Home Challenge For BbKRT In Cremona

With the 2025 WorldSBK Championship now well underway, the unique Cremona Circuit will play host to the fourth round of the season, between 2-4 May. bimota by Kawasaki Racing Team riders Axel Bassani and Alex Lowes each raced at Cremona for the KRT squad last year, but this will be their first experience of this Italian circuit on their Italian-made KB998 Rimini machines.

The new BbKRT project has made a high-profile entrance into the WorldSBK paddock this season, with each lesson learned about the overall performance of the Kawasaki-powered KB998 Rimini at different test and race venues adding to the collective experience that can be brought to bear for the next track outing.

After three rounds and nine individual races, Bassani is ninth in the championship and Lowes is 14th. Their personal best bimota results are a fifth at Assen in Race Two for Axel and a sixth in the same race for Alex. The BbKRT pairing are separated by a slender seven championship points at present.

As a circuit itself, Cremona is a known quantity for each rider, even if it was an all-new event on the WorldSBK calendar in 2024. It is an unknown quantity for all in the BbKRT team with the new KB998 machine, however, which will make the opening day of free practice at Cremona particularly important.

The compact Cremona layout is a very different kind of track from the most recent host venue of Assen, with the Italian circuit in the Lombardy region featuring a vast array of slow and tight corners, counterbalanced by a long back straight - complete with a left-hand kink in the middle.

At only 3.768km in length Cremona is very much on the short side compared to most WorldSBK venues, especially as it manages to include 13 distinct corners. Visual highlights include the unique undulating chicane that enters the heavily banked final corner, which leads the riders onto the short start/finish straight.

Action gets underway at Cremona on Friday, 2 May, with two Free Practice sessions. FP3 and then Superpole qualifying will precede a full distance Race One on Saturday, 3 May. The new traditional Sunday morning ‘sprint’ race, over ten laps, will be followed up by the last WorldSBK race of the weekend, again over a full 23 lap duration.

Alex Lowes stated: “It will be exciting to ride an Italian bike at an Italian track. Cremona is a relatively new venue on the WorldSBK calendar. The layout is good and I had a good weekend there last year on the Kawasaki. I enjoyed it, so I am looking forward to getting there this coming weekend. It is a tight, twisty track, a little bit quirky and bumpy in a few areas. I think it will suit the bimota KB998 Rimini. There will also be a load of new information for us to keep improving, so we need to work hard on Friday. It is always a pleasure to ride in front of the Italian fans, and there was a good crowd there last year. It is quite a small circuit so you can really feel the atmosphere. I am excited to get back with Team 22 and let’s see if we can get our best results of the season.”

Axel Bassani stated: “This will be the first time for us in Cremona and it is also my home round. That is always something nice - and something more, because it is really important to race at home. I really don’t know what to expect because, like the previous round in Assen, we do not have data for the bimota KB998 at Cremona. There is a long, long straight, which for us will be hard, but there are also a lot of mixed corners, so I think we can recover a little bit of time. We will have to see what the weather will be like, but it is really, really hot; it will be interesting. That would be our first time in the really hot conditions in Europe. There are a lot of things that will be new for us, so I am excited. I think we have to proceed like we did in Assen, stay focused, and always be fast from the beginning. After that, we can see what happens.”