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The rumors of Tom Sykes leaving WorldSBK for the British Superbike paddock have come true, as the former World Champion has signed up with the Paul Bird Motorsports crew for the 2022 season.

Sykes will lineup alongside Josh Brookes, and ride the PBM Ducati Panigale V4 R in the British domestic series, which is sure to make him a BSB Superbike favorite, as PBM hunts for its 9th BSB title.

Tom Sykes will remain in the Hospital General de Catalunya in Barcelona, for further examination, after his Race 2 crash at the WorldSBK round this past weekend.

The BMW Motorrad rider was involved in a Turn 1 crash on the second lap of Race 2 at Catalunya, where he lost consciousness and suffered a severe concussion.

Accordingly, the doctors at the Hospital General de Catalunya are keeping Sykes for observation, and he is expected to be discharged from the hospital on Wednesday. Sykes is unlikely to race this coming weekend at Jerez.

Tom Sykes will spend a third season with the BMW Motorrad WorldSBK racing team, signing a one-year deal with the German outfit this week.

He will be joined in the garage by Michael van der Mark, who will take his first season on the BMW S1000RR next year.

The re-signing of Sykes is no surprise, though the real news here might be the shifting of Michael van der Mark from the Yamaha squad to the BMW outfit.

It doesn’t surprise us to hear that Tom Sykes and BMW Motorrad have committed themselves to another season together, racing the BMW S1000RR in the WorldSBK Championship.

While the 2019 has been a slow start for the BMW Motorrad WorldSBK team, Sykes and the S1000RR have seen continued progress. As such, we have seen Sykes on pole position at the British round, and also on the podium at Misano, Donington Park, and Laguna Seca.

With this forward progress, BMW Motorrad says that its aim is to be on the box in 2020, and surely that means on the top step on more than one occasion.

While the MotoGP action is in the United States this weekend, the World Superbike paddock is over in Assen, putting on their on display of two-wheeled excellence.

The Cathedral is one of the most popular stops on the WorldSBK calendar, and as such we are lucky to have Tony Goldsmith swinging a lens for us in The Netherlands.

So far, Assen has failed to disappoint. At the end of Friday’s FP2 session, only 0.031 seconds separated the top five riders, with Tom Sykes leading the charge, followed by Rea and Haslam.

One of the more intriguing story lines we are following in the coming WorldSBK season is the arrival of BMW Motorrad in the superbike paddock. For the 2019 season, BMW has partnered with the Shaun Muir Racing team, with riders Tom Sykes and Markus Reiterberger.

With an all new superbike platform to develop and work with, our attention is on what this machine can do, especially with such a high-level team and duo of riders.

With SMR officially unveiling the team at their preseason test in Portugal, we sent our man Steve English into the pit box to get some up-close photos of the WorldSBK-spec BMW S1000RR for the 2019 season.

As you would expect, the details on this bike are very interesting.

While the line up for the 2019 MotoGP season was settled surprisingly early in the year, the opposite has been the case for WorldSBK. With just two weeks to go to the first full test of 2019, there are still a whole range of seats open, and questions going unanswered.

One of the reasons for the delay became clear at the EICMA show in Milan last week. While the manufacturers were presenting their newest bikes, including some of the key machines that will star in World Superbikes next year, a couple of manufacturers also presented their racing programs for 2019.

Perhaps the biggest story came from Honda, where HRC presented Althea and Moriwaki as their new partners in running their WorldSBK program. After a partnership of three years, and a relationship going back nearly two decades, Ten Kate are out, with the Italians and Japanese taking over.

It wasn’t just Ten Kate: title sponsor Red Bull were also out. The energy drink firm had signed up when Nicky Hayden was with the team, a big name draw for sponsors, and a rider with a long connection to Red Bull.

It was Red Bull who brought in Jake Gagne, the American who never really found his feet in the WorldSBK championship. After two years of poor results, Red Bull withdrew.

Over the course of 228 races, Tom Sykes made himself into a Kawasaki legend. It's easy to look at the last four years and to only see the success that Jonathan Rea has achieved on the green machine, but before 2010 the Japanese firm was struggling. Chris Walker's win in the wet at Assen was a bright spot that punctuated ten years of failure.

From the turn of the millennium, until Sykes joined, the team had three wins, a home double at Sugo in 2010 by wildcard rider Hitoyasu Izutsu and Walker's famous result. These weren't lean times for Kawasaki - this was a famine. With only 19 podiums in the ten years prior to his arrival, it's remarkable what the Englishman has achieved with the team.

“It’s the end of a great era,” reflected Sykes. “It’s been a great time, and I feel that we’ve done a great job together. We've all grown up a lot together. We had the chance to be three-times world champions and I’m very, very fortunate to be able to say that I’m a world champion.”

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Our Paddock Pass Podcast colleague Neil Morrison is reporting on Crash.net that Tom Sykes has signed with the Shaun Muir Racing team for the 2019 World Superbike season, and that the team is set to switch machinery from Aprilia to BMW.

Markus Reiterberger will join Sykes on the factory-backed BMW team, as he has the correct passport to appease the German brand.

Of course, all of this came as a surprise to Eugene Laverty, who talked about his surprise at the news, which is set to be announced at next week’s EICMA show in Milan.

WorldSBK’s South American adventure saw the history books once again rewritten by Jonathan Rea with the Northern Irishman claiming a tenth consecutive victory.

The world champion claimed a comfortable win on Saturday, the series first ever race in Argentina, but after weekend of cleaning a dirty and dusty track it was the temperature that caused problems on Sunday.

With over 110F temperatures on the asphalt, it was as slick a surface as many riders could remember with overnight rain also washing away any rubber that had been put down on the surface. It was easy to make a mistake, and coming from the third row of the grid, Rea certainly made his fair share in the early laps.

Once on clear track however, he was imperious, and comfortably the fastest man on track. He used this advantage to charge down Xavi Fores, and claim a historic double that broke the long-standing record of Colin Edwards (2002) and Neil Hodgson (2003) for most consecutive victories in WorldSBK.