Description
Coloured and graphite pencils on A3 sized 250 g/m^2 paper.
The British Superbike Championship is often seen as the cute little sister of the World Superbike Championship, only housed in the United Kingdom with one little annual overseas trip to the Assen, The Netherlands.
This brain thought though couldn’t have be more wrong. In the eyes of the hardcore motorcycle enthusiasts, the British Superbikes is where it is at. There is no such thing here as traction-, launch control, ABS, auto-blipping, anti-wheelie, anti-jerk or any other of those fancy intelligent and electronic aids. As the Brits like to say it, this is motorsport as raw as it can get. The pure test that showcases skill.
Talking about skill, It is worldly known that the British Superbike Championship has a high level competition of first-class riders. And rising above most of all those first-class riders is the Londoner Shane ‘Shakey’ Byrne.
Shakey started-out as a test rider for the monthly motorcycle magazine Colin Schiller ‘s Fast Bikes. During the track days with his Ducati 996 SPS, he impressed the right people and the connections were quickly made. He made his entry in the British Superbike Championship in 1999 with Kawasaki.
Bidding his time and climbing up in the championship standings each year he rode, he finally had his moment in 2008 where he won the championship with the Airwaves Ducati. From then on out his experience was so refined he never was out of the ‘showdown’ in the oncoming years. Third in the standings of 2011 with the HMplan Honda, another championship win in 2012 with the Solicitors Kawasaki. Second in 2013 and running strong in 2014.
The 2014 season is another season where Shakey has qualified himself for the showdown. Having led the championship standings since the start of the season and only missing the podium for 1 race out of 19 so far, he is once again pressing that Alpinestar footprint on his fellow competitors in order to get that third championship win.