Kevin Orgis: Success with a small team, “I do the data recording myself”

At the end of the Assen weekend, Euro Moto Superbike rider Kevin Orgis finished in 8th and 10th place. Top-five finishes were within reach. The 26-year-old from Saxony, who races for the small family-run Orgis Racing Team / ADAC Sachsen e.V., explained to SPEEDWEEK.com how things turned out for him and his brother Leon, who is a year and a half younger, in the following words: “My weekend at Assen was okay. We experimented a lot with the set-up because Assen is completely different to other circuits – much faster and more fluid. You’re leaning over a lot there, which is why the bike needs a slightly different set-up. So we just tried out a lot of different things.”

He comfortably topped the Superpole 1 qualifying session to advance to Q2, but in Q2 – despite the bike already being up to operating temperature – he failed to complete a single lap. “Right after I went out, my rear brake overheated and just locked up. That’s why I couldn’t set a time.”

Pushed out and running at half throttle

In the first race, he finished eighth behind the group battling for places 5 to 7, although he fell behind them early on and the gap hardly changed as the race progressed. He reflected on this later: “I was pushed out a bit in the first corner and slid off the kerb. I lost a few places there, and the group from fifth place onwards had already pulled away.”

In the second race, he had his sights set on almost the same group throughout and was in seventh place on the penultimate lap. In the end, he finished tenth, which he explained as follows: “I got off to a better start and was right on the heels of the same group this time. In the final laps, however, I had to drop back because I’d overworked my tyres trying to keep up with the pace. On the final lap, I had a problem with the fuel and could only ride at half throttle. That might have been down to some previously unnoticed damage from a crash at Oschersleben.”

The problem is that the riders behind pulled the plug.

Kevin Orgis

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He, too, finds it a shame that top-10 finishes don’t exactly look like heroic feats given a field of just twelve riders. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t look too good. The problem is that the riders at the back have pulled the plug. Even this year, there are now five fewer riders than at the season opener. Of those, only one is missing due to injury (Hannes Soomer, editor’s note). There are, of course, regular team manager meetings where they discuss how to change this again and ensure the class isn’t so expensive, so high-profile and not such an extreme competition. The aim is to ensure that more riders can benefit from competing in Germany’s top class.”

Nevertheless, the family-owned ORM Racing (private) team / ADAC Sachsen e.V. can be proud of being able to hold its own against the big names. “It’s great fun to mix it up with the big teams and give them a bit of a run for their money. This weekend, particularly in the second race, both my performance and the bike’s were unfortunately lacking. That’s also down to the fact that we can’t test and don’t have trained staff. I do my own data recording, for example. So, given the constraints we’re working under, these are very good performances. We’ve become more than half a second faster than last year, which shows that we’re constantly improving. Of course, we’ve still got room for improvement, but it’s also extremely difficult to take those final steps at this level.”