PHOTOGRAPHY BY GOLD & GOOSE
Leon Camier will be the lone MV Agusta factory rider in the 2015 and 2016 Superbike World Championships after signing a deal with the Italian manufacturer at the EICMA show recently.
Camier rode for the F4RR for the team at the Laguna Seca World Superbike round last year, in place of the injured Claudio Corti, and his first taste of the four-cylinder Italian bike confirmed to him that it had real potential.
“When I rode for them before in Laguna Seca the factory had just taken over from Yakhnich and a lot of improvements needed to be done,” said Camier, who finished the two Laguna races in 15th and tenth places respectively. “Having spoken with them, their technical plan for next year made me more interested in the whole situation. There is still a lot of work to be done, but they have a lot of plans to improve things for next year, and that is why I am interested in it.”
There will be a new F4 RR for the 2015 season, but the bike he is set to start riding tomorrow at Jerez will be a mix of 2014 material and 2015 parts to suit the new Superbike technical rules.
Camier will now be the sole focus of MV’s Superbike program, with Jules Cluzel and Lorenzo Zanetti forming the World Supersport part of the MV campaign.
Camier will soon start MV’s planned three-day test at Jerez and he will be able to bring the recent experience gained on full Superbike Aprilia and Suzuki, plus Evo BMW machinery to bear.
“When the team ran last year they entered the MV as a full Superbike, but it was not running the full Superbike rules,” Camier said. “It was more like an Evo bike because that was what they were thinking things were going to be like this year. They were being quite smart about it even then and I think next year’s bike should be a big step. There are a lot of fundamentals I know I want to change from riding last time, basic stuff that I know will make a big difference. This Jerez test is literally a shakedown. There are a lot of things to try, but nothing really massively different that is going to make us go two seconds faster. I have to get back up to speed and clarify what I thought before.”
“We had a really positive – I want to say test, but it was a race – but even more than a race it was a test, with Leon [Camier] at Laguna Seca,” MV racing chief Brian Gillen said of Camier’s signing. “Based on the information we got from that was important for us and we found out that Leon fits really good with our team. On a few different levels we had a really good feeling. We have probably about 60% of the 2015 material here – like just about everybody right now. The electronics still have not arrived from Magneti Marelli and it will be based on the MLE ECU. We will be homologating the new street model for racing and we will be on that 2015 model in Australia. A number of the components are already from that new bike and we are getting ready to receive the other ones.”
