VOL. 51 ISSUE 2 JANUARY 14, 2014
P69
(Far left) Chaz Davies: Another
season, another new bike.
(Left) Davies leads his former
teammate Marco Melandri (33) and
current World Superbike Champion
Tom Sykes (66) at Laguna Seca.
goes wrong you can use your
spare bike?
From what I can see it does
look a bit compact. Sometimes
in morning warm up if you have
had a bad Saturday I think it is
cutting it a bit fine and you have
to be a step more careful in
morning warm-up, and even between race one and race two. It
is tight. If you have an accident
and the bike gets trashed… I
like the downtime between them
because what you see on TV or
whatever, it is not just the races.
We go to the paddock show, and
so on. It is all well and good, but
you are there for another 45 or 50
minutes. You are in your leathers,
you are drinking what you can but
you need to be eating something
at that point to get something
back in you for the second race.
I think people do not see that
from the outside. We are putting
on a show, but we need to prepare properly as well. You cannot shove something down half
an hour before the next race and
perform at your optimum. You
need to give yourself ample time
to get back on the grid. All the
little things like that I hope they
have thought about. You should
be eating while you are on the
podium, ideally! If you are on the
podium it is worth it, but if you still
have the same process of preparation to go through, but you have
lost about 50 minutes after race
one, or something like that.
You have had an amazing
few years of being a part-time
rider on the Triumph 675 Daytona World Supersport triple,
then a full time Triumph rider,
then World Champion for Yamaha the year after in World
Supersport. In Superbike you
went to a private team, then
semi-factory team and now a
factory team. You have had to
change bikes a lot and adapt.
Do you feel it has been a
strong progression from your
lowly 'status' when you first arrived in the World Supersport
paddock?
Yes, definitely. Since I had a
couple of rides in 2009 and then
from 2010 right through to now, I
think it is a career path that you
would have hoped would have
happened a bit earlier. Not that
I am old now, because I will be
27 in the new season, but that
is the sort of thing that you hope
happens from 15 to 20, and then
you are on your way. But I am
happy because in the past few
