Chinese Motorcycle Maker Locks Out Front Row at France's World Superbike Round
Zhang Xue Motorcycle, a Chinese manufacturer, will start Saturday's WorldSSP race at Magny-Cours from first and second after French rider Valentin Debise took pole in 1'39.585 — after crashing in the same session. The result ranked second on Baidu's national hot board.
At the Magny-Cours circuit in central France on Thursday, the front row of the WorldSSP grid for this weekend's French round of the World Superbike championship belongs, entirely, to a Chinese team. Valentin Debise, the French rider aboard the No. 53 machine of the manufacturer Zhang Xue Motorcycle (张雪机车), took pole position with a lap of 1 minute 39.585 seconds; his teammate, the No. 64 Federico Caricasulo, was second, just 0.059 seconds slower.
It was the fastest the pair has qualified all season, and it very nearly did not happen. Debise crashed early in the session, and after the team rebuilt the bike — with what he described as significant changes to the set-up — he went faster still, snatching the pole on the final lap of qualifying. "I spent twenty years getting my first pole at home," the Frenchman said afterwards, praising the crew who rebuilt the machine between spills: first on the timing sheets, teammate second, "a great feeling."
Zhang Xue Motorcycle's rise is part of a broader move by Chinese motorcycle makers into road racing's middle tiers — a sector that has spent the past decade climbing from budget commuter machines toward performance bikes and factory-style racing programs, in much the way its car industry did before it. A 1-2 in superpole at a world championship round — on French soil, with a French rider — is the kind of result that sector has been working toward.
Chinese readers were watching. Baidu's hot board ranked the result second nationally under the headline "Zhang Xue Motorcycle takes No. 1 again," and on Weibo a fan recap of the session walked through the recovery lap by lap: the crash at the start of the session, the climb from third, the last-lap burst that took the pole. "Don't give up until the very last moment," it concluded, calling the comeback goosebump-inducing — and pointing to Saturday's race, where the team starts from the front row with a bid for what fans counted as its seventh win of the season.
The sport itself supplies the other part of the story. World Superbike's production-based format lets manufacturers race machines derived from showrooms, which is precisely why a newcomer can arrive and, within a few seasons, matter — unlike Formula 1, where entry costs are prohibitive. Saturday's race at Magny-Cours will show whether the qualifying pace converts. Either way, the front row has already done its work: a Chinese team's one-two at a world championship round in France is the sort of result that revises what an outsider assumes about whose motorcycles race, and win, in Europe.