Ilya Mikhalchik, who won the IDM Superbike 1000 title in 2018 and 2019, is once again set to challenge for the championship with the EGS-alpha-Van Zon-BMW Team. As expected, the rider lineup surrounding the 24-year-old Ukrainian has now been bolstered. Mikhalchik’s teammates are Tim Eby, who was already part of the team last year, as well as newcomers Pepijn Bijsterbosch and Jan Mohr.
Ilya Mikhalchik has been training relentlessly for months to bring the title back to the team in 2021. To that end, he’s drawing on the experience he gained in his battles with Jonas Folger, who broke the Ukrainian’s winning streak in 2020. Mikhalchik is determined to win and says: “Of course, I’m hungry for the title after finishing second last year. I didn’t like losing the title to Jonas, even though I really enjoyed battling him.”
Teammate Tim Eby is hoping for better luck this season than he’s had recently. In 2020, he didn’t get much time on the track after injuring his hand during preseason testing at the Hockenheimring, which forced him to sit out the first race of a season that had been shortened to four events.
Although Blumberger didn't score any points in the race that followed, he did show steady improvement in his lap times in Germany's top road racing class. There's still plenty of room for improvement.
Austrian rider Jan Mohr is moving from Team Hess Racing and Yamaha to EGS-alpha-Van Zon-BMW. Having competed in the premier class since 2018, he has already been through several teams before joining Werner Daemen’s successful squad, where he will once again ride a BMW—a bike he hasn’t ridden in a long time but is already familiar with. An eighth-place finish on the Hess-Yamaha at Assen was the highlight of his 2020 season. The 22-year-old from Hohenems, who rode his first laps on asphalt in 2012, originally comes from a motocross background.
For Pepijn Bijsterbosch, it’s a return “home,” as he took his first steps in the IDM Superbike 1000 with Daemen’s BMW team in 2015 and 2016. In 2019, he finished the season in third place, which is his best overall result in the class to date. The Dutchman is a sure bet for top finishes. For the always cheerful blond-haired rider, that’s also the minimum goal he has set for himself for 2021.