at not being able to put down a fast lap, despite feeling comfortable on the bike, and qualifying in P23 for race day.
Billy Van Eerde – 2019 FIM CEV Repsole – Round 7, Circuito de Albacete
‘Real racing can begin’ declares Clout following Brisbane indoor
Section: Competition
CDR Yamaha Monster Energy rider lands on the podium at the season-opener.
Image: Foremost Media.
Luke Clout says the ‘real racing can begin’ now that Brisbane’s indoor has been completed, the CDR Yamaha Monster Energy rider opening up his 2019 Australian Supercross Championship campaign with a podium result.
The tight confines of Brisbane Entertainment Centre, which saw just 10 start gates available for the double-header main event format, offered up aggressive and close racing, placing a stronger emphasis on starts to escape the carnage and earn a respectable result.
Clout, a heat race winner, was able to piece together a 4-3 scorecard for third on the night, however as the series heads into four consecutive full-size supercross circuits, the title contender is confident of unleashing his full capabilities.
“You go into the opening round of the championship looking for a positive and safe start, and that’s exactly what we did,” Clout explained. “We are in the hunt and things are looking good, but I also believe I can be better and now we are out of the tight nature of indoors, the real racing can begin.
“Racing indoors can throw up lots of things but we were able to handle them and now we have full-sized tracks at the remaining four rounds where we have time and space to make the racing better, and I can’t wait to get to Adelaide this weekend.”
A one-week turnaround will see the Australian Supercross Championship back in action this Saturday night at Port Adelaide in South Australia.
