The battle for supremacy in the 2025 FIM Sidecar World Championship took another dramatic twist as the series passed the halfway point with round four staged over the weekend at Most in the Czech Republic where an apparent mechanical issue stripped defending champions Harrison Payne (ARS Yamaha) and Kevin Rousseau of their series lead.
- Autodrom Most stages round four of 2025 FIM Sidecar World Championship
- DNF proves costly for reigning champions Payne and Rousseau
- Schlosser and Schmidt tied on points for championship lead with Christie brothers
Victory in Saturday’s intense ten-lap Sprint race saw the British/French pairing extend their advantage to seventeen points, but they were then forced to pull out on lap four of Sunday’s seventeen-lap Main race while leading and as a result have slipped to third behind title rivals Markus Schlosser (Yamaha) and Luca Schmidt and British brothers Sam and Thomas Christie (Yamaha) who are now tied on points at the top of the table.
Under clear skies, Payne and Rousseau made a brave move up the inside into the Autodrom Most’s opening right-hand turn to take an early lead in the Sprint race from the Swiss/German pairing of Schlosser and Schmidt and then reeled off a succession of smooth, fast laps to pull clear of the chasing pack.
The French pairing of Paul Léglise (Yamaha) and Marjorie Cescutti held an initial third in front of the Christie brothers and both crews picked up a position when Schlosser and Schmidt ran off the trackbefore rejoining the race in fifth.
After losing second to the Christie brothers, Leglise and Cescutti then had an off-track excursion of their own, although survived a trip into the gravel before Schlosser and Schmidt made a pass stick on them for third. At the flag it was Payne and Rousseau who took the win – and the maximum twenty-five points – with the Christie brothers just over seven seconds behind in second. Schlosser and Schmidt were almost twelve-and-a-half seconds adrift of the winners in third ahead of Leglise and Cescutti, the British/Czech pairing of Rupert Archer (Yamaha) and Ondřej Sedláček and Finns Joni and Tero Manninen (Yamaha).
With their championship lead extended, Payne and Rousseau started Sunday afternoon’s Main race in confident mood and despite failing to repeat their first corner pass from the previous day they still got ahead of Schlosser and Schmidt in a sequence of fast turns on the opening lap.
Schlosser and Schmidt lost a place to Leglise and Cescutti on lap two and then found themselves being put under extreme pressure by the Christie brothers before Payne and Rousseau, who had quickly started to extend their lead, coasted onto an infield section on lap four.
With Payne and Rousseau out of the race and the top three crews pulling clear, on the following lap Schlosser and Schmidt lined up Leglise and Cescutti with a wide line through a sweeping left-hand turn that put them on the inside in the following right-hander to take the lead.
With less than a second between first and third, the Christie brothers got inside Leglise and Cescutti at the end of the main straight at the start of lap ten, but by this point Schlosser and Schmidt had found a strong rhythm and they started to ease clear to eventually win by just under five seconds.
Leglise and Cescutti were clearly delighted to claim a career-first podium together, nineteen seconds behind the winners, before a big gap to fourth-placed Archer and Sedláček with the British pairing of Kevin Cable (Yamaha) and Charlie Richardson claiming fifth ahead of Germany’s Markus Venus (Yamaha) and his Swiss passenger Thomas Hofer.
With the points all square between Schlosser and Schmidt and the Christie brothers at the top of the table – and Payne and Rousseau just three points behind in third – the leading crews now face a nervous wait before round five is staged at Assen in the Netherlands on 15-17 August.
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The remaining rounds of the 2025 FIM Sidecar World Championship will be streamed LIVE on FIM-MOTO.TV. For more information click here.