We caught up with Jason O’Halloran two days after his victory on debut at the Le Mans 24 Heures Motos. This year marks a huge change for the Aussie, having left the BSB paddock after 15 years at the top to join the YART EWC team riding with Karel Hanika and Marvin Fritz
What a start! How are you feeling after your first 24-hour race? Bit different to BSB…
To be honest, it was incredible. To win Le Mans on debut there is huge. People try for years and years to win that race and never do. The last time YART won there was 2009. It’s such a difficult race and not just about speed, it’s about a little bit of luck. There’s so much to the race that when you get to the end and you win, it’s an incredible feeling. It’s something that I’ve not really experienced before in my career. In short circuit racing, you 20 twenty laps and it’s on you to race and finish. With EWC, you’ve got two teammates that need to do their part. You need to do your part. The guys in the garage need to do their part. If you have a crash, it’s about fixing the bike as quick as possible. There’s so much more to it that at the end, it feels like a proper team sport like football or something. You share the moment with people a bit more.
Can you describe your thoughts and feelings at the end of 24 hours?
You’re tired. You’re drained. You’re worn out. It’s quite emotional at the end of it. It was a really good experience but obviously, the race was super tough with the mixed conditions. When it came down to the final hour when Kawasaki crashed, that brought us back into the game for the lead. To win was pretty incredible, really. It was such a rollercoaster of a race.
How did you guys feel after the opening lap when Marvin – your fastest guy – went down after starting from pole?
Well, this was my first proper experience of an endurance race. Throughout the week, initially everyone’s focused on lap times. Then everyone’s so focused on qualifying – because you get five points for qualifying. It’s all about speed. Then you go into a 24-hour race, and we’re upside-down after the first lap! It’s like, shit, we’ve got 23 hours and 58 minutes to go, and we’re on the deck. It’s just incredible. The conditions were super tough, and we knew the track was going to be slippy. But we knew it could happen and it could have happened to any of us. Luckily, there was nothing wrong with the bike. Marvin stayed out and he worked his way back through and after the hour, it wasn’t so bad.
With so much chaos, was it tricky to stay focussed?
We got quite lucky, whereas when you see 10 laps later, SERT crashed and they lost 14 laps. A bit of luck was on our side. I think the biggest thing with the race is you don’t look at any one thing in particular and go, oh, shit, we’re down an hour, or, we’re back in it. You’re just focused on your stint and what’s coming up and what’s next. There’s so much going on, and there’s so much distance and time in the race. I didn’t really feel like I dwelled on any one thing in particular, it was just about getting yourself ready for the next time you’re on the bike and I think all of us did a good job. When we had problems, we made the most of it. Everyone in the race had their problems, it’s about limiting the amount of time you lose from the problems that you have.
Speaking to other endurance racers, they talk about the high physical and mental toll. How brutal was it?
The reality of a 24-hour race means you’re probably awake for 40 hours by the time the race ends. You wake up like normal at seven o’clock on race day, you have a warm-up at half ten but you don’t race until three. So, racing is three till three and then you don’t leave the track until probably eight. You’re not in bed until ten. That makes it a 40-hour day, really, so you can imagine you’re quite tired by the end of it. But physically, speaking to my teammates, I’d say it was one of the easier ones purely because it was wet. Mentally it was probably one of the tougher ones because every time we went out on track, circumstances changed.
For my first stint in endurance racing, I’m there sitting in the box waiting for Karel to come in. I’m speaking with Max (Neukirchner – crew chief) and he’s like, “Right, we’re going to play it safe, we’ll go out on wets.” That’s because there was one person on track at that moment on slicks, which was Greg Black, and he crashed about two minutes before I was about to go out. So we said, “Right, we’re going to go on wets and we’ll just play it safe for my first stint.”
I stood at the front of the box as Karel came down pit lane and Max tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You’re going on dries.” So I’m rolling down the pit lane on slicks, it’s raining, it’s getting dark and it’s my first stint in endurance racing! I’m like, holy shit! I felt a bit nervous, I didn’t want to crash, I didn’t want to ruin the race in my first stint, but it was probably some of the toughest conditions that I’ve ever ridden in.
It was an amazing stint, I cut a minute and 17 seconds into second place…I lost a little bit of time at the end of the stint just from vision – my visor got really dirty from the track and the bike – but we come in after that first stint in the lead. Marvin went out for his second stint, we’ve got a minute lead and he crashed again on the second lap. And that was purely, again, just because of how tough the conditions were.
The stats were something like 200 crashes…
The problem was it was so wet off the racing line and the track wasn’t drying. In endurance racing it’s like being at a track day; you’ve got 50 guys on track and you pass four, five, six guys a lap. In the dry that’s fine, but in the sketchy conditions at Le Mans on slicks you can’t go offline, so it’s so hard to get around people. Marvin just went a little bit offline and tucked the front. He only lost a foot peg and pitted but still lost a couple of laps, but he salvaged it. We didn’t lose a huge amount of time and it was sort of like that throughout the whole race, to be honest. It was wet, it was dry, it was in between. It was sketchy. It was super tough from that point of view.
What happens with bike setup in those conditions? When you change tyres are you also changing suspension and electronic settings?
From my experience in BSB we change everything nearly every session. Front spring, rear shock, linkages, swingarm length, gearing. To be honest, this was probably one of the biggest surprises for me in endurance racing. We did nothing. We just changed the tyres. We had a completely dry bike with wet tyres for the whole race. I knew it was going to be like that because we had some wet testing and we did the same thing. Maybe the Bridgestones helped a little bit in that sense. As a team we’ve spoken a little bit about it and the reason is that over a 24-hour period, so many things can change. You can’t be swapping springs and preloads and everything, you’d be doing it every stint and losing too much time. But I think when a race was as sketchy as it was for the duration, maybe we could have done something like soften the bike off a little bit, even if it was just a bit of preload front and rear. I’m sure some of the other teams probably did that, more so because they spent so much time in the box with crashes that it was probably easier for them to do that. But in general, we don’t change anything.
Coming from BSB with no electronic aids, has it been difficult to adapt to a different style of machine?
That’s been difficult for sure because in BSB, although you don’t have electronic aids, what you end up with is a really user-friendly motorbike – because it has to be. You have super smooth, linear torque because you don’t have the electronic aids. When you come to a bike that has electronic aids you can afford to have a little bit more torque or a power curve that’s a little bit more aggressive because you have electronic aids there to help you. That’s been hard for me to adapt to in a short period of time. Certainly, on the World Superbike side of things, if I had some test days I could adapt to it. On a race weekend it’s near on impossible because everyone’s going as fast as they can right from the first session. You get one pit stop, one exit, and you don’t really get to change a lot. EWC is slightly easier because the bike’s got a little bit less power and the chassis side of things is a little bit more what I’m used to. It’s a learning process and I’m still not maximising the potential of the bike yet, and that just comes down to trusting the electronics and using them a little bit more. Out of the three of us, my fuel consumption was by far the best. I never ride into the traction control… I don’t use the electronics as the other guys are using them, purely because I don’t trust them yet. I’ve ridden ten, 15 years in BSB not having them there, so to extract the last two or three tenths will come with time when I learn to use those aids properly.
From a spectators’ point of view, other riders have compared BSB to Supercars here in Australia but EWC is also regarded as one huge party with a great atmosphere. Did you feel that or get to experience that?
I’ve been really fortunate being a part of BSB, the crowds there are incredible. You get 30, 40, 50,000 people every weekend to a race, which is unheard of for motorbike racing at a national level. You get fans that are supporting each individual rider and it’s quite a cool thing. I’d heard a lot about Le Mans though and it lived up to expectations. From the early part of the week you’ve got all the people camping and the organisers cater for it properly. There are engines on rev limiters all night, music everywhere, it’s one big festival! Standing on the starting grid with all the teams lined up, it’s amazing. If you’ve ever been to Le Mans, on the start-finish straight there’s a massive grandstand on the right, then there’s a massive grandstand on the left, so it’s basically like being in a big tunnel. Every team and rider lines up from their starting position across the track and then they sing the national anthem. It’s goosebumps sort of stuff and from that perspective, it was incredible. At the finish the podium is basically over the start-finish straight and up really high. All the crowd stays – it’s a pretty amazing experience.
Are you able to tell us a bit about the circumstances around your departure from BSB? Was there an option to continue?
I’ve been lucky to make a career out of BSB, it was my home for so long and it was amazing. I won 28, 29 races – nearly got the title. When Steve Rodgers and the McAMS Yamaha team finished at the end of 2023, I knew it was happening. It was going to happen the previous year but they decided to stay on for one more… but then I had to find a new seat, which was difficult. It was also difficult to move away from Yamaha, but the option wasn’t there to stay on as another team (OMG – with Ryde & Vickers) took over the factory effort and they already had riders. I ended up getting a great deal with Kawasaki… we had a good group of people and initially I got on with the bike well.
I won at Donington pretty early in the year but then we had a few issues. There was an engine failure at Thruxton which really hurt me… I tore my quad muscle and I snapped the end of two of my fingers on my right hand which made it really difficult to ride for the rest of the year.
The option was there to stay with Kawasaki with the same team in 2025, but there wasn’t an option at the time to go back to Yamaha. After the year that I had with a few crashes and the issues that I had, I didn’t feel that if I stayed at Kawasaki that I was going to improve to the level I felt I was still capable of. Then the option with Yamaha came up. I knew Nicolo (Canepa) was going to retire and move into a management role with Yamaha. He asked if I would be interested in leaving BSB – there was never an option to do both. I either had to stay in BSB or move over to EWC. In EWC you’ve obviously got some top teams – Kawasaki, Honda…every rider’s deal is different. Some guys are contracted to the team, some guys are contracted to the manufacturer. The option came up for me to have a Yamaha Motor Europe contract and I was going to get put into the YART team and do some WorldSBK testing. With Johnny (Rea) unfortunately hurt, I got the call up for that. There were a few things tied together into the one deal and it really interested me, plus I’ve loved endurance racing for a long time. It was an opportunity to go back into what I felt was a winning environment and a winning team with the potential to become a world champion.
If I had one more year in BSB like the one I had last year where I won a race, a couple of podiums but you have a fifth, a sixth, an eighth, a tenth, a crash… I looked at it and thought, what was coming after that? Where was it going to go? I felt that this was a much better option, to get back on a factory bike and on a Yamaha where I’ve had most of my success. There were too many positives to move across to endurance to not do it.
Can manufacturers like Kawasaki and BMW win consistently in BSB? Is that possible?
We see them have a couple of good rounds and then trouble… like you see last year when I won at Donington and then it became difficult. The rules in BSB keep everything close enough so every manufacturer can win, but to challenge for a title or win every other weekend – I think that is very, very difficult. Last year we’ve seen more Hondas and Yamahas on the grid and I think that makes it even more difficult. I think every manufacturer can win on their day, but to win consistently, I didn’t feel that that was possible with Kawasaki.
This question might be easier to answer at this point in time when you’ve just stepped off the podium, but are you at peace with your BSB situation?
(Laughs) Yeah, one hundred per cent. To be honest, when I made the decision last year, I was at peace with it. I feel like if I was still in the position that I was in in 2023 with the McCAMS Yamaha team now, I could have won a lot of races without a doubt and I still firmly believe that I’m capable of doing that, you know? This year it’s new tracks, new teams. It’s a new challenge. We’re going to Suzuka on a factory-backed Yamaha with Bridgestone tyres and we’re going to challenge at the front of that race and potentially have the chance to stand on the podium there. That’s huge, so there’s so many good things involved in it.
What do you do long term when racing finishes? Do you stay in the UK or return to Australia?
I get that question a little bit and it’s a hard one to answer to be honest because obviously I grew up in Australia, my family’s in Australia. I lived there until I was 20 but everything that I have in life is here in the UK, so it’s a strange thing. I don’t know the answer to that yet; I would love to be in a position where I can spend some time between the two countries. I obviously miss Australia a lot, I miss seeing my family. I want to spend more time back there, but I also love the UK because it’s given me everything, I’ve got my fiancée Rachel, her family is here.
We’re in a fortunate position where we have two countries that we can call home, so it’s something that I’m not exactly sure of yet. I’d love to be in a position where we can spend the summer back in Australia again, the last few years we’ve missed out on that a little bit.
When you’re racing BSB over here you get so busy. After the year, you’re always working out a new deal or you’ve got a sponsor commitment, there’s always something that doesn’t allow us to get back for that long. What I’m hoping now is endurance is going to allow us to start to do that. We have less racing, less commitments.
