Having achieved his lifelong goal of a world championship, Jason O’Halloran is moving back to BSB with Honda… where he has unfinished business
While the plan a month or so ago was to continue in EWC with YART, certain BSB rider movements – namely Tommy Bridewell switching to the newly formed Superbike Advocates on a Ducati Panigale V4 R – opened the door for Jason O’Halloran to return. At 37 years of age, experience counts for a lot in BSB, and a move to the official Honda factory team could see the O’Show capture that elusive title.
The initial plan was to continue with YART and defend the EWC title in 2026. HRC dangled a carrot that couldn’t be refused?
I always knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to win a championship in BSB. And now I’ve ticked the EWC box, it’s time to tick the BSB box. There’s definitely unfinished business. Since the Covid-19 years, I’ve won more races than anyone there but I was only prepared to return if I knew I could fight for more.
And to do it with the Honda factory team, fighting for a title is definitely possible.
I’m returning now with the team where it all started for me. My first factory deal was with Honda and they provided me with the springboard on which to build my career. So to do the full circle and come back to BSB as a world champion and to return to the team where it all started, that’s the cherry on top of the cake.
Huge congrats on the result at Paul Ricard that made you a world champion! I think the commentators had you guys written off with about four hours to go. I sat there thinking, hang on, that’s more than four Grand Prix-length races, surely anything could happen…
It’s an endurance race, a 24-hour race, and you come into that last four hours and you think, oh, it’s coming to an end, it’s all done. But there’s still four hours of racing to go! That was my first time at Paul Ricard and I’ve never ridden on a circuit which is so, so hard on the motorbike. The back straight is over two kilometres long and you’re on full gas for most of that. When I say full gas, I mean absolutely tapped for more than, probably, 30 seconds. That’s hard on a bike for 24 hours.
There were two or three other BMWs that didn’t make it to the end, and the No.37 bike was obviously the last one that didn’t make it.
On the Tuesday of race week, we had two two-hour sessions for every rider who was racing. There would have been 10 to 15 red flags for bikes going pop. With that track, I don’t even want to say survival of the fittest – it’s just survive, and if you get to the end, you’ve got half a chance.
What was the feeling in the team with a couple of hours to go? Were they still ‘all in’ for the championship at that point? I guess YART have the experience to know anything can happen…
With YART being in endurance racing for so long, plus the riders and mechanics and everyone in the team, they know it’s not over until it’s over. They’ve also been on the other end of it, when you’ve nearly got to the end and not finished. And now we’ve been on this end of it where we have made the finish and someone hasn’t. You can only take it as it comes. That’s one huge part that I’m learning about endurance racing; there’s so much more to it than just a lap time. It is what it says on the tin: it’s 24-hour racing. It’s about keeping the motorbike on two wheels. It’s about the bike making it to the end. It’s about you making it to the end. You’ve got to manage your body throughout the night.
These multiple aspects make it especially exciting for me because I’ve raced for such a long time – yet this is such a different discipline. I’ve still got so much to learn, but it was obviously a good outcome for us at the end of the race.
What never fails to impress in the EWC paddock is that bikes take some punishment but the mechanics can repair almost anything.
I think it’s incredible. The biggest thing with endurance racing is you have to keep going until the end if you can. You see some guys changing an engine or pulling an engine apart.
Your normal head says, why? How can you even do that in a race? You get it back together and you get back on the track and the next person has the same issue as you or an issue that’s longer to repair. If you make the repair, you’re still scoring points. As we’ve seen from this year, we won by one single point.
When you think back to Spa, I was leading the race. I was two or three seconds a lap faster than anybody. Unfortunately, I had a crash at the end of one of my stints. I broke a bone in my foot, a bone in my ankle. I hurt my hip. I managed to ride the bike back to the pits with one handlebar.
Then Karel (Hanika) managed to get us to the podium. We finished third. If I’d just been a bit slower getting back, if Karel had said, “it’s over” and we didn’t get that third place, you’re not champion. You can never quit. You have to go to the chequered flag. It’s never over until the flag comes out.
I’ve got a question on the practical aspect of what happens during an EWC race. If you crash and say you can’t ride your bike and get it going again, do the track marshals still load it up and bring it back to the pits?
Yes. We get a track map before the start of the weekend. There’s shortcuts and there’s all different parts around the track you can try and get your bike recovered. If you’re severely injured or whatever and you can somehow get your bike to the side of the track or the marshals get it to the side of the track, there is a trailer that comes around and collects the bike. Although you would lose a huge amount of time, it is possible to get the bike back.
The main thing is always getting the bike back. You have to get it back to the box and then the team can assess it. Obviously, if you can’t do anything with it, then sometimes it means the end.
Nine times out of 10 – nine and a half times out of 10 – they’ll try and do something to get it back out. It’s pretty amazing what happens.
Being a short season, four races, do you feel like you’re getting a handle on the skills of endurance racing? Do you think you’ve done your apprenticeship as such?
Yeah, I think so. Even though it’s only four rounds, I’ve done two 24-hour races now and two eight-hour races. We had three podiums out of four events and one DNF where the bike didn’t make it to the end, so it was a good season from that perspective. I feel like I learned a lot from round one to round four.
The expectation certainly was to be champions this year and we achieved that.So, it was job done. But you need a little bit of everything. You need speed, you need consistency, you need a strong team, you need a bit of luck, you need a bit of everything to bring an endurance championship together.
The television broadcasts are fascinating. (AMCN’s Gordon Ritchie gets a seat for commentary through the year!) One thing that hit me again at Paul Ricard was the size of the crowds.
It was amazing, mate. Honestly, the championship has, I don’t want to say surprised me because I knew it was a great championship, but the crowds definitely surprised me because it’s not… unless you’re inside the championship, it doesn’t have the coverage and exposure that other championships that we all know and love do. Le Mans and Paul Ricard, there’s so many people there and it’s more of a festival. They get there early and stay.
When we spoke earlier in the season, you were talking about coming to terms with the bike and adjusting to the differences between the EWC bike and your BSB bike, particularly electronics. How did you feel by the end of the year?
Yeah. For me, I definitely adjusted to it as the year went on. The biggest thing that I’m still adapting to, and it’s hard to adapt in the races, is to the tyres. I still don’t feel like I’ve maximised the Bridgestones yet. It’s really difficult to do that when you’re racing for a championship because you want to find the limit of the tyres, but you obviously don’t want to crash either.
It’s a real balancing act across a race week and a race weekend.
How did you feel coming off BSB to EWC, having been in that paddock for so long? 12 months down the track, you’ve won an Endurance World title. How’s it all processing through your mind? It’s such a massive life change…
Yes, huge. It was a huge decision for me and my partner, Rach, at the end of last year to move away from what we knew in BSB.
We won a lot of races in BSB. We’d worked ourselves into a fortunate position in BSB – people don’t talk about it – but I was one of, if not the highest earner in British Superbikes. We’d worked ourselves into that position over a number of years. I just got to a point where I wanted to try something different. I really enjoyed racing the Yamaha in BSB. I loved it when we were winning.
I tried the Kawasaki last year and unfortunately got injured right in the middle part of the season, which hindered us, but we still managed to win. When the option came up to ride a Yamaha again, especially in endurance, I just thought we needed to make a change. It was a really big decision but the main driving force behind it was that when I left Australia I was 20 years old. I left to give myself the opportunity to be world champion.
Obviously, along the way, you go down different paths. My home ended up becoming British Superbikes, which I was really, really happy about. When the opportunity to ride for YART came up, it really triggered me. I thought, “This is your opportunity to achieve that goal”. It might not be World Superbike, it might not be MotoGP, but it’s World Endurance champion.
Now, we can sit back and say, “2025 World Champion”. It’s an incredible feeling.
The only thing that could have made it better was the podium at Suzuka. When you get to the end of an endurance season you see everyone’s had their good luck, everyone’s had their bad luck.
After so many hours of racing, we managed to win a championship. It shows how competitive the championship is and it shows what sort of job we’ve done across the season.
What happens now? Is it holiday time?
Yes. Now I’m just going to take a little bit of time off. The one good thing for me at the moment is that I don’t have any injuries. When I finished BSB last year, I had busted my shoulder pretty badly. I had surgery in October last year and then it took me four months of recovery to get to a point where I could ride again. So I’ve had a really extended period of time without giving my body any rest. Now it’s just about having a month or so just to let the body calm down, just relax. Then, yes, start training again for next year and hopefully get on a bike, go and do some riding over the winter. I’m going to try and come back to Australia as well, which will be great.
Then start planning the preseason where hopefully we can do plenty of riding, get over to Spain in some decent weather and turn some laps.
You should do an ASBK round…?
Yes, absolutely!
Just throwing it out there…
If it’s available, why not? I enjoy racing now more than ever. Racing in Australia, America, BSB, World Endurance, whatever there is, I’m game for a bit of a pedal around.
