TAG-Racing Honda Special – Jaimie van Sikkelerus

Motopod, proudly supported by Road Skin, a UK label specializing in protective outerwear for motorcyclists. Modern biker clothing that you can wear all day long, and engineered to save your skin. For the road, for life, visit roadskin.co.uk Hello and welcome to Motopod, the internet radio show all about motorcycle road racing. This is episode number 773 and this is the first of the special episodes in association with Tag Racing Honda and Road Skin. This is your show host Richard Jowett and in the first of these specials I'm delighted to have been able to sit down with BSB Pathways rider for Tag Honda, Jamie van Sikkeris.

As you'll hear Jamie is an incredibly open, honest and I would say very humble young man and he was able to give us some really valuable insights into what it's like to compete at this highest level of national superbike racing. Jamie is very open about the injuries that he's suffered throughout his career and just what these guys put themselves through to try and stay at the top. Now turning to the Snetterton weekend, this was recorded on the Thursday before the weekend got properly going. The weekend itself, well it was plagued by bad weather, first time it's rained at Snetterton for quite some time so it did cause a lot of disruption. I think all of the races were disrupted with red flags and crashes at certain points.

Prior to the weekend unfortunately Fraser Rogers on the other BSB bike had been ruled out due to a motocross accident so we're wishing Fraser a speedy recovery. Hopefully he'll be back sometime around Thruxton. In terms of Jamie, well in race one unfortunately he did go down in the wet but in race two and race three he had a pair of 22nd places which bearing in mind is on the Pathways bike, pretty creditable and as we discuss hopefully that's something that he'll be able to improve on as the season moves forward. I'll definitely be talking to Jamie again a little bit later in the year so based on what you hear in this episode, if any of the listeners have any questions that they'd like to fire in, I'll be delighted to pose some of those to Jamie as we get to know him and the rest of the team a bit better as the season goes on and hopefully into next year as well. Thanks very much to Tag Honda, to Rob, Tracy, Gary, Charlie, Sean, all of them.

Really great bunch of people and opening the doors to us so that we can get under the covers a little bit and really find out what's going on in the operation and running of a BSB team. In terms of the next plans, well I'm hoping to get to Brands Hatch for one of the days over that weekend and certainly to the Thursday prior to Thruxton. So all been well, we'll be able to chat to a few of the team personnel and assuming he's back from injury we'll hope to speak to Fraser and hopefully to Sean and Matt who race the Stock 1000 bikes as well. So with all of that being said, here's my chat with Jamie. Here we are, it's Thursday the 4th of July, a rather windy Snetterton as always, it's an ex-airfield so they tend to be windy places and so this is the first of the Motopod Tag Racing Honda in association with Road Skin chats that we've been trying to get set up and we're going to follow the team.

So I'm delighted to say I'm sitting with Jamie van Sikaris, if I pronounced that correctly. Yeah, yeah, it's a hard name but you do. Good, good. So Jamie, first of all, let's just talk a little bit about Donington because as we saw in the warm-up session or the qualifying session you had a nasty crash at the Red Gate. First race, first lap, first corner, crazy.

But yeah, the corner went really tight for me with the other riders and that created a high side on the exit. So yeah, got some bad injury there, not really a bad one but yeah, some cracks in the bones of my rich and in knee impact fracture and the medical put me on fit there so I was not allowed to do any races that weekend. Shame because Donington is a pretty good track for me, we have shown it in the Super Sport already in the years before but yeah, couldn't help it. Things happen and it was my first real crash in a Superbike weekend. I was commenting to Steve Day, who's one of the commentators on Eurosport, that when you watch that corner on the television it doesn't look that fast but when you stand by the side of the track and you see somebody taking a high side there it's amazing how the speed is so much more than you think and so the impact of a fall, not surprising that you had a nasty wrist injury as a result.

It's correct, even when you see the straights in the race you think it's not going that quick but still we go like above 250-260 km per hour, far above. But even on that video the bike was completely sideways already and only flipped the back what you saw on the video so it looked not that bad on the video but yeah, the impact was worse than then it looked like. But it's what it is and we tried to get a quick recovery as possible. And what was involved in the recovery, was it just resting the wrist or did you go for some particular rehab? No, we went to a physio straight away, talked with doctors, did some x-rays and MRI scans at home.

I have good connections with doctors in the Netherlands because sometimes we need some operations and so we are quite close with them and on the MRIs you could see a good or a bad fracture on the knee and the ridge had some bone tears in it. So back to what, 80% ready for Snetterton this weekend in terms of wrist? Yeah, that's not, I think, yeah for sure. The only thing I'm a little bit, I have a bit headache about is like from the beginning of the season we are really fighting with knee problems. My kneecap is getting out of the rails so it's when I bend my knee, my kneecap locks sometimes and it's getting worse so we are really talking with hospitals and physio therapy about how to solve this problem.

But yeah, I always try the best I can. Snetterton I pretty like, I like a stop and go tracks and Snetterton has a lot of hair pains and tight corners so I was really looking forward to this track but yeah, we need to wait two minutes, the pain sometimes. Yeah, the life of a professional racing bike rider. So let's tell the Motopod listeners a little bit about you then Jamie. Let's talk about your journey through motorcycle racing.

So you started off like so many people do, you just mentioned in what we call your schoolboy motocross I guess and then you were in the European Junior Cup for a little while. Then you've been through Dutch Supersport, I think you were the champion there in 2021? Yeah, we had Dutch champion yeah but we did already real championships on that time only because we were doing real championships if I did the Dutch championship race I always won the race because the level is a bit lower than world of course but we were never allowed to use all the races so I could be the champion at the end of the season and in 2021 we got the luck that all the races were not the same. So yeah, that was the reason we finally could be Dutch champion but I started when I was four years old in motocross. My first bike was already bought before I was born so from after baby I was on the bike already and from a four years old time we were doing competitions European Championship motocross but because of injuries we quit at the end but we did European Championships already at a young age and 2010 I was you know when I was 10 years old we were already to America for races and testing so as a small kid.

2010 we jumped into supermoto and we jumped into world championships again within three years and done supermoto of nations three times and from after 2014 we started to get into racing in the party union cup as you told and yeah we were gaining 2014 was my first time with racing didn't know slipstreaming never heard of that word before so my first race in GERES was quite a hard race but many people start off on motocross bikes and as you say they do sort of the other off-road kind of racing let's say and some people obviously continue in that path we know that injuries are very common particularly motocross so what was the point at which road racing or track racing became of interest to you what happened to light that fire in 2008 I cut my liver with blood inside because an handlebar gets in with a crash into my stomach and 2010 I broke my back three bones and some other bones in my body and then my parents said hey you're 13 years old too tight and intensive care in two years time it's not worth it yeah and we created supermoto and because we did a world championships the team told me once at 2014 like we want you to be on a race bike to get more feeling with high high speed so I jumped on an r6 for the first time in my life in Almeria and that went pretty good so above what we thought it would be and then some people told me like hey you have to do more testing on a race bike and I started to like it even more as I did supermoto and yeah that was why I grew into road racing and were you at that age that young age you know I guess that you know motocross all the rest of it was kind of an obsession yeah were you kind of aware of things like moto gp and world super bikes and so on so I didn't know anything about racing so it's just motocross and supermoto was my thing and I was not focused on racing at all until they put me on an r6 and then I thought hey this is nice yeah and yeah the lap times were strong from after first moments and so yeah I got the questions like hey yeah you have to jump into racing and so we did with the party union cup the first season so yeah that's quite a big jump to get in road racing straight away in the European championship with agusto Fernandez and all the other guys but still we could manage it and 2014 was my first year we did 15 2016 was my first year this championship with the r6 2017 European championship and 18 worlds 19 worlds and 20 world championship super sport it was a quite big growth yeah yeah yeah and kind of trying to read between the lines a little bit in terms of the the biography stuff that you can read about your career so far online would it be true to say that world super sport paddock is a tough place financially for teams to operate and therefore was that what prompted you to eventually come to the British super sport what was the transition the transition was quite special it had nothing to do with the money what you're telling me is true is like it's about a lot of money but we did the super sport on our private team and that's quite the same amount so that was not the reason okay I had quite a lot of injuries in my knee and problems in my knee and that gave us a lot of operations and in 2020 we are still had the same problem we were riding with injections in the knees to get it sorted in that way and my doctor told me that maybe an option was to change my foot position so looking at just for people because this is audio not video i'm looking at scars on jamey's legs and it's already quite horrifying and um yeah i have got 13 operations in my legs already and maybe you can tell your listeners about what you see or maybe we can share the share the photo if it's for public yeah that's not a problem for me we cut both bones in the lower leg yeah and twisted the foot 15 degrees wow okay on the right so i'm looking at an x-ray image now which is yes showing this in rather graphic detail so um and we we changed it and this operations took me seven operations in total with infections a lot of things and my last operations should be in april 2021 the season starts world super sport in february so i wasn't ready for the world super sport season also with the with the practicings before and that kind of things and because of covid the 2021 season of bsb started later and we wanted to have highest level possible championship next to world super sport and we think bsb is like a high level it's the highest level on national championships in the world yeah so that was our reason to jump in supersport bsb interesting so it was just a collision of circumstances and dates and covid and because of yeah and circumstances because in 2020 i broke my ankle and because of that operation i was out of the full season and then we thought okay now we do big operations it takes a lot of recovery but that was the time to do it yeah and because if i didn't break my ankle we would never have done this operations and i would never been in bsb funny how things kind of work in your in your favor i know i say that obviously knowing that you've had many operations and obviously gone through a lot of pain to get to where you are now so okay so up to date then you're in the tag racing honda team this year now you're on this british superbike which is called the pathways bike so can you try and because even i'm struggling a little bit to understand technically what the difference is between say a completely stock thousand bike like sean and matt are riding in the team in the stock thousand championship and obviously fraser is on the full blown bsb spec bike so what is the pathways bike and what led to you being on that machine there are some more restrictions on it a lot of people are have questions about it it's also pretty hard to tell against your sponsors and things yeah but we have some more restrictions so that means a real superbike they are allowed to have a different gearbox we are not so we are racing the original gearbox yeah the swing arm is original at my bike and on a real superbike with maybe a suitor or another brand and the front suspension the outer tubes need to be original and with a superbike they may be like real superbike i see but we are riding the same electronics traction control also at our bikes no traction control so the electronics are exactly the same as the real superbike the main thing is just the gearbox swing arm and front fork and or engines may not be tuned so we are riding stock engines right so you have less power than the other i know it's worth just noting i'm sure most of our listeners will know this but in the stock 1000 series they are allowed to run full electronics on those bikes so you have none on the pathways interesting okay and was that the bike that you were offered by the team to ride or did you see the pathways bike as a good introduction into the bsb without having to go to the full level bike i mean i'm sure you would ride that bike yeah it's also like a budget thing for us but we were guessing about what to do for 2024 and we had some good results in the in the super sport class 2021 22 and 23 and in 24 we wanted to make a step up we thought about maybe stock thousands but then this opportunity came up so yeah the opportunity to jump into the pathway new class was coming to us so that was what we took straight away it's great with to be with the tech family because it's it's really like a family team and they don't give any pressure on it even with the struggles we have now they really want you to enjoy racing that's a beautiful part yeah and i'm just trying to think there's probably i'm guessing maybe what six to eight pathways back bikes out there i know billy's on one it's a bit sad news on that point um it was the door and organization was trying to get like a nice field of the pot wave like nine to eleven bikes on it i thought but at the end it's just a lot of them jumped into the real superbike and the so there are just three riders three bikes oh it's just the three at the moment so rollo and billy mcconnell i think no no billy mcconnell should be on the pathway bike we begin the season but also he jumped into the main so i'm not focused on the pot rave result i see myself between the main riders so if i'm on p25 i'm on p25 and not on p2 or p3 or p1 in the pathway yeah is that a frustration to you though the way that that i mean it's obviously it's not the team's fault it's not your fault because yeah otherwise when you have a bigger group of riders you can gain a bit more competition within that group yeah even when you are first in the pathway which is nice and you still need to open the throttle to get there it's just yeah there's only three riders you know yeah and they are strong riders but still that is the situation you get but maybe next year can be different so it's what it is yeah i'm really focused on my results between the others and not just on the pathways but yeah we can't change it yeah no no it's what it is isn't it it's as you say it's a shame that more teams didn't adopt yeah and when they start with this concept a lot of teams are really positive about it and even last year you saw some testing from teams but yeah it didn't work out in the way everybody thought interesting let's talk a little bit about away from the racetrack then so just remind me your age you are how old yeah what do you think well i'm trying to remember what the date of birth was i'm guessing you're in your early 20s or somewhere around about yeah i look pretty young but i'm 27 okay 27 and you're based in the netherlands yeah so you travel to and from the uk yeah so every race you're traveling to the uk so monday i'm back in the netherland and i know that some riders up and down the pit lane here for various reasons you know maybe they're working on a building site during the week what does jamie do during the week are you a full-time professional athlete or you have some other things? trying to but um now my parents have a car company and we built a motorcycle company next to it in a garage i'm doing the motorcycle you're in the family business yeah family business and i'm a mechanic of motorcycles so specialist in ktm so rebuilding engines and doing everything but especially this year i took a step back out of the company so i'm just supporting my parents still nearly every day with preparing and things but my main focus is on sport at the moment yeah i have to ask because i know when i've been at a couple of the other rounds i've seen your father is with you quite a lot is he kind of looking at what's going on in the garage and trying not to interfere or and yeah it's um he is more enjoying now because the years before he was we had our own racing team so we own members in the team and so he needed to be there every race also yeah you have other members in the team so you need someone to control everything and make a balance but now he's just because he wants to be here and um he's more relaxed and even when he's not he's not needed so sounds quite strange but he can come whenever he wants yeah but it's not a need it's for pleasure more for pleasure and to support his son yeah so and he really enjoys it so uh and he loves how the teams are working so the first race he had a little bit of headache about it if he needed to control everything but now he sees like okay they are managing it i can watch the race from the outside yeah yeah and obviously you know the dutch and the british have a long history together so we're not so different so for you being in the uk a lot i guess is like being at home anyway yeah no true and yeah i've been in different teams italian teams but here with the tech it works perfectly and there's a lot within the team and some fun but also like serious business and uh it's the perfect balance yeah yeah talking about snesterton this weekend then it's a funny track i always think because there's lots of fast straights and then lots of hairpin turns it's uh probably a tricky one to get the bike set i mean excepting that you have ongoing trouble with your knee as you have identified your wrist is still recovering a little bit yeah how are you feeling about this weekend in terms of what's achievable if i'm really honest i had a little bit of headache coming up this weekend because yeah even two days ago i was still in hospital talk about yeah some options to get this sorted but um still i have a lot of energy to jump on track snetherton is really a track i like and i like stop and go tracks and and short corners so um yeah i'm really looking forward to it for me it's still every race is learning on a superbike yeah especially between the big guys because they go very quick but yeah so it's this year and also this weekend will be a school again but i will do the best i can and i will enjoy every lap and i think you've had a best finish so far which i think was racing race to in navara yeah maybe in uh in navara yeah so i'm not even sure about it myself i died a quick look this morning although the bsp website isn't the easiest one to find that information so obviously we've just been talking about the fact that there's you and one other currently on the pathway spec bike and you can't really compare it to the rest of the bikes because they as we've already discussed and described our full spec bsp but where do you see the main areas to improve either in terms of yourself or the bike because it's a new specification i think for now it's mainly myself and that's what i am telling the team also sometimes even when we are not really strong or the team is asking me like hey what do we need to change to go quicker i try to be fair and i said it's not a bike i need to change and i think the bike has shown himself already with other riders that it can jump in top 50 in the race and like top 20 like general and i think that's needed to be around their place i need to understand the bike more i'm riding in 600 style right i was gonna ask you if it was a body kind of injury thing if it's more just adapting because obviously this is the first year on the 1000 cc bike because you've been on supersports before like like noke we were really fighting with injury so the mind was not where it needed to be like in fp1 i was changing a suit to take off some tape because it was not working in the way i wanted and but if you have to take off a suit in a free practice session and take it on again you're busy with physical and not busy with racing and so i'm really thankful to the team that they really support me still in that way because it felt from my side very unprofessional but yeah we are trying everything to be on track but yeah jimmy talking to you now for the first time that we've ever spoken with each other and you're incredibly humble and honest about everything so far i think that's the way to go yeah so you know it's 2024 we live in a world now well first of all all riders it seems to me no matter what category which series are racing in are always injured to some extent there's not many riders out there midway through a season who are 100 so excepting that's the case i mean how do you approach this mental preparation how do you manage the pressure and you know the pressure of the body the pressure of the expectations that you put on yourself team or you're saying the team have been very fair with you how do you approach all this because we hear a lot about mental health in this day and age and so on and that's great and people have different approaches to that well how do you kind of try and manage this pressure and i give myself because the team is not giving me any pressure i'm the one who gives the pressure himself and also because i think i have to a bit because you are in the main championship at the moment and people really think something about you so you need to show yourself and it's like it's still a hard game if you are far off the rest you're out the next season so you want to show yourself straight away in the first season but what i do now is like i have some books really like focused on mentally or just on a race weekend before the race i take 50 minutes for myself like completely just or music or nothing but to relax kind of like a meditating almost exactly and because you needed to put it on the side only the last couple of races it was a bit hard for me and i felt also the struggle was from there and we had some sessions that i was not on the speed at all and then i changed my mind and i was a second quicker that means it's not the body it's not the bike it's just the mind game yeah and that means like the mind game is a very very important part maybe the most important part so yeah it's always a thing you need to keep working on but yeah i try in that kind of ways to relax myself i try to control it but still even i can learn of it yeah and are you one of these riders that likes to have a i don't know a red sock on the right foot and a blue sock on the left foot nothing no no no no no i don't need that kind of thing so i'm not a special you do hear some funny things that people do in their routines and so yeah or special underwear or yeah lucky pants yeah like a fence but no i i don't have one of these things nothing like that okay and obviously you've been racing in the uk for several seasons yeah which would you consider to be your best or favorite track um for the track i think donnington so uh it's because in yeah 2021 was my first season in bsb and my first podium was in 21 on donnington in 22 i took my first win in donnington in 23 i took my first win that season again in donnington yeah so it's like a lucky lucky place for me yeah exactly but so that was quite a shame because we had a good test in donnington earlier this year and again in the race weekend we showed we could be strong there but yeah from after first race we were out straight away and tell me a little bit just moving over to something that's just come into my mind i was very lucky last year to go to the moto gp in catar so i spent 15 minutes or so talking with colin via and he couldn't really give me a clear answer to the question but i was commenting to him about you know the benelux countries let's say holland or netherlands i never quite understand the difference between those we don't need to talk about exactly the same i don't need to talk about geopolitics now but i have no idea myself and belgium you know suddenly you know you guys have quite a few riders you have obviously colin in moto 3 there's barry balter says santa as well uh mark randemarcus boze has been around for some years and yourself here blazing away in bsb it's a little bit funny is there a big racing scene in poland no it's like it's very small and what you see is most of times this kind of riders like santa is living for most of the times in spain colin same in spain so because in the netherlands we have only one track and that's awesome that's the only track we can race on if you want to practice you have to go to spain or to other places so it's quite hard to create quality in racing as a rider and that's why you see them going to other championships very quick or for us the first season was pata junior cup jerky championship yeah you have to go to other places i guess it must just be that as one or two people nationally become famous in a certain sport young people start to take notice and they want to try yeah that's why you also see a big gap between the level in the dutch championship or other areas when they want to grow they go to a german championship or to other championships yeah okay last question because we're going to try and catch up a few times during the year you know and see how the progress of you is and the team in general so it's kind of like a question to make you think a little bit i was trying to think of an interesting one to ask so is there a particular event globally motorcycle racing wise and a certain category that if you have the opportunity to go and race let's say the suzuka 8 hour for example on a superbike is there a particular event that would really kind of if you had the opportunity you would do it yeah i think um good question i think it will be like a suzuka or a world endurance event interesting because world endurance is becoming really quite a big category in a very popular category now it's for the future it's quite always a good step to to jump into you see i have a lot of riders where i've raced with they're racing the the world's endurance right now yeah but that's always something you can do when you are finished like the short racing championships and you have the quality you can always jump into the world endurance yeah but i think a suzuka or that kind of race is really something to be on the list interesting okay and i know i'm not asking this in terms of whether you would want to do it or not but have you had a chance to go to an event like the northwest 200 or the tt for me it was the tt was always on the list but not been yeah i think and when i get the option i really will think about it but my parents always hold me back on it because no i was talking about going to watch not necessarily to race but i was always about thinking about it's race like amazing but uh that takes so much things in front of the event but to watch it it's an amazing event and i think everybody needs to be there at a certain point in their life yes it's something what you can't see at another place yeah well jimmy that's just about half an hour talking uh just as an introduction to get to know each other i'm sure that's going to be very interesting for the motopod listeners so thank you for your time uh we're doing this on the thursday so it's a slightly more relaxed day before things get going properly tomorrow but best of luck for the weekend yeah thank you watching the results and keeping our fingers crossed for some good progress and good results for you so and um i'm not sure if i'll make it to brands which is the next race i think but certainly one of the next races after that i'll be there so we can keep in touch we'll keep in touch and have another chat and uh see how the progress is going so for now thank you very much yeah thank you for the chat and thank you for the listeners and always welcome cheers