I had never seen such amazing bad luck in a race ever before!!! YART (Yamaha Austria Racing Team) came into this final race of the WEC season as leaders with 7 points lead over SERT (Suzuki Europe) and as 2023 champions, so the situation seemed under control even though of course in any race you can never know what can happen especially in a 24 hour endurance race.
YART qualified second behind the official BMW team and when the race started at 1500 on Saturday all seemed good and the YART R1 was in about 6th place after 40 minutes with Nicolo Canepa (the most experienced YART rider) at the helm with everything ok and the BMW was in the lead. But then suddenly the rear tyre of the R1 disintegrated, luckily he managed to stay on the bike and pull into the pits for a wheel change so everything seemed resolved.
(During the race a Honda team running Bridgestone tyres also had a rear tyre fail so this was obviously a bad batch of tyres).
BUT MUCH WORSE WAS TO COME. Later in the race when the YART R1 had been running perfectly, the bike started to display problems from the rear of the bike. They were forced to return to the pits and then lost 25 minutes changing loads of wires and components to resolve the mysterious problem. And it seems that this problem had been caused by a piece of rubber from the failing rear tyre destroying a wire or sensor on the swinging arm which then caused these problems and the huge loss of time!!
When the bike restarted she was down in 42nd place and the SERT Suzuki was firmly in the lead and despite the amazing efforts of the YART riders and team pulling back up and finishing in THIRD position in the race they lost the WEC 2024 championship by only 14 points an AMAZING achievement, against all odds indeed!!
TERRIBLE luck and such a shame, beaten by a faulty tyre which then triggered a series of problems and delays.
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