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/128368
By IN THI PADDOCK MICHAEL SCOTT And So It Starts o you like your omens half-baked? That's what came out of the first World Superbike Championship race of the season at Qatar. The message from the desert was clear all the same: expect the unexpected. If rain can disrupt racing out there in the lone and level sands, then anything can happen. The other messages from the opening World Superbike round were also clear enough. Troy Corser is back, after suffering in the Petronas wilderness, and the Suzukis have come out fighting. The new Suzuki in the rejoined Belgium-based team was better prepared to race than Chris Vermeulen's year-old Honda CBR IOOORR and the (still impressive) new Yamahas. And that also holds true it seems for the factory Ducati, at least the one with World Champion James Toseland on board, though Regis Laconi needed little urging for a pair of rostrums. World Superbike's very early Qatar race was not the first time a premature start to a season has been disrupted by weather - though the snow that stopped the Austrian Grand Prix of 1980 was rather more predictable than rain in the Gulf, as the Salzburgring circuit is in the Alps. This year's splashing in the sands followed MotoGP's pioneering Middle East run there last year (in heat so dry that the Yamahas vaporized their fuel) and is in turn followed by an interruption to racing of more than a month. Time enough for the various factory and near-factory tuners to change this profile at least somewhat, though it does seem the writing's on the wall for the Ducati twins and indeed the Petronas triple. Fours are what you're going to need. Funnily enough, Ducati has one - their V-four Desmosedici MotoGP prototype. What are the odds on a road version (and thence World Superbike derivative), as soon as they can afford to make one? The wider racing picture offers an interesting perspective. What does this mean to the World Championships as a whole? World Superbike reinvented itself last year in the wake of the factory withdrawal, with the control Pirelli tires part of an overall package of dumbing down to get back in touch with production-bike roots. This strategy was much derided but has been astonishingly successful. Some fine battles proved that though lap times may be slower on the Pirellis than on the previous year's free-choice Dunlops and Michelins, that doesn't matter a damn if the racing's good. And after just one year D away, all the Japanese factories are back, albeit under the guise of support teams. This U-turn is neither surprising nor unprecedented, but it is highly significant, and is surely causing some worried frowns over at MotoGI' Take Suzuki, for example. Its new GSX-R road bike's a snorter and had road-testers in an ecstasy of superlatives. If it carries on its double-win performance in World Superbike, its already enviable reputation will be gilded and exalted still further. Ker-ching... lots of sales, and welldeserved. Over at MotoGP, it's long been a puzzle that with such a successful inline four, why have Suzuki struggled to achieve the same sort of competitive performance from their V-four GP engine? For 200S, they have again upgraded their tardy GSVR only to find that the improvement merely matches that of their more successful rivals, leaving hapless riders Kenny Roberts Jr. and John Hopkins in just the same position as last year, sucking the hind teat. This left the Suzuki flack hacks little to boast about but a new color scheme - which they did repeatedly - but making the GSV-R competitive will take a factory commitment rather deeper than a layer of paint. If you're looking at all this from the point of view of a senior manager, whose job it is to justify the numbers to the accountants and ultimately to the shareholders, the whole MotoGP exercise loses luster, in stark contrast to the dazzle coming off the World Superbike team. Hmmm ... Which represents the better investment? And which is good money after bad? It's not only Suzuki, of course. The whole MotoGP field is constantly having to ask itself serious Its position was particularly acute after the factory ran into financial problems and was taken over by Piaggio. After some prevarication, and after remaining committed to supporting 250 and I25cc GP racing, the new owners finally pulled the plug on the MotoGP class. No more Aprilia Cube in the mix on the grid, bellowing like a stampeding rhino, and handling like one as well. Rest in peace, feisty Cube. Team KR is also on the brink. Proton has withdrawn the bulk of its sponsorship, and no significant replacement has so far been found, in spite of the highly promising test runs with their new KTM engine at the end of last year. Team KR has a plan in place for a one-rider team, but at the time of writing, participation was still far from certain, unless they could acquire Michelin or Bridgestone tires. Even then, it is only with major support (including potentially financial) from Dorna. Which is why Dorna had the clout to dictate rider choice - ousting the preferred Proton veteran Jeremy McWilliams, on the grounds of age, in favor of relative rookie Shakey Byrne. All this is happening against a background of escalating costs and technology. Honda takes racing the most seriously and is driving the technology relentlessly forward, spending the most money and making the most of many years of experience. In the course of the last two years, Yamaha has taken a deliberate decision to follow suit, spending money and manpower to give Valentino Rossi a much-improved MI for its first riders' title since 1992. The prophets of doom are noting all this, and predicting (not for the first time) a future with just one or maybe two factories, supporting 10-strong grids. The dreaded "Honda Cup." By comparison with the big two, Kawasaki's MotoGP project, tinkering around with a beefed-up superbike, is small beer. For this season, Suzuki has devoted much effort to trimming costs. In both cases, it's a hell of a way to go GP racing, and in earlier times, both Suzuki and Kawasaki have withdrawn factory support from GPs on financial grounds, the latter for two decades. In the end, the lure of racing proved strong enough to pull them back in. To purist racing fans, MotoGP will always be the pinnacle - and it is one of the series' greatest strengths that the Japanese factories in particular are full of purist racing fans. But there are also plenty of bean counters who don't care a fig about anything except the bottom line. They have to be convinced of the need to spend tens of millions to do little more than go through the process of racing, especially when they can spend less and achieve race wins over at World Superbike. The next couple of seasons will be an important test of whether MotoGP itself might have to consider dumbing down and cutting costs to avoid disappearing up its own ivory control tower. eN financial questions, while the sponsorship pool is not exactly overflowing. Suzuki's new coat of many colors is again its own factory livery, rather than that of a big-spending sponsor. The list of endangered species is growing. Aprilia is already extinct in MotoGI' CYCLE NEWS • MARCH 9, 2005 9S