THE BIG READ stage , especially as other avenues became blocked for them . From the British riders being one time Grands Prix major players to suddenly persona-non-contracta when teams and sponsors fell in love with the tail-steering Americans and Australians , WorldSBK witnessed a whole generation of small two-stroke and TT-F1 refugees from the UK dive into production-derived globalism with alacrity .
If you were an ambitious short circuit guy like Terry Rymer , or a rider who couldn ’ t fit a 250 anymore like Carl Fogarty , then a Yamaha OW01 , Honda RC30 or a Ducati 851 in WorldSBK was an almost instant godsend . A career saver .
Rymer was Britain ’ s first WorldSBK race winner , Fogarty the second and James Whitham ( in Indonesia , of all places ) was the third . The first British Donington race winner was , of course , Fogarty , in those wild , offthe-shelf ‘ acid worm ’ white and pink leathers , on a partly family-funded 888 Duke in 1992 .
Foggy won a few more races ( maybe you heard ?) and enough at Donington to get the Esses named after him , of course .
Neil Hodgson was the next Brit to win in Donington , in 2000 , on another regular Ducati , while he was a BSB rider . Who can forget the sight of Hodgson and his great BSB rival Chris Walker almost literally panelbeating the vast talent and valour of Noriyuki Haga into submission , particularly into McLeans ? Not Haga , that ’ s for sure …
James Toseland somewhow wrestled what was , in hindsight , a very unfactory Hannspree Ten Kate Honda to a race win at Donington on his way to an equally incongruous world championship victory in 2007 . You could argue that that was the last World Championship title from a rider who just rode harder and harder to succeed , on a truly private bike . The overall effort was not even from an importer team , but a Dutch motorcycle dealership . Netherland weaponry and a Sheffield swordsman , what a combo ?
We also have to shoot forward a few years , some of them entirely barren , to get to the next British race winners under the East Midlands Airport flightpath . Tom Sykes took the first of his all-time record of nine Donington Park WorldSBK wins , in 2013 , the year he won the championship on Kawasaki ’ s factory KRT offering .
Jonathan Rea would unfloat his KRT team-mate ’ s victory boat in 2017 . He was the last UK rider to win a WorldSBK race at Donington Park , in 2021 , but there will be a few candidates for victory again this year , even if Alvaro Bautista and his Ducati ’ s dominance continues on strongly . And remember , the entry to the tricky Goddards Hairpin was the only selfinflicted undoing for Bautista last year , just as he was rolling his thunder inexorably towards the championship title .
There have been other British rider WorldSBK race wins at home - at Silverstone and Brands Hatch of course . But in Donington ’ s inimitable Alpha and hopefully never-ending Omega fashion , where WorldSBK
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