EXCITING CONTENT all surprisingly spacious , and was built that way deliberately . The Portimao paddock area is equally vast - 72,000 square metres with 42 big garages going on for days , right to the end of pitlane . As projects go , Portimao was conceived not on the sheer scale of an Istanbul Park , Losail or a Motorland Aragon in terms of track length , but with no less ambition , allied to a strong sense of customer , team and future needs . It was built to a fast timescale , way less than a year , and even needed its own brand new road to take traffic from the nearby main cross- Algarve motorway , the A22 . Portimao has hosted some epic WorldSBK moments of drama and intrigue , right from day one . Troy Bayliss hung up his red Ducati WorldSBK leathers here after scoring pole position and winning a double in 2008 , not long after securing his third World Championship . Portimao in 2008 was Jonathan Rea ’ s first ever WorldSBK race weekend , as one old master left the scene and another set about carving his own legend at what would become one of his best tracks . He was on the front row in qualifying first time out . In 2009 who can forget the final day turnaround in fortunes that saw Ben Spies win the title itself in his rookie WorldSBK season , after an epic season-long battle with one of the best riders never to quite win the title , Noriyuki Haga . Some top names of our sport have won at Portimao , but after Tom Sykes had conquered Race One in 2014 , something remarkable happened . Rea won the second race that year , on a Honda , and as soon as he got on a Kawasaki in 2015 he went about winning almost every single race there ever since . Only Alvaro Bautista and Ducati , in that half invincible / half unfathomable 2019 season ( where he lost a dominant lead to Rea in the end ), has broken Rea ’ s run of victories , in Race Two . Rea ’ s got 12 Portimao race wins in his amazing career stats , and until his triple of wins at Assen this year , Portimao was marginally his best track of all . He loves Portimao , as you can tell . But then again , so do most people . We have only not gone to Portimao once since its WorldSBK inception in 2008 , back in 2016 . It has not always been an easy run for Portimao on the whole , and trying to get the biggest four and two wheel ‘ tickets ’ on board have all been obstacles to overcome . But they have been , quite recently . After herculean efforts from just a handful of staff at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic the track did not just stay open , it thrived by adding a much longed-for Formula One and MotoGP round to the existing WorldSBK weekend in 2020 . AIA , short for Autodromo Internacional do Algarve , is just one of Portimao ’ s many potential nicknames ( Parkalgar and simply ‘ Algarve ’ are two more ) and whatever it ’ s been called WorldSBK has been at the heart of things . During these pandemic times when it makes
Some top names of our sport have won at Portimao , but after Tom Sykes had conquered Race One in 2014 , something remarkable happened .
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