Ride like a champion; a superbike spin around Lombok’s Mandalika circuit

As I rev the accelerator, the liquid-cooled twin-cylinder four-stroke engine on the Honda CBR250RR roars like a caged tiger, aching to break free and run like the wind. Born and bred in Indonesia with throttle-by-wire technology derived from the RC213V, the fastest motorbike ever made by Honda’s racing division in Japan, it is a fitting chariot on which to negotiate the hair-raising twists and turns of the Mandalika International Street Circuit, on Lombok, Bali’s lesser-visited sister island.

After settling into the wafer-thin seat, I nod to the pit boss, who waves a black-and-white starter flag. I drop the clutch and speed out of the pit stop onto the circuit, surfaced with a polymer-modified bitumen that provides superior resistance to the extreme stresses and temperatures of the tropics.

It’s the beginning of a white-knuckle ride anyone with a motorcycle licence can take, to test their mettle on one of the world’s most technically challenging race tracks.

Back on March 20, 2022, more than 100,000 people gathered at Mandalika, on Lombok’s dreamy south coast, to witness history being made: the return to Indonesia after a quarter of a century of Moto Grand Prix, MotoGP for short, the premier class of international motorbike road racing.

Indonesia hosted such events in 1996 and 1997, at the Sentul International Circuit in Bogor, West Java. But after the 1997 Asian financial crisis saw the government collapse and race riots engulfed the country the following year, Indonesia was no longer considered a suitable host nation.

Seen in this context and arriving after more than two decades of democracy and at the tail end of two years of punishing Covid-19 outbreaks and restrictions, the return of championship road racing to Indonesia – a motorbike-crazy nation that, according to Statista, has 132 million machines in use, more than any other country in the world other than India – was seen as a social, political and diplomatic triumph.

Set on a tropical bay edged by palm trees and backdropped by green mountains, the Mandalika circuit proved to be a crowd-pleaser for spectators and another 300 million race fans who watched the event on television. But with Covid quarantines having been lifted only two weeks earlier, attendance by foreigners was limited to a few hundred diehard race fans and a handful of moto-journalists, your correspondent included.