WSBK: Phillip Island Race Notes

Spring. The very word implies motion. Hope springs eternal. Spring forward, fall back. To a motorcycle racing fan, spring implies the kind of motion that we live for -- the beginning of the racing season. Never mind that, in Australia, February is more like late summer -- the excitement the follows the start of a major series transcends mere geography.

The World Superbike championship came into the traditional opener at Phillip Island with questions to be answered and a giant hole to fill. The questions all revolved around the vacuum left by departing champion Ben Spies. Pundits have been working overtime as to ascertain which of the dozen or so potential race winners would accede to the vacant throne. We got some answers from the first round, namely, that until further notice, the championship is wide open and it ain't over 'til it's over.

Race One: Got a Rocket in my Pocket

Polesitter Leon Haslam, aboard the Alstare Suzuki GSXR,  jumped out to an immediate lead, trailed by the Dynamic Ducati Duo of Michel Fabrizio and Noriyuki Haga and stayed there until the finish that saw Haslam take his first WSBK race win. Pretty simple (and boring) right? Not exactly. Haslam endured close pressure from the Xerox Ducati teammates the whole race, until the very end when Fabrizio made a move coming out the last corner and almost beat Haslam to the line. It was so close, in fact, that official timing had declared Fabrizio the winner; then a photo finish was declared. Inspection of the image snapped at the  line revealed that Haslam had beaten Fabrizio to the stripe by the thickness of his front tire -- a mere 4 thousandths of a second, the closest finish in WSBK history.

Haga, feeling the effects of a 150 mph collision with Ruben Xaus in that morning's warm-up session that destroyed his Xerox Ducati and injured his right forearm to the extent that it required a pain-killing injection, finished less than a second behind the leading pair. Xaus, claiming that he felt "disoriented" after the accident, failed to appear on the grid for the race. Others have intimated that the reason for the nonappearance might have been a lack of confidence on Xaus' part or something as prosaic as a lack of spares precipitated by Xaus' 4 crashes.

Back in the field, lap 2 saw James Toseland highside coming down from Lukey Heights and Chris Vermeulen and Cal Crutchlow lowside in the Honda Hairpin on laps 3 and 5 respectively. Vermeulen's crash apparently forced the throttle wide open, grenading the engine on his ZX-10. Toseland aggravated a broken bone in his hand incurred in an earlier practice crash. The Sterilgarda team blamed both crashes on the inability of the new traction control system to cope with the increased power of the 2010 R1.

Ten Kate Honda's Jonny Rea overcame a CBR1000RR that was "a little bit off", according to Ronald Ten Kate, to hold off Alitalia Aprilia's Max Biaggi, Alstare Suzuki's Sylvain Guintoli and Althea Ducati's Carlos Checa to take a hard-fought fourth.

Race Two: A Spaniard in the Works

The second race started much like the first, with Leon Haslam jumping out to an early lead. Haslam's Alstare Suzuki teammate Sylvain Guintoli harried the Pocket Rocket and took over the lead on lap 6. The two would eventually swap the lead 4 times over the course of the race. Also in the mix were the two Xerox Ducati riders and Althea Ducati's Carlos Checa, aboard what is widely considered to be the closest "customer" bike to the factory Ducati machines.

Checa had been going well all weekend but got a poor start which put him well down in the field. The man formerly known as the Careless Chucker took advantage of a softer tire than the one he had used in Race 1 to advance quickly through the field, catching the lead pack about half-way through the race and dispatching Michel Fabrizio and Guintoli with three laps remaining. The Spaniard then stalked Haslam until near the end of the last lap and overtook the young Brit to take the lead and the win, the first for the Althea squad.

Jonny Rea, Max Biaggi, Leon Camier, Max Neukirchener and Matteo Baiocco all had off track excursions and Jakob Smrz and Chris Vermeulen crashed out of the race. Vermeulen's lap 7 crash was a particularly scary affair that saw the MotoGP refugee endure an horrendous high-speed slide through the gravel before narrowly avoiding being jammed into the tire wall by his careening ZX-10. Vermeulen escaped with a badly bruised right leg and a damaged finger. With Vermeulen's crashes, Tom Sykes'  and Matteo Baiocco's retirements, It was a bad day to be green. American Roger Lee Hayden had the dubious honor of being the sole Kawasaki to finish race two, albeit in last place.