Kaspars Liepiņš (born 11 October 1984 in
Cēsis
Cēsis (; (, , , ) is a town in Latvia located in the northern part of the Central Vidzeme Upland. Cēsis is on the Gauja River valley, and is built on a series of ridges above the river, overlooking the woods below. Cēsis was selected to b ...
)
[Joris Hendrickx official website]
accessed: 14 September 2009 is a
Latvia
Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to t ...
n
sidecarcross
Sidecarcross racing, also known as sidecar motocross, is a branch of motocross. While regular motocross riders use solo machines, sidecarcross involves a different type of motorcycle chassis operated by a team of two people: a driver and a sid ...
rider and the
2009
2009 was designated as the International Year of Astronomy by the United Nations to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first known astronomical studies with a telescope and the publication of Astronomia Nova by Joha ...
World Champion, won as the passenger of the
Belgian Joris Hendrickx.
As Hendrickx's passenger he is also a three-time Belgian national sidecarcross champion, having won titles in 2008, 2009 and 2010, and the 2013 French and 2015 German champion.
Sidecarcross results
Kaspars Liepiņš took part in sidecarcross races in the national Latvian championship from 2003, at first as passenger for U. Zvaigznītis, and, from 2004, on the side of Kārlis Leimanis.
Kaspars Liepiņš made his world championship debut on 9 April 2007, in the first race of the season, alongside fellow Latvian Kārlis Leimanis. In their first race, they finished only 26th but managed to win three points in race two of the event, the Dutch GP at
Oldebroek. The duo took part in the first four of eight events that season, with a sixteenth place their best result and an overall finish of 33rd.
[Sidecarcross.com]
accessed: 25 September 2009
The following season, Liepiņš teamed up with Joris Hendrickx and earned considerably more success, coming fourth overall
and winning the Belgian national championship.
The 2009 season was initially dominated by
Daniël Willemsen
Daniël Johan Nico Willemsen (born 7 May 1975 in Lochem, Gelderland) is a Dutch sidecarcross rider and ten times Sidecarcross World Championship, World Champion.
Willemsen is the most successful rider in sidecarcross history, winning the title te ...
, who had won the previous six world championships. When Willemsen missed a number of races because of injury,
Jan Hendrickx took the lead in the competition. At the German GP at
Strassbessenbach, Hendrickx/Liepiņš took out their first race win and also their first Grand Prix victory. With one event, the GP at
Rudersberg, to go, Joris Hendrickx and Kaspars Liepins were 13 points behind the leaders Jan Hendrickx / Tim Smeuninx, in second place, but the leading combination suffered an engine defect in round four of the first race in Germany and lost all its advantage. A win and a second place in the last event earned the Belgian / Latvian combination the world title, with Joris Hendrickx becoming only the second Belgian to do so, after
Sven Verbrugge, and the first Belgian driver to record this achievement. Kaspars Liepiņš, in turn, is the fourth Latvian with world championship honours in the sport.
The Belgian-Latvian combination Hendrickx-Liepiņš suffered a season-ending injury at the qualifying of the German Grand Prix in July 2011, being able to compete in the race but requiring surgery afterwards. Consequently, the team only finished ninth in the overall standings at the end of the season.
The team was able to complete the 2012 season without injury and finished fourth in the world championship, 83 points behind Daniël Willemsen who won his tenth title. In November 2012, Joris Hendrickx retired from the sport, initially leaving Liepiņš to look for a new team. Despite his announced retirement, Hendrickx still took part in non-GP sidecarcross races together with Liepiņš, the pair winning the event in Muri, Switzerland in 2013. Hendrickx also declared that he would start at the Belgian and French GP's in 2013, but did not compete in either event. Instead, Hendrickx and Liepiņš raced the French national championship which they won.
In the 2014 season he competed in only a few selected races of the French championship, still as passenger of Hendrickx, but still as a top contender. The following season the pair won the German championship.
2015 German national Sidecarcross championship
accessed: 24 September 2015
Season by season
Kaspars Liepiņš sidecarcross world championship statistics:
Source:
* ''Passengers'' in italics.
Honours
World Championship
* Champions: (1) 2009
* Runners-up: (1) 2010
Belgium
* Champions: (3) 2008, 2009, 2010
France
* Champions: (1) 2013
Germany
* Champions: (1) 2015
References
External links
Official website
Article on the championship-winning race in 2009
The World Championship on Sidecarcross.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Liepins, Kaspars
1984 births
Living people
Latvian sidecarcross riders
Sportspeople from Cēsis