EWC Q&A: Gregg Black

Part of the Suzuki-powered Yoshimura SERT Motul team that won the Bol d’Or in 2021 and currently heads the FIM Endurance World Championship standings, Great Britain-born French rider Gregg Black, 34, talks exceeding expectations at Suzuka, the absence of pressure, what it takes to win at Circuit Paul Ricard and more as the build-up to the 100th anniversary of this famous 24-hour race continues. You start the Bol d’Or on the back of finishing third at Suzuka.

A great result but one that exceeded expectations, perhaps?“Definitely, a great result for the team and for me personally. Finishing on the podium as a European is always great there because we know it’s a really hard race with all the Japanese teams and Japanese riders who have spent a lot of time to be up there performing.

It’s always hard to perform against them but we proved this year with Yoshimura, SERT and Bridgestone that we can be competitive. It was a hard week with no Sylvain [Guintoli] or Xavier [Siméon] so it ended up with just Kazuki [Watanabe] and me riding the bike, so the objective was clear: just score some points for the championship.

But we ended up having pretty good pace and even if we’d finished fourth, which we were going to, it was already a great performance because we showed our pace in a race that was really hard. At the end of the day YART made a mistake and we finished third but that’s racing, it was a good result and we were really happy.” Ad Does the extra points scored and the bigger cushion that gives you take off some of the pressure?“We haven’t actually had that much pressure since the start of the season, we’ve just continued to do our job which we know how to do with the team.