Hawk Racing
We go behind the scenes at Hawk to get the lowdown on running a race team.
The Buildbase Suzuki BSB team, run by Hawk Racing are set to take on the BSB 2019 championship with Brad Ray and Luke Stapleford, but it’s taken 20 years for Hawk Racing to get to where they are today; they have had plenty of success but a few tricky seasons along the way. After a strong 2018 season in the British Superbike Championship which saw Ray securing a place in The Showdown, finally finishing sixth in the championship and teammate Rich Cooper ending the season in twelfth place, we caught up with Steve Hicken, boss of the Mallory Park based Superbike team.
Hawk Racing has been a pretty big name in the British Superbike Championship for a lot of years now, but we wanted to know where it all started.
“It all started with my old man in 1999, or that’s when Hawk Racing started anyway,” said Steve. “He had done loads of racing and decided to come back to the paddock as a team principal. We won the privateers cup straight away in 1999 with a lad called Phil Giles, just running out the back of a Transit van and working from home. A few years later in 2002 there was an opportunity to become the lead Kawasaki team but things really took off when Glen (Richards) joined the team in 2003, even though we were still on the underpowered 750. We got the new ZX-10R in 2004 and Scott Smart took the first ever race win on it which was a really cool thing to achieve. Over the years since then, we’ve had loads of top riders, like Jon Laverty, Dan Linfoot, Peter Hickman, Ryuichi Kiyonari – and that’s just a few.
“Taking the team over from dad (Stuart Hicken) was a big thing for me but I had always been involved so it wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was getting myself in to. When you are the ‘son of’, you always think you know better but he raced all his life, so there were definitely things I learnt from him. I learnt to get good at ducking because I have had plenty of hammers thrown at me in the past, but we got on well most of the time. He is still involved with the team but is running Mallory Park now so we are a little bit more out of each other’s hair, and we get on much better because of it.”
Over the years, in BSB, we have seen teams come and go. Big teams and small teams, teams with big budgets and teams without. But there aren’t many teams that have been in the running for the past 20 years, so we asked Steve what Hawk’s secret is. He said money wasn’t everything: “It annoys us seeing brand new teams coming in to the paddock with massive sponsors. They all go over the top straight away.
It’s great that if a businessman with loads of money wants to come and spend it running a BSB team, he can do it but it’s just not that easy – it takes way more than a massive budget to run a successful race team. Take Honda, for example, one of the best workshops in the championship, full factory effort, with what seems like a good budget, more full time staff than anyone but we have beaten them in the last three seasons – and they haven’t won a TT since 2016. In 2016 Hawk Racing was a private team, and we won two TTs, a NW200, an Ulster GP, four Southern Hundreds, a British Superbike race at Oulton Park and won the British Superstock Championship. Yes, you need a big budget to win, but you also need to know what to spend that budget on. And it’s knowing what to do with the bikes – we pride ourselves on knowing how to set a bike up and make a rider happy, and the effort that the whole team puts in. You can’t just buy that with a massive sponsorship deal.”
It was pretty clear that you need more than just a massive stack of cash to make a race team work – that said you still need a pretty big stack, so we asked Steve about the process of securing the budget to run a race team and how that’s changed over the years. “It’s extremely difficult finding budget. These days it’s as much about presentation, and the type of hospitality you can offer. The corporate side of things is an area we know we have to improve and we have spent a lot of money on it. It would be nice to think that the big sponsorship deals come with good results, but if it did we would have been guaranteed BMW’s budget after smoking Tyco BMW in 2016. When Tyco took that deal from us at the beginning of 2016 it really grated us – and it created a bit of animosity between us and them. We haven’t got anything against any of the Tyco lads, but we had been told that deal was for us, and we wanted it. In ’16 all we wanted to do was to go out there and beat them so to get Michael to ride our bikes on the roads was great, we gave them a proper run for their money on the roads and took the stock 1000 Championship with Taylor Mackenzie against Hutchy on the Tyco bike. After the bad blood, there was no way of staying with BMW and to run at the front of BSB you really do need some sort of factory support.”
So in search of factory support, Hawk Racing decided to go down the Suzuki route, but according to Steve it wasn’t all plain sailing.
“It was tough, and looking back on 2017, we took too much on. As always with a new bike, everything came late, the bike itself came late, all the parts were a struggle to get hold of and we had way too many bikes to look after. We didn’t get any fairings till March – trying to get 20 fairings prepped and painted in the space of a few weeks is nigh-on impossible so we had to do the first round in gel coat, which is hardly a fullfactory way to carry on, is it! But we won a senior TT that year, on a brand new bike, and as Michael (Dunlop) said, we made the impossible possible.”
And after a couple of years under their belts with the Suzuki GSX-R1000, Hawk Racing look to be in a pretty good place with the Superbike. But with a new BMW S1000RR, and Ducati Panigale V4 set to make their debut in BSB, as well as an updated
Honda Fireblade, it is going to be interesting to see how the Gixer fares against the very latest technology. Steve seemed really confident in the Suzuki though, telling us: “The Suzuki we have now is the best superbike we have ever had and we have a brilliant rider line-up too. There is no reason why, in 2019, we can’t win Superbike and Superstock on the Gixer. It will be interesting to see how the other teams get on with the new machinery, but I don’t envy them – I think we’ll have enjoyed a nicer winter than the guys that are waiting for, or working on brand new bikes. Ducati is bit different, when we got the new bikes, it was us and our little team of technicians trying to get it to work with MoTeC. They (Ducati) are a racing factory, that thing will come out of the factory and work straight away. I doubt BMW are doing that, so it will be hard work for the teams running them. But it’s not just building a one-off bike. You need a full set of spares in case the thing gets totalled in FP1, and then again in FP2. And it can be really difficult getting hold of that stuff, hence the fairing situation in ’17.”
Despite running the same bike as last year, running a superbike takes a lot of work. With 215bhp, the engines need quite a bit of looking after, so we asked Steve what the script was with engine rebuilds,
“Every 1,500 miles the engines are stripped, valve springs, pistons and con-rods all replaced. That’s playing it safe and the engines will do more than that but we can’t afford to risk a DNF and the loss of potentially 25 points, or worse a crash, caused by something breaking in the engine. We can get a season out of a crank, they are pretty hard-wearing. Leon Jeacock is our in-house engine builder; we are supplied cylinder heads and camshafts from
YOU NEED A BIG BUDGET TO WIN, BUT YOU ALSO NEED TO KNOW WHAT TO SPEND THAT BUDGET ON.
the factory and we assemble it all up here. Now we are linked to the factory and Yoshimura we don’t do any tuning work here, although we used to do with previous models. We didn’t have an engine failure in the whole of 2018 and we have got a very fast bike. In fact we can keep up with any other bike down the straights, it’s nice not chasing horsepower.”
But there are a lot of fast bikes, strong teams and experienced riders going into the 2019 British Superbike Championship. The Buildbase Suzuki team, who we know have a very competitive bike, will be looking at pushing for plenty of wins. Steve, though, didn’t want to get too excited, too soon.
“We know the bike is capable of winning races, Brad has proved that, and we know him and Luke are capable of running at the sharp end of the championship. But we aren’t going to get over confident, we will go out there and work as hard as we possibly can. It’s a long season and we have still got to get through testing yet.”
Brad Ray came to the team in 2017 and turned plenty of heads in his first season on a Superbike, now with two years’ experience on the thou’, it could well be his year. Steve told us what he thought of his race-winning rider.
“Brad is a great rider but, after winning the first two races at Donington last year, had a little bit of inconsistency in the middle of the season. He put it on pole at Snetterton and then crashed twice, losing 50 points. He got the lap record round the Natonal at Silverstone circuit, and yeah he slips off sometimes but he is just a young kid. He doesn’t want to just win, he wants to win by ten seconds. And I’m not going to knock that out of him. He is always gaining experience and I know that when we find the level of consistency that we need with the bike, he will be up there every weekend.”
Joining the team, fresh from World Supersport competition, is Luke Stapleford. Although new to Superbike racing, Luke is no stranger to the British circuits and looks to be an asset to the team. Steve told us that Luke is no stranger to the Hawk Racing team.
“We brought Luke into racing in 2008 in the Superstock 600 Championship. He went on to be a British Champion in 2015 on a Supersport bike, and then had a good go at World Championship level. I think he has struggled with a few elements and not been able to do as much riding as he would have liked. He’s coming to us and we will be doing loads of laps to get up to speed, and giving him the chance to concentrate 100% on riding. It’s his first season on a Superbike, in one of the toughest championships, on one of the best seats, so the pressure is on but he is confident and a world class rider. He qualified fourth at the last round of the World Supersport Championship, he has been on pole, and had regular top six finishes so there is no denying the fact that he can ride.”
Hawk Racing, who will also be fielding Rich Cooper in the Superstock 1000 Championship, seem to have had their fair share of top riders in the past. We asked Steve if securing those top riders has always been done the same way.
“It has changed a lot, back in ’04/’05 you’d ring someone up, have a conversation, there would be an agreement, a hand shake and it would be done. Now it’s a lot different, the riders have to be contracted to so many dealer days and this, that and the other – but the top riders can still make decent money at it. And it starts much earlier now; we signed Brad around July last year. During a season we never used to worry about the following season but now it gets to June and you have to start working really hard on sponsorship deals so that you can start offering riders X amount of money to come and ride for you.
“In the past you would get to the last round and all the racing stuff would stop for a good few months, but now as we have grown into a bigger team there is so much to
do to get ready for the season. There has been a winter test ban but we have built a Superstock bike so that we can get out to Spain during winter and at least get some laps in somewhere. To be honest at the minute it’s more like we are running a logistics company, all the trucks have to have MOTs, we are arranging parts suppliers, planning testing trips and making sure all our insurance stuff up to date. And that’s aside from the constant development of the bike. There is five of us working here full time at the moment. During a race weekend though, there’ll be over 20 of us. Because we are an official Suzuki team, there is a level of professionalism expected.”
After achieving so much in the British Championship, we couldn’t help but ask what might be in store for Hawk Racing in the future – would Steve consider taking the team to World Superbike level?
“We are always striving to do the best as we can and take the team as far as we can. But our main aim is to win the BSB Championship; it’s the biggest show around at the minute and we been pretty close to it a few times, like in ’14 when Kio crashed at the last round of the championship fighting for the title. If you go to world Superbike, you need to be going with proper budget and with some real factory backing. We have chatted about it and a 24 hour flight back from Australia after finishing 15th would be pretty gruelling, it’s bad enough driving home from Oulton Park when you have had a rough weekend.”
It was great to spend a bit of time with Steve and the lads from Hawk Racing and it was clear that they mean business. All of the boys seemed quietly confident that they had the bikes, the riders and the team to fight for strong results in the Superbike and Superstock Championships, and with good reason. The 2019 BSB season promises to be a corker, the first round of which is at Silverstone on April 21, and we can’t wait to see how the Buildbase Suzuki team fare.