Sito Pons

Pons on Honda at the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix

Pons at the 1989 British Grand Prix

Alfonso Pons i Ezquerra , known as Sito Pons , (born November 9, 1959 in Barcelona , Catalonia , Spain ) is a former Spanish motorcycle racer .

Between 1981 and 1991 he contested a total of 121 races in the motorcycle world championship , won the title in the 250 cm³ class in 1988 and 1989 and was successful as a team owner after his active career.

driver

Pons celebrated its first success in 1986 by winning the Spanish 250 cc championship. Just two years later, in 1988, he became the first Spanish driver to win the world title in the quarter-liter class. After successfully defending his title in 1989, Pons switched to the 500 cm³ class, where he was fourth in the World Championship in 1990 until his injury at the Yugoslav Grand Prix. In the premier class, however, he could not build on his successes in the smaller class and ended his active career in 1992 .

Team boss

Sito Pons moved behind the pit wall as head of his own racing team, Honda Team Pons . He hired the former 125 cc world champion Àlex Crivillé as a driver, who won the team's first race in the premier class in Assen in 1992. Further victories came in the following years with Alberto Puig , Carlos Checa , Alex Barros and Loris Capirossi .

In 2001 , the Sito Pons team with Capirossi and Barros in third and fourth place in the World Cup was the most successful of the season. In 2002 , after switching from the 500 cc two-stroke engine to the MotoGP four -stroke engine, Barros showed a significant increase in performance during the current season and, after two victories and two further podium finishes in the last four races of the season, finished fourth.

In 2003 , the Sito Pons team was renamed Camel Pramac Pons Team due to a new main sponsor . Max Biaggi and Tōru Ukawa were hired as drivers . Biaggi took third place in the World Championships in 2003 with two wins and in 2004 with one victory. At the end of 2005 , a year after Biaggi left the team for Honda Racing Corporation and was replaced by Alex Barros, who also won a race in 2005, but only finished eighth in the World Championship, they got out of MotoGP, now with LCR another Honda satellite team was added. A total of 13 races were won in the premier class.

In 2008 and 2009 , Pons focused on the 125 cm³ class, in which the drivers Simone Corsi and Nicolás Terol achieved a total of six victories, and since 2009 on the 250 cm³ class, which became Moto2 in 2010 . Among other things, the team won the drivers' world championship with Pol Espargaró in 2013 and the team world championship in 2019 . Pons' team has achieved a total of 31 race victories in the middle class so far.

In 2020 the Moto2 team will compete under the name Flexbox HP 40 with drivers Lorenzo Baldassarri and Héctor Garzó .

statistics

title

• 1986 - Spanish 250cc champion

In the motorcycle world championship

Grand Prix victories: 15
Podiums: 41
Starts:	250 cc: 87
	500 cc: 34

Placements

year space class team 1984 4th 250 cc Cobas 1985 12. 500 cc Suzuki 1986 2. 250 cc Honda 1987 2. 250 cc Honda

year space class team 1988 1. 250 cc Honda 1989 1. 250 cc Honda 1990 10. 500 cc Honda 1991 14th 500 cc Honda

Web links

Commons : Sito Pons  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Sito Pons on the official website of the motorcycle world championship (English).