Haga by 3 hundredth's in Race 1 at Philip Island

Well a decent first race of the year for WSB with Haga and Neukirchner breaking the field to duke it out in the final laps.

Max Neukirchner looked to have the race in the bag, moving ahead of Haga into Doohan's final time round and being quicker than Haga in the first half of the lap. Haga's strength on the Ducati was the second half of the lap however and he closed right up, but it seemed to be the cool weather and a few spots of rain on the last lap that decided matters.

Running up and over Lukey Heights Neukirchner's Suzuki snapped out of line throwing Max out of the seat allowing Haga to pass. Max regained control and dragged Haga up the straight to close the gap over the line to just 0.032 of a second. Close stuff.

The fortunes of these two couldn't be more different to the other Max. Biaggi got off the line well, not quite getting the holeshot from Johny Rea. But having got away in 2nd place, he was predictably duffed up and fell down the field. In fact it was a rider cutting across Biaggi, causing him to sit up and run wider, that pushed new boy and pole sitter Ben Spies off the track ruining his race.

In stark contrast Haga and Neukirchner pushed through from 13th and 14th on the grid to finish the first lap 2nd and 5th.

Why Biaggi can't seem to race anymore is beyond me and must drive his team manager insane. He settled for 11th place.

But arguably the surprise of the race was the 3rd place finisher Yukio Kagayama. What a dude. His English for my bike is fast is getting better too!

World SuperBike is looking really good this year, as has been said many times. But I have to say the TV coverage is very poor in comparison to MotoGP. Very little on screen info, no on bike pictures, not enough cameras around the track, and pretty poor direction.

Dorna might not be very good at growing the sport and making it more commercially attractive, but they do a much better job of making a TV show out of a race than their SuperBike rivals.

What a shame.