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King Carl Fogarty in all his pomp.

Carl Fogarty dominated World Superbike racing in the 1990s. His time in the championship spanned from 1991 through to 2000 and in that time he won 59 races, took 21 pole positions and four world crowns. Carl has been synonymous with Ducati, winning all bar four of his races on the blood-red 888 or 916-based Desmos. The other four came on the Castrol Honda RC45, a bike which John Kocinski took to the title in 1997. This shot comes from 1998, when Carl was on his way to the tightest of championship wins. Kocinski had gone back to 500cc GPS and Carl was in the single-rider Ducati Performance team. It was a year where Ducati wanted to sort out the pecking order of its riders. They had three: Foggy in his one-man outfit and Troy Corser and Pier-francesco Chili in the flagship Ducati Corse team. It could have seen the end of Carl’s career with Ducati, had he failed to win the title. Ducati only wanted one team and two riders on factory bikes for 1999 and in 1998 they didn’t want to fund £200,000 of his £700,000 fee: instead UK Ducati importers Moto Cinelli made up the shortfall selling the limitededition Fogarty replica road bikes. The lowest ebb that season was two 13th place finishes at a wet Nurburgring, which saw him in sixth in the title race. Improvements to the base homologation 916 SPS Fogarty Replica and his race bike saw the results come so he was in third overall going into the final round at Sugo, six points behind series leader Troy Corser and five-and-a-half behind Honda’s Aaron Slight. You couldn’t have scripted the last race weekend: on Sunday warm-up Corser crashed and broke three ribs and damaged his spleen. He was out of the battle. On race day Slight could only manage seventh and sixth in the two races, while Foggy took a third in race one – which saw him lead the series for the first time since the start of the year – and a fourth in the second race, which was enough to seal the title. Want to get hold of pictures from Mortons Archive? Then head to: www.mortonsarchive.com