As the winter moves on, the CSBK change-ups continue. We now see BMW rebuilding its team with a new hotshot rider, and we see Trevor Daley also aiming at adventures in Florida this winter.
Starting with Daley, we see he’s headed back to the Daytona 200 in a few days with his OneSpeedInc Racing team. Daley is back aboard a Suzuki GSX-R750, the same machine he ran in the Canadian Superbike series last summer, and he is officially riding for Team Battlax and Bridgestone America.
Daley saw a 20th-overall finish out of 67 racers at Daytona last year, very respectable for a newcomer, and tested at the track last fall to see if he could up those results. Team Battlax seems to think he can, and so he’s back for the March 6-8 race weekend. He’s bringing some of his Canadian sponsorship money down with him, and his bike is supported by Suzuki Canada.
We haven’t seen any announcement for a Daytona 200 broadcast schedule, but that should be coming on the MotoAmerica site soon.
Back home, we now see who’s replacing Ben Young at the BMW Motorrad Canada team. Alex Dumas, who’s raced a Suzuki the past few years in Canada, is now going to be on a Beemer with Sam Guerin as his teammate. It should make for some interesting scraps this season as Dumas is perhaps the rider best capable of challenging Ben Young (who left BMW for Honda this off-season) as long as he’s on his game, while Guerin has been a strong force in the Superbike series the past few years as well and is now older and wiser as a returning rider on that BMW M1000RR.
There was talk that Dumas was done at the end of last year; indeed, he’d missed a good chunk of the CSBK season while racing in the US again after years away. But over the final four race weekends he still proved he was an elite rider and ended up finishing behind now-teammate Guerin (second overall) in fourth in the series (Jordan Szoke also topped Dumas in the standings; see the final overall results here).
All in all, it’s setting up to be an interesting season in Canadian roadracing, with a swing out west and some seat shuffles that don’t happen very often up here.
