Superbike World Championship preview: round nine - Assen

After a break of almost a month the Superbike World Championship enters its hectic final leg with round nine of the series at Assen in the Netherlands this weekend. With four rounds over the next six weekends it promises to be a busy time for the teams and riders in what has been a thrilling championship so far. One man who can surely be expected to be in the thick of the action is Yamaha Motor Italia's Noriyuki Haga, who is the closest rival to series leader Troy Bayliss (Ducati). The Japanese star gave his best form of the season last time out in Brands Hatch, winning the day's second race, and consolidating his second place in the championship. Haga rates Assen as one of his favourite circuits although, like his rivals, he has yet to experience the shortened circuit that awaits him this season. Previously boasting the longest lap time on the superbike calendar, the entire northern loop section has been removed to make way for a new car park and improved spectator facilities. The circuit now measures 4.55km, compared to 6km of the previous incarnation. Many riders have expressed their disappointment at the emancipated layout but the real winners will be the trackside spectators, who will experience 22 laps of superbike action, rather than the 16 laps of previous years. "Assen has always been one of my favourite circuits and I have had some good results there before," explains Haga. "I know that they have changed the track quite a bit but it does not bother me at all - the track is the same for all the riders and we must just go out and ride it. At Brands Hatch everything was good. Only a small problem with the bike stopped me from pushing as hard as I would have liked in the last laps of the first race, but otherwise the bike was perfect.

"I'm not thinking about the championship and I just want to go out and win as many races as possible. It was a great feeling to win again in Brands Hatch and since then I have had a holiday back home in Japan. It was good to relax and spend some time with my family and I'm feeling in good shape for the last part of the season." Haga's team-mate Andrew Pitt was the rider of the day at Brands Hatch for many people. The Australian recovered from two bad starts to charge through the field and finish fourth and third in the races. If the former supersport world champion can get off the line better in Assen then there is little doubt he will be in contention at the Dutch round. Pitt currently lies sixth in the championship but, with former MotoGP winner Alex Barros (Honda) just nine points ahead of him in fifth place, his target for Assen is to add to his three podium finishes this year and move up the leaderboard. While Haga faces an uphill struggle to claw back the early-season advantage of Bayliss, the 2006 Supersport World Championship looks like going right down to the wire. Kevin Curtain heads to the Netherlands on equal points to defending world champion Sebastien Charpentier (Honda) with his Yamaha Motor Germany team-mate Broc Parkes also well in contention for the championship. Yamaha's third-generation YZF-R6 has flourished over the second part of the season, taking pole position and the win at each of the last three races, in the hands of Curtain, Parkes and Yamaha Team Italia's Massimo Roccoli, the winner in Misano. "It's back in our own hands now," says Curtain. "We were working on developing the bike at the beginning of the season and then had a few races where we ran into a bit of bad luck. We're working together much better as a team and our understanding the bike improves at every race. I've always maintained that the championship wouldn't be decided over the first half of the season and here we are going into the last four races with everything to play for."