The 2025 FIM Sidecar World Championship gets under way this coming weekend (18-19 April) at the world-famous Circuit Bugatti at Le Mans with twenty-two-determined, highly-motivated pairings from seven nations set to line up on the grid in north-west France.
- Harrison Payne and Kevin Rousseau begin title defence in France
- Le Mans’ iconic Circuit Bugatti hosts title opener
- Twenty-two teams get 2025 championship campaign under way
Staged as part of the fabled 24 Heures Motos programme, the opening round will feature nine competitors – six riders and three passengers – who between them have already won twenty coveted FIM gold medals in the discipline so to say that there is real strength in depth in the field would be an understatement.
Contested this season over seven rounds, just one week after Le Mans the action will move south to Estoril in Portugal followed by visits to the Pannónia-Ring in Hungary and Most in the Czech Republic in June. After back-to-back visits to Assen in the Netherlands in August and September the series will conclude in early October at Oschersleben in Germany.
Payne and Rousseau at 2024 FIM Sidecar World Championship - Le Mans (France) © Mark Walters
Last year’s dramatic final round saw Britain’s Harrison Payne (Yamaha) and his French passenger Kevin Rousseau clinch the title in the concluding race of the campaign after a season-long battle with Swiss former champion Markus Schlosser (Yamaha) and his German passenger Luca Schmidt and both crews will renew this fierce rivalry in 2025.
Remarkably, this will be only Payne’s fifth season in the championship after making his debut in 2021 – the year Schlosser won his title – and the thirty-two-year-old was only thirteen when Britain’s six-time FIM Sidecar Rider World Champion Tim Reeves (Yamaha), who this year will once again race with compatriot Mark Wilkes in the chair, won the first of his crowns.
The Reeves/Wilkes partnership won the title in 2019, but they were unable to defend it because of the pandemic and when racing resumed in 2021 they had separated with Reeves joining forces with Rousseau and Wilkes teaming up with Payne for two seasons before the pair reunited in 2023.
Champions in 2022 and 2023, the British/French pairing of Todd Ellis (Yamaha) and Emmanuelle Clement dropped to fifth last year and will start this season with their sights firmly focussed on completing their hat-trick, but the competition will be intense and fast Finn Pekka Päivärinta (Yamaha) with Britain’s Adam Christie in the sidecar will want to improve on fourth in 2024.
Päivärinta has five FIM Sidecar Rider World Championship titles and although his last crown came all the way back in 2016 he has remained an ever-present threat and heading into his second successive season with Adam Christie he will be hopeful of taking a sixth FIM gold medal.
Adam Christie’s brothers Sam and Thomas Christie (Yamaha) first teamed up in 2022 and steadily climbed the rankings all the way to third last year and it would be brave to bet against them continuing this progression, despite a field that also includes 2015 FIM Sidecar Rider World Champion Bennie Streur (Yamaha) from the Netherlands who teams up with Germany’s Kevin Kolsch for the third successive season.
The opening eleven-lap race at Le Mans is scheduled to start at 15:35 (local time) on Friday 18 April with a concluding eighteen-lap race due to be held the following day at 11:50 (local time).