The entry list was unveiled last week for the forthcoming 2022 FIM Flat Track World Championship, featuring no less than 30 permanent riders representing eleven different nations.
The retirement of 2020 and 2021 World Champion Lasse Kurvinen guarantees that a new name will be added to the roll of honour in what is the third World Championship season for FIM Flat Track. The 30-rider list of hopefuls includes the nine riders who finished inside the top ten behind Kurvinen last year. Italian youngster Kevin Corradetti, Czech Round winner and reigning world number two, will bid to go one better in 2022.
Also among the favourites for this season will be Francesco Cecchini; the six-times World Cup gold medallist missed most of last season due to a fractured shoulder blade sustained at the opening Final of the campaign, but came back to win the Italian Round in October.
Ferran Sastre – who finished fourth in the 2018 FIM Flat Track Cup in Misano – will make his World Championship debut, as will Jack Bell; the highly-rated British teenager is a former youth Champion in his homeland where he competes regularly against Sastre.
Further afield, Masatoshi Ohmori, who finished tenth in the 2020 Championship, will again make the trip over from Japan onboard Kawasaki machinery. From Argentina, Matias Ezequiel Lorenzato and Juan Oliva will make their World Championship debuts while Micaela Bazan, better known in Europe for her exploits in Speedway, will take the newly created FIM seeded for the final three Rounds. Spain’s Eric Reverte is seeded for the two opening Rounds, plus a local Wild Card will be nominated on behalf of each venue to complete the 32-rider fields.
The Championship calendar remains largely as announced back in November but with a single change: the planned Portuguese Round has been replaced with the returning German Round in Diedenbergen, with the series now set to open on 16th July before a summer break. The remaining four Rounds will take place over the months of September and October, with the Champion again crowned in the traditional season finale at the Boves TT Circuit in Italy.