Who Is Carl Fogarty?
Carl Fogarty won the Superbike World Championship four times. He took the title for Ducati in 1994, 1995, 1998 and 1999 and stopped on 59 race wins from 220 starts, a total no rider passed until Jonathan Rea’s 60th victory in 2018. He is English, born in Blackburn in 1965, and the son of the racer George Fogarty.
His career did not begin on short circuits. He won the TT Formula One world championship in 1988 and 1989 and the FIM Cup that replaced it in 1990, took three Isle of Man TT victories from 26 starts, and in 1992 lapped the Mountain Course at an average of 123.61 mph, a record that stood for seven years. In the same year he won the Le Mans 24 Hours and the Endurance World Championship on a Kawasaki.
The Ducati years made his name. He won 11 races in 1993 and lost the championship anyway, to Scott Russell, on consistency. From 1994 he won two titles in a row, spent an unhappy 1996 on a Honda, then returned to Ducati and won two more. The 1998 championship was the closest of them: sixth in the standings after the Nürburgring, champion by the final round.
His career ended in one corner. At Phillip Island in 2000 he made contact with the privateer Robert Ulm and crashed, injuring a shoulder that never healed well enough to let him race again. Troy Bayliss took his seat at Ducati. Fogarty went on to help develop the Petronas FP1 and was named an FIM Legend in 2011.