Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128222
less and with of a lot of funny things to say even when he's got a bloody lip and a headache. I would say that the biggest difference between the MotoGP and World Superbike paddock, other than the bank balances of the riders and team 'owners, is the refreshing openness and simplicity of the World Superbike scene. Sure, there is politics, spin and some flim-flam going on behind the scenes. After all, this is the secondbiggest motorcycle championship in the world, but 90 percent of what you see and what you hear in the series is about what goes on "out there" between the white lines. The current MotoGP paddock is full to the gunwales with posers, cuffflashers and spin doctors, the collateral damage that accompanies gaudy success. Step into a big hospitality, if they will let you, during final MotoGP qualifying, and you may find team principals and prospective sponsors ;huddled around the table with their backs to the TV monitors sorting out the details of some new deal. Suddenly, as I write here in the mountains of Madrid, I am visited by an image of Mike Hailwood in flowing \vhite robe and long wooden staff bursting into a casino-like GP hospitality and driving the money changers from the temple. But, of course, that's silly. The realities of commerce drive MotoGP and pay for it. And it is, bar none, the greatest motorcycle show on earth. What really happens "out there" on the MotoGP track between the white lines (and slightly outside them as well, using all the curbs, rumble strips and a bit of grass and 'dirt sometimes) is the ultimate in two wheel sport. Watching little Loris Capirossi, the proverbial monkey riding a greyhound, winding out the big, red Desmosedici and then backing it in on the brakes and trying like hell to get it down to the apex with the rear tire smoking, with Rossi, on the sweet-handling Honda, right up his howling pipes, is magic, pure magic. If sponsorship can somehow be sustained after the European Community deep-sixes all tobacco advertizing as of mid-July 2005 (with the possibility of extending to the end of the 2005 season), MotoGP will continue to grow and even prosper. We'll see in a couple of years. The whole MotoGP idea is based upon the Formula 1 concept. There Gregorio Lavilla finally has a competitive machine, and he's making the most of it. His Alstare Suzuki GSXR1000 is tuned to full Superbike specs but detuned by 32.Smm restrictors in the inlet tracts. According to the Rizla Suzuki team in Great Britain, their more mildly tuned GSX-R did not show any significant decrease in performance when fitted with restrictors. Lavilla says that the first thing he did after a disappointing Valencia debut was detune the engine to make it less violent at midrange. will be ] 2 two-rider teams, a 24-bike grid, and each rider, whether on the pole or the outside of the back row, will be a star and a millionaire, riding for a millionaire team owner on a bike built out of unobtainium and tuned by well-to-do technicians driving BMWs and whose Rolexes are not made in Hong Kong. That doesn't mean that all machines will be competitive, any more than that the Minardi can run with the Ferrari, Williams and McLaren in Formula]. Somebody Kawasaki, Suzuki, Proton - is going to end up being Minardi (the Mendoza line of F]) under these wide-open, anything-goes MotoGP regulations, but the idea, the concept, is that just being part of the show will be enough to bring on board huge multinational sponsors, proud and happy just to be there, entertaining corporate guests behind the tinted glass of the hospi- tality or gazing down from the regal heights of rooftop VIP dining areas. It could happen, and for the good of all professional road racing, we should hope it does because there will be an inevitable trickle-down effect that will benefit the sport in general. Even if it does hang together after tobacco is gone and some semblance of parity is retained, the finite 24 slots on the all-star MotoGP grid will never offer enough opportunity for the talent that top National Championships, like AMA Superbike, British Superbike, the All-Japan and Spanish CEV Nationals, etc. are now producing. And that is where World Superbike and World Supersport come in. The little two-strokes still provide good entertainment, and the likes of Rossi and Capirossi are ex-] 25 and 250 World Champions, but with the preeminence of Superbike and Supersport racing at national level and the switch to 990cc, 220-plus horsepower four-strokes at the peak of the GP pyramid, the] 25 and 250 two-stroke support classes are becoming irretrievably irrelevant. The new stars emerging from National Championships around the world now come mostly out of the top national Superbike and Supersport Championships, and the FIM's effort to unify the rules so that the same Regis Laconi, a winner two seasons ago in World Superbike on an Aprilia ~in and also a SOOcc GP winner with Yamaha, rides the long-stroke RS yersion of the Ducati 998 for the NCR ~eam and has been threatening to win all season. Just surviving the 2002 season on the AS "Cube" MotoGP Aprilia (now ridden by Colin Edwards) was "'a miracle" according to the Frenchman, who says the Ducati 998 is a wonderful motorcycle and that the Aprilia 990 was "a beast that was trying to throw me off its back whenever I looked at the throttle." n eVIls • JULY 9. 2003 35