Kevin Orgis (BWW): “The motorbikes were flying wildly all over the place”

The mass crash involving five riders in the first Superbike race at Oschersleben was a real doozy and is currently still one of the most-viewed short videos from last weekend. After Twan Smits, who was in second place, suffered a massive engine failure as he approached the Hasseröder bend – spilling plenty of water and oil onto the track and sending a huge cloud of smoke billowing through the area – not only did he crash, but so did the riders behind him: Florian Alt, Markus Reiterberger, Toni Finsterbusch and Kevin Orgis. The latter theoretically had the most time to react, but no such luck.

Speaking to SPEEDWEEK.com, the 26-year-old later described the bizarre situation in the following words: “I was the first rider who wasn’t directly in the group that crashed. There was smoke everywhere, so you could hardly see a thing. I plunged into the smoke, and the moment I was in it, my front wheel just gave way beneath me. As usual, I braked on the outside and then thought I’d better move inwards, just in case there was oil somewhere. It had already happened by then. There was oil all over the braking zone. Some of it had even spread out to the side of the racing line. I’d left a metre’s gap from the white line, but that just wasn’t enough.”

Front-row seat at the air show

Although he was the last to go down, he’d still managed to catch enough of the bikes’ aerial display and commented: “The motorbikes were flying around like mad, as if they weighed nothing. They were like paper motorbikes and some of them flew up the slope where the spectators were. My bike flew up the slope too and then slid back down again.”

Miraculously, nobody was seriously injured. Not even a photographer standing right there. Only Twan Smits did not start the second race again, with a suspected hand or arm fracture. Commenting on his condition, Kevin Orgis said: “I didn’t hurt myself at all; basically, I just had a front-wheel slide.”

And only as a second question: what about the motorbike? “The motorbike looked a right mess, but in the end not much had actually happened. Luckily, the important parts – the frame, engine and swingarm – were fine. Only the fork had taken a bit of a knock. I noticed that during the second race too. There was quite a lot of vibration in the bike. But it was rideable. We’d made most of the repairs provisionally during the break so that I could ride, but it wasn’t a top-of-the-range bike anymore.”

Kevin Orgis #44

Foto: Thorsten Horn

On the bright side of the technical damage, he explained that the left handlebar end had snapped off, as had the front wheel rim. “They probably absorbed most of the impact. On top of that, the footrest had snapped off and the fairing parts were a right mess. But it’s not too bad – we can glue most of them back together. In other words, most of the parts that need replacing were broken, but it could have been much worse.”

Collective clean-up efforts

He described the repair phase carried out by the family-run team ORM Racing / ADAC Sachsen e. V. as follows: “We worked through it and actually finished relatively on time – so by no means at the last minute. We were even able to let the motorbike warm up properly and check a few things over again. In the end, my father and our four mechanics – my two and two of Leon’s – as well as myself, so six of us, worked on the bike. Of course, friends and family also lent a hand wherever they could. But they only did odd jobs, because at a certain point you just end up getting in each other’s way.”

Until the repair work could begin, Markus Reiterberger and Kevin Orgis had been acting as track marshals, retrieving the three motorbikes that had flown over the crash barrier. “We spent 20 minutes there trying to get the motorbikes out again, and we managed it. First we got mine out, then his, because my bike was blocking Reiti’s. It was a right mess. We also tried with Florian Alt’s motorbike, but it had actually dug itself so deep into the grass that it had to be hoisted back onto the track with a crane.”