Doha: Round two of the FIM Cross-Country Rallies World Championship gets underway next week with a Team HRC squad made up of Paulo Gonçalves, Joan Barreda and Jeremias Israel.
Barreda triumphed in the 2014 edition of the event.
The Middle East will once again be hosting a world championship event — this time the Sealine Cross-Country Rally in Qatar — just two weeks after the end of the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge.
Team HRC will this time line up the triumvirate of Paulo Goncalves, Joan Barreda and Jeremias Israel.
Paulo Goncalves goes into the race as current world championship runner-up and will be jostling for front positions alongside Joan Barreda, winner of last year’s Sealine Qatar Cross-Country Rally, as well as endeavouring to help fine-tune the Honda CRF450 RALLY’s performance.
Jeremias gets a great opportunity to continue to hone his road-book reading and interpretation skills as the rally features some rather demanding navigational stretches.
Team HRC General Manager Martino Bianchi said: “The second race of the Cross-Country Rallies World Championship 2015 will be very interesting for HRC in order to make further tests to our bike and to our riders. Dakar is always our main target, but these world championship races are very important in order to do the fine-tuning and set everything up before the big event.”
“And of course we want to defend our victory from last year in Qatar with Joan Barreda. I am sure that the team will make the maximum effort to get a good result,” Bianchi added.
Team HRC’s Team Manager Wolfgang Fischer said: “With full motivation and high expectations Team HRC started the first round of the Cross-country Rallies World Championship in Abu Dhabi, but unluckily we suffered some technical mishaps and could not bring home the result that we had been hoping for.
“Anyway, two weeks later we are heading to Qatar for the second round and everything is all set to bring home what we didn’t manage to achieve in Abu Dhabi,” Fischer said.
“Also, in Qatar we have last year’s victory to defend with Joan Barreda and Paulo Goncalves as motivated as ever. They are joined, not by our rookie Ricky Brebec, but by our man who helped out a lot in the last Dakar, Jeremiah Israel from Chile, who has just confirmed his new contract with Team HRC and will be supporting our two guys in Qatar.
“We will try everything to secure the defence of last year’s victory and hope for a better race.”
The Sealine Qatar Cross-Country Rally begins at the Losail International Circuit, north of Doha, on Monday.
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