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How important is winning the first race in the eventual outcome of the Championship? According to the stats, the winner of the first race has gone on to be crowned champion 15 times out of 28, the most recent example being Jonathan Rea last year. In the last six seasons, the probability has leveled at 50% with the winner of the first race taking the title on 3 occasions: Checa in 2011, Biaggi in 2012 and the aforementioned Rea in 2015.

Overall finishing position for the first race also seems important: in the 28 seasons of WorldSBK so far, the eventual champion has been classified within the top 5. Tom Sykes is the only Champion who kicked off his title winning campaign with a fifth place, in 2013.

Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit will this weekend become the first track in the world to have hosted 50 WorldSBK races, followed by Assen on 48, and then Misano World Circuit Marco Simoncelli and Donington Park on 46.

For the eighth consecutive year, Phillip Island will stage the first Round of the season. The Australian track is the one that has kicked off the season most often, nine times, followed by Donington, Valencia and Losail in Qatar that have each done it four times. Australian riders have won at home in 23 of the as yet disputed 49 races, the last home win coming in 2008 with a double for Troy Bayliss. Since then riders from seven different countries have taken victory.

The last rider to have won in Phillip Island coming from outside the top ten on the grid was Noriyuki Haga, who started 13^th in the first race in 2009 and had made it into P2 by the end of the first lap, taking the lead after only 4 laps.

The last World Champion to win in Phillip Island was Carlos Checa, who managed it as part of his attempted title defense in 2012. Since then, the race has always been won by riders who were not the reigning World Champion at the time (Guintoli, Laverty, Rea and Haslam), although two of them had won the title before.

The last race run at an average speed of less than 170km/h in Phillip Island was Race 2 in 2008, when Troy Bayliss registered a 169.636 km/h. The last pole position of the same was set in 1998 when Troy Corser averaged 168.683 km/h.

Phillip Island has one of the fastest straights on the calendar. The last time a WorldSBK bike didn’t reach 320km/h during the race was in 2013 when fastest man on the day Jonathan Rea registered “only” 319.5 at the speed trap. Last year during the race, Jordi Torres was recorded at 324.3 km/h.

It’s not easy to escape for a win at the Island: the last rider capable of leading every lap was Leon Haslam in the first race of 2010. However, it wasn’t an easy task: the Englishman beat Michel Fabrizio to the line by only 0.004 seconds, which is the smallest winning margin in WorldSBK history.

Speaking of winning margins, the last time that the winner managed to have a margin of 5 seconds crossing the line was in the second race of 2012, when Carlos Checa took victory by 5.707 seconds over Max Biaggi. In 4 of the last 5 races, the winning margin was less than one second. To find a rider who has taken victory at the Island by more than 10 seconds means rewinding to 2000, when Anthony Gobert won Race 1 by 29.542 seconds over Carl Fogarty thanks to the right tyre choice in mixed conditions giving him an almost 20 second advantage over the rest of the field in only a few laps.