World Superbike rider Leon Camier has endured a difficult season thus far in the World Superbike Championship. Breaking ribs and suffering from a lung contusion during Race 1 at Aragon, Camier had to miss the next two rounds of the 2018 season.
Now suffering another crash, this time at the Suzuka 8-Hours test in Japan, Camier is once again on the mend, fracturing the C5 vertebra in his neck.
What you are looking at here is the bike that Honda hopes will win the Suzuka 8-Hours endurance race this year. It is called the Honda CBR1000RRW.
It is not all that different from the WorldSBK-spec model, the one that Leon Camier and Jake Gange are competing with currently (and that PJ Jacobsen is helping develop), save for some interesting changes.
For starters, the Honda CBR1000RRW dumps its Cosworth boxes, and instead runs the Magneti Marelli electronics package that Jacobsen is using in WorldSBK.
Also, there are some obvious bodywork changes, namely where the exposed front spars of the frame would be, which are now covered by a silver painted panel.
Then of course, there are the mechanical changes for endurance duty, like quick-change wheel pieces and functional lights. Also note the Nissin brakes, Showa Öhlins suspension, and Bridgestone tires (the FIM EWC is the last major series where there is competition also amongst the tire brands).
Before CBR1000RRW can race at Suzuka though, Honda will campaign the machine in the All Japan Superbike Championship, with Takumi Takahashi at the helm.
Takahashi-san will race at Suzuka as well, with two other teammates, who are still to be named, and likely will come from Honda’s MotoGP or WorldSBK racing efforts.
So far, Franco Morbidelli and Thomas Luthi have been tipped as being asked by Honda, but we are sure that Big Red sent out more feelers to other riders.
This year’s Suzuka 8-Hours endurance race is heating up with competition, as today Kawasaki announced that it will field a one-off factory squad for the race.
Riding the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10RR, the Kawasaki Team Green will consists of three riders: Jonathan Rea, Leon Haslam, and Kazuma Watanabe.
The move bodes well for the Suzuka 8-Hours, as the iconic Japanese race continues to see growing interest from the Japanese OEMs.
The last three races have seen Yamaha’s one-off factory team winning the race, and this year Honda announced that it would field an official factory team in response to Yamaha’s recent domination.
Not wanting to be left out in the cold, today marks Kawasaki’s response to the growing Suzuka challenge, and all three factories have a chance of winning one of Japan’s biggest bragging rights in the motorcycle industry.
The Japanese motorcycle manufacturers take the Suzuka 8-Hour endurance race very seriously, and none of the brands make a bigger deal out of the mid-summer event than Honda.
Big Red has won the Suzuka 8-Hours on 27 occasions, out of its 40 runnings, which is an impressive win ratio, but there is one issue: for the last three years in a row, the Yamaha Factory Racing Team has displaced Honda’s supported efforts on the top podium step – a feat no other team has ever achieved.
This is an insult that Honda can apparently no longer tolerate, and this week the Japanese manufacturer announced that at the 2018 Suzuka 8-Hours, a factory-backed “Team HRC” squad will compete in this iconic race.