The 2026 North West 200 is set to host a round of the European Series Road Racing Superbike Championship (ESR).<\/p>\n
The road race, which will run from 4-9 May on Northern Ireland’s north coast, will be the second round of the new six-round series. <\/p>\n
The championship, which replaces the International Road Racing Championship (IRRC), will race at Hengelo in the Netherlands before Thursday’s Superbike race and the feature North West 200 Superbike race on Saturday count towards standings. <\/p>\n
The series will then have two rounds at Horice in the Czech Republic and also race at Imatra in Finland and Chimay in Belgium to round out the season. <\/p>\n
Belgium’s Laurent Hoffmann, Finland’s Erno Kostamo and Switzerland’s Lukas Maurer are all regulars at the North West 200 and are set to race for the 30,000 euro prize in the ESR.<\/p>\n
Mervyn Whyte, the race director at the North West 200, said it was a “very exciting development”.<\/p>\n
“Changes to the IRRC series for 2026 created an opportunity for us to host a round of the new ESR series and I am certain this will attract a lot of interest from European competitors, who now have an extra incentive to compete at Portrush. <\/p>\n
“It will strengthen the international character of our event and the new competitors can be assured of a warm welcome on the north coast.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2026 North West 200 is set to host a round of the European Series Road Racing Superbike…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-330079","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-motosport","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-motor","11":"tag-motor-sports","12":"tag-motosport","13":"tag-motosports","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}