DiSalvo To World Supersport!

Paul Carruthers | January 19, 2010

Jason DiSalvo is the latest of the Americans to pack his bags and head to Europe, the former factory Yamaha man having signed on the dotted line to ride a Triumph in the World Supersport Championship for ParkinGO Triumph Factory BE-1 Racing.The 25-year-old DiSalvo will join fellow AMA and former Grand Prix racer Chaz Davies on the two-man team that late last year featured Davies and Australian Garry McCoy on the Triumph triples.”As you can tell, I can barely contain myself over here,” DiSalvo said. “I’m so pumped to have a job, first off. And to have it be with just such an awesome team like the BE-1 Racing Team. It’s incredible. I’m just stoked.”DiSalvo finished fifth last year in the AMA Daytona SportBike class on an M4 Suzuki GSX-R600 with six podium finishes. DiSalvo, who rode a factory Yamaha Superbike in 2008, is familiar with racing in Europe he raced 250s there in 2000 and 2001.”We raced over there in 2001, 2001, we did the French World GSX-R Cup in 2002 and more recently I’ve gone back to watch a couple of races in ’06 when Nicky [Hayden] won the World Championship,” DiSalvo said. “I have very fond memories of Europe in general.”DiSalvo is slated to ride the bike for the first time this weekend at the official World Superbike/World Supersport test at Portimao in Portugal, but he already likes what he’s seen from the Triumph.”From what I saw at the last round… I was more paying attention to last round at Portimao because Martin [Cardenas – his M4 Suzuki teammate at the time] was over there racing, but seeing Chaz [Davies] doing so well on that bike has really got me pumped up on it. Just from that race alone, we could be a good contender for the championship,” DiSalvo said.Like most of the AMA paddock, DiSalvo spent the off-season sweating it out over whether or not he’d have a ride in 2010.

“The off-season was terrible,” he said. “It was like last year I had some extra cash from when I was riding for Yamaha so it was like, ‘Aw, screw it. If we have to buy a ride we will. No big deal we can afford it.’ I would always pay attention to the regular paychecks from Yamaha, but I never really paid attention to the expense checks that they would send me. I would just deposit those and never look to see how much they were. But after doing last year, not only paying for the honor of going and busting my ass for a team, but then also paying for all my own travel… it was like, ‘Dang, this stuff costs a lot of money.’ This year, we weren’t going to do that again. So to have a team totally out of the blue… they called me about this ride last Thursday [January 14]. It was like, ‘Hey, you want to ride…’ ‘Yes!'”I’m pumped. It will be good to be over there with Chaz and I kind of know him a little bit and Rog [Roger Lee Hayden] a little bit. Maybe not racing against each other in the same class, we [DiSalvo and Hayden] can kind of restore our relationship a little bit being over there. It will be a lot of fun.”DiSalvo replaces Australian Garry McCoy on the team after the two sides failed to reach an agreement for 2010, according to the team. McCoy, however, claims otherwise. You can read what he says about it here… https://www.cyclenews.com/articles/road-racing/2010/01/19/what-mccoy-says