It’s been a weekend of unremitting heat at the UK round of the Superbike World Championship — motorsport which makes F1 look like a sedentary Sunday afternoon drive — and, at the end, the outstanding racer tells me about life and death.
Toprak Razgatlioglu is motorcycle racing’s most compelling character since Valentino Rossi — riding on the edge just like the Italian, and Barry Sheene decades before him.
The Turk brakes unfathomably late as he heads into corners, his rear tyre rising high into the air, brakes aglow, allowing him to take his bike beyond a normal rider’s limits.
His aggression extends to a distinctive restlessness in the saddle. He’s less squat than other riders. One of those who will corner with leg extended out — the ‘doctor’s dangle’ — a style that Rossi, known as ‘the doctor’ because of his precision riding, introduced to lower his centre of gravity going into bends.
When he wins — which he did, three times at Donington Park to go top of the world championship standings, he is known among his millions of fanatical followers for riding with his bike balanced on its front wheel — a stunt known as a ‘stoppie’.
‘I can’t think about death and consequences,’ he tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘The minute it enters my mind, the calculation changes. I change. I don’t race the same. There’s suddenly a limitation on me.’
Toprak Razgatlioglu is motorcycle racing’s most compelling character since Valentino Rossi
Razgatlioglu’s father, Arif, a stunt rider, died in an off-track motorcycle accident eight years ago
The consequences are always there. His father, Arif, a stunt rider, died in an off-track motorcycle accident eight years ago. After his first win at Donington, Razgatlioglu carries a flag bearing the image of Borja Gomez, a 20-year-old Spanish rider killed during practice for the European Superstock Championship at France’s Magny- Cours track last month.
You might say this is the sport where they really do ride to survive and Liberty Media, under whose ownership Formula One has found extraordinary popularity by the leveraging of its characters and stories for Netflix, have now seen the potential.
A £3.2billion Liberty deal to buy World Superbikes and MotoGP, its wealthier, more polished and less visceral sister championship, from Italian company Dorna, was concluded last month. It’s expected to mean the same investment and ambition which has seen F1 accelerate ahead of motorcycle racing.
All the talk in motorcycle’s pit lanes and garages has been of what Liberty will do for MotoGP but World Superbike has by far the greater storytelling potential.
That much is evident trackside inside the Yamaha garage, in the heat of the Saturday morning of the Donington weekend, as mechanics work against the clock to ready riders Jonathan Rea and Andrea Locatelli’s Pata Maxus Yamaha bikes for the ‘Superpole’, in which riders complete a single fast lap to establish their grid position.
There is tension. Not a word spoken.
The heat is generating track temperatures which will make it harder for the tyres to grip.
Riders describe how this heat makes the track feel ‘greasy’. When racing starts Razgatlioglu is one of those who seems to be struggling, his bike briefly seeming unbalanced until he wrestles it back under his control to win first spot on the grid. Rea places fourth and Locatelli sixth. Nine bikes crash out.
The Turk is known among his millions of fanatical followers for riding with his bike balanced on its front wheel — a stunt known as a ‘stoppie’
There is no chance to confer with the garage or team director once these riders are out on the track, as there is in F1, and no engineers instructing riders on radio comms what lap time they must make. The level of physical stress all competitors face racing the machines at 190mph — their heart-rates touching 180 beats per minute — render any F1-style radio comms impossible.
At that intensity, there is no way of taking additional information on board. The teams are banned from using radios and can only hold up boards, with minimal information for riders to see as they race past.
‘The riders have no time to think about what they do,’ says Sarah Byles, marketing manager for the Yamaha team, amid race preparations in the garage.
‘It’s body positions on track. It’s the small movements they make so they’re slightly forwards, compensating for the wheel spin or for when the tyre life starts to drop. We’re giving the riders the confidence to push through the brake. It’s not like any other motorsport. The riders are the biggest element that makes the difference.’
Razgatlioglu has proved this fact — leaving the might of Yamaha at the end of 2023, having narrowly missed out on the title two years in succession, to join the less competitive BMW, who had never before won a Superbike title.
Many called it career-ending. Razgatlioglu, nicknamed ‘El Turco’, promptly won BMW’s first championship title in the series. He is on course to retain it.
Such a narrative would be unthinkable in F1 — or in MotoGP, where the Ducati riders generally win. But World Superbikes is motorsport’s great leveller. A championship in which the bikes raced must be based on production models sold on the commercial market. ‘Win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ as they like to say in the sport.
It means every rider has the chance to be competitive. It’s why the competition’s devoted fan base consider it the best form of elite racing in the world.
Razgatlioglu, nicknamed ‘El Turco’, promptly won BMW’s first championship title in the series
The championship’s rules mean that every rider has the chance to be competitive. It’s why the competition’s devoted fan base consider it the best form of elite racing in the world
Razgatlioglu won’t be here beyond this season. He’s secured a more lucrative MotoGP seat next season, leaving World
Superbike to look elsewhere for his rare magnetism. But his own emergence from nowhere, as a shy young man with minimal English who once needed an interpreter, to the rider with the X-factor, shows the sport’s capacity to find such stars.
Other stories are already here to tell. Rea was a seemingly untouchable six-time world champion and legend of the sport until Razgatlioglu left the team and dethroned him. Now his future is uncertain. He’s yet to secure a seat for next season. ‘I’ve no doubt about my ability. I don’t have to sell myself,’ he says, after racing in a custom-made replica of the iconic yellow helmet worn by his Northern Irish compatriot Joey Dunlop. It’s 25 years since Dunlop, 26 times Isle of Man TT winner, was killed on a racetrack in Estonia.
In the World Superbikes TV truck, where Dorna will produce the live feed of races for rights holders, they make no pretence of the fact that crashes are fundamental to the drama.
The production team, pulling a feed from 18 trackside and 17 bike-mounted cameras, with four embedded in the track kerb, are experienced in which smashes not to dwell on.
‘The crashes expose how riders are always on the edge, fighting the bike; that these guys are made of something else and wired differently,’ says Dorna’s Michael Morel, as we walk through the pit lane. ‘All the pressure is on you if you make that mistake. We want to see those crashes on the gravel run-off traps, not multiple pile-ups on the track.’
It doesn’t always work out that way. Gomez, whose image Razgatlioglu carried, crashed his Honda on fluid dropped by another motorcycle in a series, part of the FIM JuniorGP World Championship, also run by Dorna. There were no marshals to retrieve his motorcycle from the track, so he returned to it, only for another rider to slip on the same fluid and pile into the Spaniard. Another rider, Filippo Fuligni, one of three race men to crash in the incident, has provided a haunting account of his attempt to rescue the rider.
‘I slightly unzipped his suit because, not being a rescuer, I couldn’t touch him,’ he said. ‘His eyes were open, but dull, in a void, so I tried to tell with my fingers on his neck if he had a heartbeat and with my hand on his chest if he was still breathing. At that moment I felt vital signs, I don’t know if it was a reaction in the last moments of life…’
‘There’s no such thing as a small crash involving a motorcycle. These guys are gladiators,’ Yamaha team director Paul Denning tells Daily Mail Sport
Yamaha team director Paul Denning tells me: ‘Some of the injuries the guys have come back from create incredible stories. When an F1 car spins off the track and hits the fence it’s spectacular and the danger involved is something but there’s no such thing as a small crash involving a motorcycle. These guys are gladiators.
‘Where Liberty can make a huge difference is by replicating what they have done in F1, by telling the stories of the characters behind the sport. Because we do have some real characters.’
These racers are well accustomed to the curtain being drawn back on them and their lives. In their fight for audiences, Dorna have built World Superbike into the most accessible and inclusive motor sport of all, in which spectators walk the paddock, wait for riders to emerge from their trucks and join media around the area where riders arrive after the race.
After he wins the big Sunday race at Donington, Razgatlioglu rides a red carpet from garage to the centre of the paddock, standing within touching distances of fans as he is crowned champion. Elite racing with human connections.
When he and I meet 10 minutes later, he is still flushed from the intensity of the race which has taken him top of the championship — a lead he has since extended with wins at Hungary’s Balaton Park circuit two weeks ago. There are four of 12 rounds to conclude.
‘Other riders will be there, waiting to come through now,’ he tells me. ‘It is the way. People have looked up to me and spoken about me. In time, people will be speaking of them in the same way. It’s the cycle. This sport makes competitors of us all. And who knows? I might be back one day.’
It has been a weekend of documentary gold, from riders competing on the edge. The championship which put them there is ready to seize Liberty Media’s investment and help tell that story.
