The Pata Honda team and its current rider line-up of Leon Haslam and Michel Fabrizio are preparing for round 12 of the 2013 World Superbike championship this weekend (27-29 September)at Laguna Seca in the USA.
The 3.610km circuit is situated a couple of hours south of San Francisco near the Pacific coastal town of Monterey. While Laguna Seca has been a regular venue for the MotoGP world championship, it has not hosted a World Superbike round since 2004, when Australian rider Chris Vermeulen took both race wins on his Ten Kate-prepared Honda Fireblade.
In a specially-revised schedule for this American round, race one will be run on Saturday with race two going on Sunday, both at the local time of 14.00 (23.00 CET), with the Superpole sessions to determine final grid positions running on Saturday morning.
Of the two Pata Honda SBK riders, only Leon Haslam has raced at Laguna Seca before but both will be determined to fine-tune their Honda CBR1000RR machines for optimum performance over the weekend.
Leon Haslam
It was good to have a few days at home before the whole family set off for America on Monday. I’m really looking forward to going back to Laguna Seca where I raced once in 2004, my first year in World Superbikes. I remember it being an awesome place but my memories of the actual races are a little hazy. I know I broke my wrist in the second race, so that part of the weekend wasn’t so nice. What I do know is that Honda won both races with Chris Vermeulen, although the bikes were a bit different then – no electronics for a start. But that’s an area where we’ve made some progress lately and, although we had one or two other issues in Istanbul, we continued to make forward steps at that last round. The guys have got a good plan for the final three races of the season so I hope we can continue the progress at Laguna.
Michel Fabrizio
I’m still disappointed by the results that we were able to achieve at Istanbul because I think they could have been better. However, I am going to Laguna Seca with a big motivation. Although I have never raced at this circuit before I can hope for a good performance because of the experience that I was able to gain on the CBR in Turkey. I have been in contact with my crew chief, Chris Pike, and we have a clear idea about the direction we need to take in America so I am looking forward to riding at this iconic circuit.
