Ride like a champion; a superbike spin around Lombok’s Mandalika circuit
The Indonesian racing track is inviting all riders with a motorbike licence to tear around one of the world’s most technically challenging circuits on a machine built for speed
As I rev the accelerator, the liquid-cooled twin-cylinder four-stroke engine on the Honda CBR250RR roars like a caged tiger, aching to break free and run like the wind. Born and bred in Indonesia with throttle-by-wire technology derived from the RC213V, the fastest motorbike ever made by Honda’s racing division in Japan, it is a fitting chariot on which to negotiate the hair-raising twists and turns of the Mandalika International Street Circuit, on Lombok, Bali’s lesser-visited sister island.
After settling into the wafer-thin seat, I nod to the pit boss, who waves a black-and-white starter flag. I drop the clutch and speed out of the pit stop onto the circuit, surfaced with a polymer-modified bitumen that provides superior resistance to the extreme stresses and temperatures of the tropics.
It’s the beginning of a white-knuckle ride anyone with a motorcycle licence can take, to test their mettle on one of the world’s most technically challenging race tracks.
Back on March 20, 2022, more than 100,000 people gathered at Mandalika, on Lombok’s dreamy south coast, to witness history being made: the return to Indonesia after a quarter of a century of Moto Grand Prix, MotoGP for short, the premier class of international motorbike road racing.
Indonesia hosted such events in 1996 and 1997, at the Sentul International Circuit in Bogor, West Java. But after the 1997 Asian financial crisis saw the government collapse and race riots engulfed the country the following year, Indonesia was no longer considered a suitable host nation.