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Video: SBK Argentina 2019: Schedules and where to watch the races live
2024 Author: Nicholas Abramson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-10 16:41
This is over. The Superbike World Championship faces its final stretch this month and this weekend the riders of the series derived motorbikes contest arrive at the technician San Juan Villicum Circuit in Argentina.
The Patagonian track will host the penultimate event of the year in a display where we do not expect to discover great unknowns, but we do expect to see exciting races if a certain Jonathan Rea allows us.
Two appointments to end 2019 and an eye on the future
Magny Cours put point and followed a 2019 season that has been turned around like a tortilla. With an enormous advantage of 91 points, Jonathan Rea had the so-called luck of the champion in the Gallic layout. Toprak Razgatlioglu took on Álvaro Bautista in the second race, leaving the fifth crown for the Northern Irishman.
Rea beat the two Yamaha of Michael van der Mark and Alex Lowes to celebrate their fifth title as Superbike world champion with a victory. From the top of the podium and dressed in a tuxedo, a plethora of Jonathan was able to release the tension accumulated during a season in which for the first time he found a rival at his height and that put him on the ropes.
We all know the first part of 2019, with a Alvaro Bautista overwhelming mounted on the Ducati Panigale V4 R that almost humiliated everyone, including the king of WSBK … until Bautista went into a spin. Maybe it was an excess of confidence, maybe it was a cluster of bad luck or a lack of real adaptation to the bike, to the tires, to the tracks or to a contest full of weekend races.
We will never know and possibly not even Bautista will know either, but now, with all the fish sold, it's time to look ahead. Bautista has two appointments and six races remaining on his Ducati, a mere formality (the runner-up is assured) before embarking on probably the most difficult challenge of his career with the intention of being champion again.
In a somewhat erratic movement, Bautista will leave a winning motorcycle like the Ducati to get on a Honda in 2020 that nobody knows about at the moment. Well, except for the parties involved. Honda would have presented Bautista with a CBR1000RR Fireblade so revolutionary as to convince him that next year he will be able to win with it at the WSBK.
But focusing on this weekend, Rea swept San Juan Villicum in 2018 and Bautista has never raced on the Argentine track. It will be difficult for the results to vary too much from what appears in the pools. But it is the same, the fight is no longer between them even if they both want to win.
Where the fight really is in the final stretch of the championship is in third position. Alex Lowes, Michael van der Mark and Toprak Razgatlioglu they are separated by only 19 points overall. Three riders who have been showing a very similar level all year.
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SBK Argentina 2018: Schedules and where to watch the races live
SBK Argentina 2018: Schedules and where to watch the races live