Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

The Plight of World Superbike Colin Edwards' world title-winning SP-2 V -twins. Whether Plater transfers to World Superbike in 2004 is an open question, but for sure there'll be a two-man works team racing in World Superbike - as well as in the UK on the RCB 1000 from 2004 onwards. The identity of the second workssupported Honda squad in World Superbike 2004 is already an open secret, with Gerrit Ten Kate's Dutch team having already forged close links with Honda RE.D, even before winning the World Supersport title with Fabien Foret last season. Honda has healthy respect for the Dutch tuning guru, who will also be called on to run a parallel development path to the factory's engineers with the new one-liter, four-cylinder Superbike, just as he's already doing right now with the new CBR600RR. The fact that Team Ten Kate Honda just completed a massive new extension to its base near Assen underlines the connection. Expect Aussie Chris Vermeulen, riding for Ten Kate this season in World Supersport and, at age 16, a winner of the privateer title in the hard-fought Australian Superbike series aboard a Yamaha Rl, to step up to World Superb ike a year from now. Honda will also have at least one RCB 1000 satellite squad, in the form of the Italian team that won the first two World Superbike titles for Honda in 1988/89, Team Rumi, whose riders Mark Heckles and WaIter Tortoroglio (twice runner-up in the European Superstock series, most recently this year on Oscar Rumi's Honda CBR954RR) will ride bikes developed in-house by respected veteran tuner Carlo Facetti. But as part of Team Rumi's four-cylinder learning curve, Heckles and Tortoroglio will ride Facetti-developed CBR954RR Hondas in the 2003 World Superbike series. The bikes will be fitted with the new restrictors, which will be introduced next season on a partial basis, when World Superbike will experience the same kind of transitional year as MotoGP just underwent in 2002, with yesterday's 500cc ringdingers battling against tomorrow's 990cc super-diesels. In World Superbike this will entail the next generation of 1000cc fours fitted with restrictors competing against the existing derestricted 750cc fours, 900cc triples and 1000cc twins, as part of the one-year transition leading to the revamped series in 2004, when all bikes will be fitted with restrictors and the level playing field will have been restored. Yamaha is returning to World Superbike in 2004 with what is reliably understood to be a considerably more radical version of the current R1. It will appear a year from now and will feature the ram air induction which 24 JANUARY 22,2003' eye the present bike lacks and a host of spinoff technology from the M 1 MotoGP racer, thus justifying in the minds of Yamaha's accountants the hefty budgets currently being spent on GP racing. This is likely to include the M 1 's trick electronic slipper clutch. It will be raced by as many as three separate teams, one of which will certainly be the Italian Belgarda squad already leading the R6 Yamaha pack in World Supersport. Another will probably be run by Yamaha Deutschland, which already won Yamaha's only World Supersport title with Jorg Teuchert two years ago, and the third may be the Italian Gimotosport team, which will, in any case, be racing a restricted currentmodel R 1 in World Superbike this coming season, with Giovanni Bussei as the rider, unless he ends up with Aprilia (see below). Kawasaki's plans for World Superbike 2004 are believed not yet to have been defined, but with the longawaited fuel-injected ZX-I0R certain to make its debut in the marketplace a year from now - and understood to follow very closely the race-face format of the new ZX-6RR - it's certain the Green Meanies will be in contention. There will almost certainly be two teams - one run by perennial enthusiast Sergio Bertocchi, whose two-man ZX-7RR squad will represent the only Kawasaki Superbikes on the grid in 2003, and the other under the aegis of Kawasaki France's Christian Bourgeois, who's assumed control of the company's World Supers port effort from Harald Eckl, who's moved over to MotoGP but still supervises the company's production-based race I e n e vv s effort at world level. Team Eckl still builds all Kawasaki's World Supersport race engines, for example, so it's certain the German-based operation will continue to playa key role in the Green Meanies' World Superbike campaign, when it resumes in 2004. Suzuki has already stolen a lead on its three compatriot rival marques by launching its new GSX-RI000 a year early, which will give its Alstare Corona-run works team a whole season to shake it down at world level, as well as to understand the practicalities of the new restrictor rule. For 2003, the Belgian-based team will run just a single bike for Gregorio Lavilla, which they'll develop in Liege with input from Japan, but in 2004, for sure, Corona Suzuki will have a two-rider team that may see a Japanese rider parachuted in alongside Lavilla, seeing as how Alstare did such a good job of making Katsuaki Fujiwara feel at home in Europe, and emerge as a world title contender in the Supers port class. However, in addition to Lavilla, this coming season Alstare Corona will also run European Superstock champion and resident lronman (he won the title with a broken femur!) Vittorio lannuzzo in half a dozen rounds (in between his trying to win the Italian Superbike title) on another GSX-Rl 000, this time prepared by Monza-based tuning guru Beppe Russo. With Suzuki Italia's active support, lannuzzo is likely to have a full-time ride in 2004, in a two-man team run by former SBK championship runner-up Fabrizio Pirovano. It's practically certain that Suzuki's lead British Superbike/BSB team Crescent Suzuki will move up to the World Series in 2004 - team owner Paul Denning has been planning on doing so for some time. While veteran former British Champion John Reynolds may not return to the World Superbike paddock, former European Superstock Champion Karl Harris could well do so, having ridden for Crescent in BSB 2002, before switching to Honda for 2003 to ride the new CBR600RR in British Supersport. This would be a great chance for him to put a reserved sign on one of those RCB 1000 seats for World Superbike 2004; failing which, there's likely to be a ride open for him at Crescent. Expect one Suzuki ride to go to factory star Yukio Kagayama, who has been parachuted in to ride for Crescent in the coming season in BSB as part of the new GSX-RI000's RE.D program. And for sure there'll be a serious selection of Suzuki-mounted privateer squads lining up to grab a place or two on the World Superbike grid in 2004, given that the new fourcylinder bike is set to be much less costly for a nonfactory team to race than a Ducati and - if the factory engineers are correct in their assessment of the new rules - totally competitive against the twin-cylinder bikes when all are forced to carry restrictors. You might think that's the end of the four-cylinder lineup for World Superbike 2004 - but you'd be wrong, because one of the greatest names in motorcycle history is set to return to the tracks in official guise a year from now: MV Agusta. With the company now refinanced and production set to restart in January, the

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