The Laguna Seca round of the World Superbike championship has gotten a great deal of press this week, but entirely of the wrong variety. As reported in Grandstand ( and just about everywhere else in sensationalist news ) two riders in the MotoAmerica Superstock series were killed in a large, mutli-vehicle crash the same weekend. The tragic loss of life was the almost the only noteworthy news from the weekend.
Race results were nearly identical in both race one and two, but the key difference was that the all conquering Kawasaki teammates of Tom Sykes and Jonathan Rea were in second and third places, respectively and not first. That honour went to Aruba.it factory Ducati rider Chaz Davies who completed the double victory on Sunday, starting both events from the front row and racing decisively.
The three lead riders jostled a little amongst themselves for the top three spots while the rest played their own game. Davies’ Ducati teammate Davide Giugliano staged some impressive passing control to take fourth place in race one, ahead of SBK rookie, Aprilia rider Jordi Torres. The Aprilia pair of Torres and Leon Haslam dutifully cleaned up fourth and fifth in race 2, after Giugliano crashed out on lap 24.
The racing was dull and the whole weekend had a decidedly second-rate media presence, compared to when MotoGP visited the famous Monterrey California circuit in years past. The decided lack of any real competition didn’t help. The Davies, Sykes and Rea trio were 16 seconds ahead of the other finishers in both races, meaning that the gap between contenders and the rest is too great to make for entertaining racing.
In the championship standings, Jonathan Rea leads by an almost unassailable 125 points over his Kawasaki teammate Sykes, with 407 points total. In an even more distant third place is Chaz Davies with 263.
SBK resumes in two weeks in Malaysia.
