Aaron Yates Joins Geoff May on Team Hero EBR WSBK Team

Aaron Yates is joining Geoff May in making the jump to the World Superbike Championship with Erik Buell Racing. The two Americans will ride the Team Hero EBR 1190RX for the bike’s debut season of international racing.

Yates and May finished 8-9 in the 2013 AMA Superbike Championship for Team Hero EBR, with Yates edging out his teammate by a single point. For 2014, the pair will have the honor of being the first to ride an American-made motorcycle in the WSBK championship.

“It is a great pleasure for WSBK to welcome an attractive and unique brand like EBR to the series,” says Javier Alonso, WSBK executive director. “The American manufacturer is the eighth different brand to compete in this new and challenging edition of the Championship, and we are equally confident that their involvement will add to the show. It is really good to have two American riders on the starting grid again representing a strong nationality in the history of the series.”

The team will be led by owner Claudio Quintarelli and manager Giulio Bardi. The challenge now is to prepare the all-new 1190RX for WSBK competition on completely foreign race tracks, a task made more difficult by the winter testing ban.

“More than three decades of racing, engineering, and manufacturing experience goes into every EBR motorcycle,” says Erik Buell, founder of EBR and Buell Motorcycles. “The EBR 1190RX has some very unique engineering technology, and how to optimize this for each race series is something that takes time to learn. With the winter testing ban, we will have to wait and see where we are in terms of current pace and performance. Nobody is expecting podiums, but we will be hard at work, learning and improving. We are confident EBR will bring a fun and exciting story to the series, and know the results will come”

[Source: WSBK, EBR]

By Dennis Chung