‘I could crash five times a lap, but not crash – I’ve won a lot of WSB races on that limit’
This summer Chaz Davies contests his 20th season on the world stage – no other Briton has ever raced at such a high level for so long. This is his story…
Twenty years ago 15-year-old Chaz Davies became the youngest rider to contest a full season of grand prix racing, the 2002 125cc world championship. This year he’s still fighting for world championship glory. Davies may not be Barry Sheene or Mike Hailwood but no other British rider has spent so many years on the world stage.
During those two decades Davies has done it all: 125 GPS, 250 GPS, Motogp, World Supersport and World Superbike. Along the way he’s won 34 WSB races, finished WSB championship runner-up on three occasions, won the World Supersport title and become the first Briton to win the Daytona 200.
The 34-year-old Welshman is modest, so he’s never grabbed the headlines like some other Brits. The best Davies headline I could find on the internet goes like this: ‘The Welsh sportsman you’ve barely heard of who’s actually a superstar living a jet-set lifestyle’. Davies may seem meek, but he’s always had fire in his belly. His career has played out in three chapters: GPS, exile to the USA, then back to Europe to contest World Supersport and WSB.
Trying to make it in GPS nearly killed his career, so if 15 years ago you’d told Davies that he’d still be racing a factory-spec Ducati in his mid-thirties he would never have believed you.
It’s never easy for a Brit to make it in GPS. Most of the teams and sponsors are Spanish and Italian, which is why most of the riders are Spanish and Italian.
Davies was one of the first British riders to get backing from Dorna, Motogp’s Spanish owner. Dorna earns its money by selling TV rights
to as many countries as possible, so it makes sense to invest money in nurturing riders from as many countries as possible.
Dorna’s trick was to force Spanish and Italian teams to take foreign riders to broaden Motogp’s global fanbase. This was a great idea, in theory, at least.
In 2002 former 500cc GP winner Alberto Puig advised Dorna to bring three non-latin teenagers into GPS. The three were: Davies, Leon Camier and Casey Stoner. Davies was assigned to the Italian Matteoni team, owned by Massimo Matteoni, who had previously run Max Biaggi and Marco Melandri.
‘But giving Matteoni a rider he’d never heard of put his nose out of joint,’ says Davies, who recently became a dad for the first time. ‘He had no reason to believe in me, so the effort reflected that. Matteoni liked a drink, so me and my dad would bring bottles of whisky to races to try and butter him up but it didn’t change anything. I still wouldn’t have the correct main jet in the bike on Sunday. ‘It was tough because making it into GPS was everything you’ve ever dreamed of but once you’re there it’s not going right and you’re overwhelmed by everything. It was a huge baptism by fire.’
There were good times, of course. Davies and Stoner became close friends. They’d first got to know each other in 2000, when Stoner arrived in the UK to contest the Aprilia Superteen series.
At first Davies wasn’t amused. ‘My first memory of Casey was testing at Donington before the first race. I was one of the championship favourites and here was this guy I’d never heard of in dirty old yellow leathers ahead of me and I wasn’t catching him.’
In the Motogp paddock they became inseparable. ‘We shared this tiny little trailer his mum and dad towed behind their motorhome. We
‘By the end of ’06 the money had run out… the dream was over’
spent a lot of time together and it was good for both of us. Casey was phenomenally talented and headstrong, so his character rubbed off on me. And I think it was good for him to have a friend around, so he could switch off a bit.
‘We’d play Playstation for hours. It was nearly the most important thing of the weekend: who could do the best lap of Sachsenring on Takuma Aoki’s NSR V-twin without traction control. I’ve got a lot of good memories from those days.’
Despite his dog-slow Aprilia RS125 Davies did well enough to win promotion to the 250cc class in 2003, aboard an Aprilia RS250. He became a regular top-ten man, an obvious candidate for a factory bike. ‘But you needed to find a million Euros to get a factory Aprilia. You cannot imagine the difference in speed between the factory bikes and mine. It was mind-blowing – they’d take half a second out of me on every straight.’ Davies didn’t only lack horsepower, he also lacked grip.
‘I remember visiting the Dunlop truck to have a look at my tyre list for the weekend. My list was always really simple: a couple of different tyre numbers for the front and couple for the rear. That’s your lot. This time they gave me this tyre list which was more like a book: five different fronts, seven rears… I stared at it for a bit and then the Dunlop guy snatched it back off me. He had shown me [Andrea] Dovizioso’s tyre sheet by mistake. That’s what you were up against – if you paid for the better bike you got better tyres too.’
By the end of 2006 the money had run out and the dream was over. Davies went home to work at his parents’ kart track on the Welsh borders, where he had started riding minimoto bikes ten years earlier. ‘That was that – my career was essentially done. The GP thing hadn’t come good and I was at the end of the road. Then Jeremy Mcwilliams
calls me to tell me about this little team in
America that wants a rider for the last two rounds of the AMA series. I thought AMA was more like a retirement plan, but I was stood there washing a car, thinking, why not? If nothing else I’ll see a bit of the States.’
Stateside exile should’ve been the end for
Davies. The USA was decades past that time when its best riders crossed the Atlantic and conquered Europe. By 2007 it was a backwater of the racing world, where you went when you were descending the ladder, not ascending.
But somehow, through ill-luck and illjudgement, the USA saved his career.
In July 2007 Davies was at Laguna Seca, contesting an AMA race during the US GP weekend. During Motogp FP1 Pramac Ducati rider Alex Hofmann got taken out by a rival at the Corkscrew, badly mangling a hand. Pramac asked Davies to take his place and he didn’t need asking twice.
Davies didn’t win the race by a long, long way but he did impress Ducati who then offered him a tyre-testing contract for 2008. He turned them down, but he had refreshed memories.
The following March he was at Daytona to contest the 200 miler, America’s biggest bike race, aboard a Kawasaki ZX-6R. Plenty of Brits had tried to conquer the Floridian banking before: Hailwood in the 1960s, Sheene in the 1970s, Ron Haslam in the 1980s and Carl Fogarty in the 1990s. But none of them had made it.
Therefore Davies became the first Brit to hold the 200 winner’s trophy in victory lane, although that’s not quite how it happened. ‘I finished second and we went out to dinner to celebrate with the team. Halfway through dinner I get a phone call, “Josh Hayes has been
disqualified for an illegal crankshaft, so you are the winner of the 2008 Daytona 200!” The team boss got another round in.’
The $80,000 Davies won that day still rates as his best day’s wages. And the ill-judgement of Hayes’ team and Hofmann’s ill-luck at Laguna put him on a plane back to Europe.
The Italian Parkingo team – funded by an airport-parking business – wanted him to ride their Triumph 675 in the 2009 World Supersport championship. Two years later the team got hold of the Yamaha R6 that Cal Crutchlow had ridden to the 2009 WSS title.
‘That year was super-important because it was the first time I could say I was on the best bike on the grid, so I used everything I’d ever learned from minimoto, 125s and 250s to racing in the U.S. to make the best of the opportunity.’
Davies dominated the championship, graduating to WSB in 2012, riding a near-factory-spec RSV4 for Parkingo and taking his first WSB victory, at Nürburgring. No wonder Aprilia wanted him in their factory team for 2013. Like many Brits who had struggled to make it big in GPS Davies was making it big in World Superbikes. But he was about to make a very big mistake. ‘Aprilia made me an offer to replace Max Biaggi for 2013, who told everyone he was retiring. I didn’t trust him – I thought he was just holding out for more money. Things were dragging on and I didn’t want to end up out in the cold, so I signed for BMW Italia. When Gigi Dall’igna [then Aprilia race boss, now Ducati race boss] found out he was royally pissed off. I went into his truck and he ripped up our contract right there and told me to leave. I was like, I’ve fucked up here!’
Aprilia’s RSV4 was the best bike in WSB at the time – Eugene Laverty rode one to second overall in 2013 and the year after that Sylvain Guintoli won the title on one. That’s life…
‘Gigi had put all his years of racing in 125 and 250 GPS into building the RSV. The right choice would’ve been to stay there – the engine was incredible and they had the budget.
‘The BMW was a bit less of a racing bike than the Aprilia, a bit more agricultural in some ways.’
During 2013 Davies won three races on the S1000RR, enough to get him his first full-factory contract, with Ducati. These were the Panigale’s troubled early days, so he didn’t win his first race for the Bolognese brand until 2015. By then he was the man most likely to defeat Rea. Between 2015 and 2018 he finished second to Rea three times and third behind Rea and Kawasaki team-mate Tom Sykes once. Beating Kawasaki is difficult because they are the only factory which doesn’t spend most of their racing budget on Motogp.
‘Beating Rea and Kawasaki is challenging but not impossible. It’s frustrating because you need everything to be just right for the whole length of the season.’
In 2019 Ducati parked the V-twins in their museum, introduced the Panigale V4 and signed Motogp rider Alvaro Bautista. While Bautista duelled with Rea for the title Davies was nowhere.
‘The twin was much more natural for me – I could put together a race weekend with a bit less stress and when everything worked I could go ahead and dominate.
‘I had the twin figured out from a geometry and riding style point of view. I had a pretty relaxed set-up with the front pushed out, so I could ride it really hard and get away with losing the front because I could really feel the limit. I could crash five times a lap, but not crash. I won a lot of races on that limit.
‘The V4 makes the lap time quite differently, plus the Pirellis had changed, so there was more time to be gained with corner speed, whereas before that you got into the corner and you got out, spending the minimum time on angle.’ During 2019 Davies was overshadowed by Bautista and last year he was mostly overshadowed by new team-mate Scott Redding. However, by mid-season Davies had got the V4 figured out and at the last nine races scored more points than both Rea and Redding.
‘I got back to being able to do that crash-but-not-crash thing. That took a drastic overhaul of the set-up, but eventually I found the feeling I’d had with the twin.’
However, these days factory contracts aren’t signed at the end of the season, they are signed well before, so Davies had lost his ride to Italian Michael Rinaldi by the time he got his V4 sorted.
This year Davies rides for Ducati’s Team Go Eleven satellite squad, equipped with a factory-spec Panigale V4. And hell hath no fury like a rider spurned…
‘He ripped up our contract and told me to leave. I was like, I fucked up here!’