SLIGHT ADVANTAGE!

think it would be unfair to come up with the age-old statement ‘the best rider never to have won a World Superbike title’, for Aaron Slight – it’s the sort of thing that gets trotted out for Randy Mamola when it comes to 500cc GP racing. There was so much more to Aaron. He took seven pole positions on his way to 13 World Superbike race wins (along with 42 seconds and 32 thirds) and this gave him the two runner-up spots in the WSB championships. There are other remarkable achievements to note: how about three back-to-back Suzuka 8-Hour race wins in 1993, 1994 and 1995? Then there’s the 1991 Aussie Superbike Championship, a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit award and various sports personality of the year awards back home. He even had a song made for him by his local radio station in Masterton… We think the most impressive of all was coming back to race just 12 weeks after major brain surgery, when – at the start of 2000 – a two centimetre bleed was found on Aaron’s brain. This condition had clearly not only affected his run-up to the 2000 WSB campaign, but also his 1999 campaign, where he finished ‘only’ third