It’s been a while since we’ve caught up with Dan Kruger, the Canadian ex-pat roadracer who’s been tearing up street circuit and track racing around the globe for the past decade. COVID slowed things down for Kruger, like it did for the rest of us, but he came back with a vengeance for 2022, winning the WERA national title for both Superbike and Superstock classes this summer.
Along the way, Kruger and his Nature Power Kawasaki Superbike team won 25 podiums in the States this year, bagging regional championships as well. His big win came at Barber Motorsports Park at the end of October, where he beat out some pretty stiff competition.
It wasn’t easy, though. Kruger got into a bad crack-up at Road Atlanta in September, earning a concussion, broken ribs, a bruised lung and a badly broken collarbone. Incredibly, Kruger got the collarbone plated and was back on track two weeks later … and crashed again. And then the new Kawasaki ZX-10R that the team built for Barber blew a valve during Lap 2 of the first practice day. But they struggled on, with crew chief Stefan Kuehm building a new bike that Kruger used in the Endurance race the next day. Talk about a tough shakedown test!
It paid off. Kruger’s press release says “Dan rode with significant pain and the team came up with the strategy that was needed to win the National Championships for Pirelli (Thank you Oscar) and the rest of the teams sponsors that include; Xlite, RK, Mototron, EBC, HEL, SK Support, Titanic Kawasaki, PSI, Dainese, Ktech, Kinetik, Nature Power, and Hindle. A huge thank-you to all of them. We look forward competing in 2023 in various series and will announce our plans in the coming weeks.”
Note that Kruger is not going to race the Macau Grand Prix this month. He withdrew from that event after his crash at Road Atlanta; hopefully he can make it back to that event next season.
Please excuse my ignorance, Dan appears to be Canada’s top racer, internationally anyways, why hasn’t WSBK or MotoGP come courting him?
Good on ya Dan – you are the only Canadian that has cracked international competition in any serious manner in a very long time. Get well soon.