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Victor Steeman is no longer with us. He was 22 years old and had arrived in Portimao to fight for victory in the Supersport 300 championship, but on that track he met another destiny. Terrible, the dark side of motorcycling that leaves you breathless when it appears.
Another mourning, in a category where young riders should grow up to become great and which instead took away the life of one of them. As happened to Dean Berta Vinales last year, in Jerez, in a 2021 season marked by his death, together with that of Jason Dupasquier at Mugello in the Moto3 World Championship and that of Hugo Millan, in Aragon during the European Talent Cup.
So many tragedies in such a short time had led to a moment of reflection to understand how to further increase safety on the track. For Supersport 300, the airbag in rider leathers was made mandatory, a dedicated transponder was mounted on the motorcycles for urgent communications to the riders, the minimum age was raised from 15 to 16 years and the maximum number of participants reduced to 30 (plus 2 wild cards ).
Some necessary and correct solutions (such as airbags and transponders), in other cases not very effective (minimum age and number of participants), because the real problem of the Supersport 300 is above all technical.
The category was created as a sort of Moto3 for SBK: small displacement bikes, derived from series production and inexpensive. In fact, they attracted many riders who could not afford the costs of the world championship, but this triggered other problems.
Circuits and protective gear have reached very high levels of safety, but the biggest risk in a motorcycle race is a crash in the group, because you risk being hit and in that case a helmet and airbag can do little. Clearly, the danger increases when there are many participants and the bikes have very similar performances and, above all, they can be taken close to the limit by everyone.
This is what happens in Supersport 300: small 4-strokes that do not need a refined riding style and that therefore lead to races in which a lot of riders are often enclosed in a small space. To make the situation worse is the weight of these bikes: over 140 kg, a huge amount if you think that for MotoGP the minimum weight is 158 kg, while in Moto3 it is fixed at 152, but it is given by the sum of bikes plus rider.
We can call for better education for very young riders who sometimes don’t think about the risk of a rash manoeuvre, but we must also think about putting them in a position to be able to make mistakes in the safest way possible. Cancelling danger is simply a utopia, but you can try to limit it.
Scott Redding, after the tragedy of Vinales, declared that watching the Supersport 300 races made him "scary, they are all very close to each other and those bikes are really heavy for small guys".
Perhaps it is the Supersport 300 formula itself that is wrong for the way it is now and should undergo a rethink. We must not forget about Vinales and Steeman, we cannot do anything to bring them back, but we must think about how to prevent similar tragedies from happening again.
