Longtime international Jason O’Halloran transitioned from British Superbike competition to the Endurance World Championship (EWC) for the 2025 season, where he – together with YART Yamaha teammates Marvin Fritz and Karel Hanika – earned the title after the series went down to the wire. In Conversation, the experienced 37-year-old Australian recaps YART’s victory, as well as his first season in the series.

Image: Supplied.

Congratulations on the Endurance World Championship victory, Jason – that’s got to be a good feeling coming out on top in your first season, right? I’m sure you couldn’t draw it up any better than that.

Yeah, absolutely – thank you! To win the title in my first year of EWC is just incredible. Being new to endurance racing, I was figuring out a lot of little things throughout the year, but there’s so much more to it than just outright speed or one lap or one stint pace or whatever. It’s a whole season, and these races are really long. When you’re doing 24-hour races, it’s hard, not only for you physically and mentally, but it’s also hard on the bikes. It’s so hard on the machine, hard on the team. They’re up the whole time, doing their pit stops and working out strategies and everything else that goes on in between. So it’s a super, super tough discipline. All of the races are tough. The 24-hour races are really challenging, but it’s an immensely satisfying feeling to walk away as the champions this year.

I can imagine. I feel like the racing would be quite different in terms of your approach, too, how you go about it versus the sprint racing-type format. How does the riding style change? Is it more about consistency over outright speed, and how do you balance each?

It’s very different, for sure. You have to make sure you’re good for every stint that you complete. You don’t want to lose too much time in the stints, but you also want to keep it on two wheels. You don’t want to make mistakes, if you have a crash, you lose much more time than if you’re going half a second slower [a lap] but managing consistency, so it’s a balancing act all the time. One of the biggest things with endurance racing is that there are a lot of bikes out on the track and a lot of different speeds from a lot of different people, so, you know, once the race starts and it spreads out after the first few hours, you’re pretty much passing multiple bikes a lap every lap. And it’s a balancing act because, for me, I start the third stint, so it normally goes Marvin, Karel, and me. My first stint is usually half in the daylight, and then the majority of my stints are through the night until the following day, so it gets even trickier once you get into the night time, adjusting your eyes and adjusting your breaking markers and your reference points because it all changes.

What do you end up racing against? Because it’d seem quite easy to get scrambled, you know, when you’re so deep into a race like that, that it’s not necessarily the competition itself that you’re fighting. Do you ever feel like you’re measuring the clock more so over the competition, or are you still aware of where everybody is?

You’re definitely aware of where everyone is, but it’s not like a normal sprint race because you’re very rarely on the track with your competitors. So, other than the first couple of stints, everyone has different strategies for the pit stops. All of our bikes do different numbers of laps [per stint], so we normally get separated quite quickly, and then you’re basically just racing the lap timer, trying to stay as consistent as possible. You’ve got an average target lap time that you need to achieve each stint, meaning you’re working towards that. And then just watching the pit board, which gives us information on the gap ahead and a rough gauge of our pace compared to the people we’re on circuit with. But it’s definitely more like a time trial than a race with someone else – you’re just racing yourself most of the time and trying to stay as consistent as possible throughout the hour or so that you’re on the bike.

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One of the more unique parts about EWC is having teammates. That’s quite different from something that – for the most part – is a pretty individual sport across different categories. What’s that like?

Yeah, to be honest, it’s been really good this year with my teammates Marvin and Karel. They’re both really fast riders, and they’ve got a huge amount of endurance experience, so that’s helped me quite a lot. It’s definitely different having to share a bike. That’s one thing that I’m still adapting to, as both of them are a little bit heavier than I am, and they ride a little bit differently. So we’ve not had the perfect setting for me personally, but overall it’s not been bad. I’ve been adapting as I go and trying to change the way I ride a little bit to be more suited to the way that the bike’s set up. In general, you all need to be happy on the bike. You all have to compromise a little bit because it’s not… you know, one person can’t be super-fast and one person be super slow. It doesn’t work out. So you’re better off all to be reasonably happy and at a similar pace than to be separate… I don’t think we’re a million miles away with it. I think now we’ve got a season under our belts, you go into a fresh pre-season, you do some testing, you’ve got an idea of what you want. I think for sure we can still make improvements, but yeah, that’s been one thing this year that I’ve had to learn to adapt to. You can’t have everything as you would want it, like you do in sprint racing, where you can have anything you want. In endurance racing, you have to compromise, and you have to get on with it. And it’s been an enjoyable part as well because it forces you to get on with it.

This marks a pretty big jump in your career in a lot of ways. How do the events themselves differ from what you’ve done in the past – meaning the fans, the spectacle, everything like that?

It’s been great – I’ve really enjoyed it, it’s something that I was looking forward to from the start. I had 15 or so years in British Superbikes, and I enjoyed a lot of success there. And, you know, we’re lucky in that championship that we have big crowds and we have a lot of support. I enjoyed my time there, and then moving across to EWC, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I hadn’t been to that many races previously, but it’s been great. To win the first race at Le Mans was incredible, it has to be the biggest race win of my career. You know, 100,000 people there, 24 hours of racing, standing on the podium at the end, looking down the main straightaway, with absolutely packed grandstands, was incredible. And all the other events, the new circuits that I’ve been to, Spa was amazing. We should have won there. I was two to three seconds a lap faster than anyone in the rain, and unfortunately, I had the stop-and-go [penalty]. Got back to the lead after losing 40 seconds in that and then had a big crash towards the end of the race, but we still finished third. Then, Suzuka was an amazing, incredible event – that’s a special race in itself. To finish off with Paul Ricard down in the South of France was amazing. So for me personally, it’s been really enjoyable to get inside the paddock and experience some of these great races.

How do you feel about entering further seasons of EWC, having year one under your belt? There must be a lot of takeaways from your initial season.

Yeah, without a doubt. When I first entered, you talk to people about it, and you’re trying to get your head around the fact that, normally, the fastest people win the race in motorsport, but that’s not always the case in endurance racing. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn’t. You take races from this year as an example, we weren’t the fastest at Le Mans, but we made the least amount of mistakes over a really difficult race with difficult conditions, and we won. In Spa, we were clearly the fastest team there, but we made a mistake and we didn’t win. You know, it’s just how it goes, and I think before the start of this championship, I spoke to Mandy [Kainz], the team owner, and he said at some point in the races, every single team here is going to be in the box, it’s just how long they spend in the box. We’re all going to have problems, but it’s about how fast we can overcome them. You can imagine doing anything for 24 hours, you’re going to make a mistake at some point – something’s going to happen to the machine or to you. Like in the night at Paul Ricard, myself and Karel both got food poisoning. When you’re sitting on a motorbike for an hour at a time, it’s really not easy to do.

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Is it exciting, this phase of your career? Is this where you see yourself for the next little while?

I think so. I think… I’m always open to all sorts of racing, and British Superbikes was my home for such a long time, so I still have a soft spot for BSB. I would love to do some BSB races in the future if the right opportunity came up, but, you know, the Endurance World Championship is what I want to focus on now – it’s what I want to do for the next few years.

Is there a deal in place with the team, or is this something you’re still running through?

So at the moment, my deal is a little bit different as my contract is with Yamaha Motor Europe. So it’s not directly with the team – it was through Yamaha. And that’s something that at the moment we’re speaking about. Hopefully, we’ll be able to speak about what we have planned shortly.

Lastly, this championship is a big one to win. It’s pretty mega that you did it in the first go. So, where does it rank – how do you situate this accomplishment in your career?

It’s huge – it’s the biggest achievement of my career. When I left Australia many, many years ago to race internationally, the goal was to be a world champion. When you set off on your path, you come across many hurdles, ups, downs, lefts, rights, and go in circles a couple of times. You just keep figuring it out along the way. The world championship road didn’t open up for me, but BSB did – I won many races there – and had a huge amount of success and absolutely loved it. But one of the biggest draws for me in changing to this championship and joining Yamaha was the opportunity to be a world champion because that’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid, so to tick that box and to have that next to my name now is an incredible feeling and something I’m really proud of.