Cycle News

VOL. 55 ISSUE 40 OCTOBER 9, 2018 P135 One is that you can't keep a good man down. Especially if you give him a good bike. Rea's serial success started directly when he switched to Kawasaki—still the only major manufacturer that puts SBK and not MotoGP at the top of their racing agenda. Which is surely hugely significant. (He still had to ride the bike, mind you, consistently beating his teammate in the process.) Another is that you can't keep a good bike down. Superbike's new(ish) owners Dorna have, among other wacky rules, introduced formal mechanical meddling to even out the compe- tition—a sliding scale of rev limits, regularly adjusted. In this way all the others, including Honda, Yamaha and Ducati, received favor during the season. Rea's Kawasaki still won. There are some important questions, too. Mainly, what happened to the spectators? When four- time champ Fogarty was at his height, two British Superbike rounds each year were jammed with fans, while the British GP could hardly muster a quorum. At the time, I was in the position of a self-appointed advocate for the greater importance of proto- type GP racing, and in the U.K. it engendered notable hostility. One correspondent to Motor Cycle News amused me by call- ing me "Michael 'I'm Right And You're Wrong' Scott." Now the race attendances are the other way around. In Britain, in spite of a relatively tentative British MotoGP presence, the GP pulls good crowds, the now- a-days single superbike race was very poorly attended. It's the same pretty much every- where else in the world. Empty grandstands abound—and not just in Qatar. Laguna might be an exception, but it is generally exceptional anyway, in that the SBK race is combined with a national championship as well. Predictability can be boring, and Rea's dominance hasn't helped add to the tension. Rea would doubtless echo Mick Doo- han's comment when he was also winning almost every race: "What do you want me to do? Slow down?" It's not his fault. Funny enough, his five-year reign coincided with a time when GP attendances were on the skids, while superbikes were booming. Once again, can this be a coincidence? But there's more too it than that. Many would blame Dorna, since they now control both se- ries. They've certainly achieved a distance between them, with some barmy innovations. Like running the two races over two days, which, rather than mak- ing Saturday mean something, instead just dilutes the interest. And like punishing Saturday's podium finishers by shoving them back to the third row of the grid. More significantly, they have dumbed down the technical regs even more than in MotoGP, with- out really bringing the benefits of closer racing that the senior service has enjoyed. If Dorna wanted to kill off superbikes, they're doing a good job. But of course they don't. But they're casting around in outer darkness. I like to think it's a natural progression. When GP bikes were two- stroke prototypes, their only reason for existence was GP racing. They isolated themselves to death, whether or not one man was doing all the winning. Greater forces were at play. Dorna's (and the industry's) response was to switch the steeds. Rightly or wrongly, the two-strokes were buried, and MotoGP would echo the top of the range sports bikes in the showrooms. Much to the dis- comfort of world superbikes, which was already doing that. Nowadays, street bikes are astonishingly close to MotoGP bikes. And vice versa. For example, Yamaha's R1's engine design, the cross-plane crank, was informed by MotoGP. The subsequent superbike merely followed suit. So WorldSBK had that right all along. It'll be the death of them yet. CN

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