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/128408
By ROSTRUM OR HOSPITAL GORDON RITCHIE Taking Stock (And Making Stock Work) t's retrospection time in the World Superbike paddock. No change with that, but this time it's not just because it's the end of another year. It is now officially the end of the transition of World Superbike from a silhouette class (a sort of watered-down MotoGP championship with ambitions beyond its means), based on the increasingly irrelevant 750cc fours or big twins, to a more truly production derived environment, where things are fairer for all. Or at least as fair as any cash-driven motorsport can be. Hence, bulging grids and a huge improvement of strength in depth. Seems like we can now happily forget the politics of self-imposed factory team exile, the enforced exit of all the tire manufacturers (except mono-tire supplier Pirelli) and every other contentious scenario we've witnessed on the road to where things stand today. This past season was simply the year of getting on with it. Since unrestricted 1000cc four-cylinder machines were allowed into World Superbike in 2004, we have seen an unprecedented level of fairness in this class of racing. The way we got there may not have appeared to be fair to all, but can we look dispassionately at the evidence of 2005 and say that the Championship was skewed in favor of any rider or manufacturer in particular? That situation of mechanical and regulatory egalitarianism has, arguably, never quite occurred in pre-2005 World Superbike history. After a mix-up of the early technical regs, Ducati ruled the roost for donkey's years, with only the highly meritorious blips of Scott Russell and Kawasaki, john Kocinski and Honda, appearing as unwanted crackles on former radio-manufacturer Ducati's broadcasts of the Italian national anthem. Entering a phase of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," mentality in the new millennium, multi-cylinder masters Honda even built a two-cylinder neo-MotoGP bike, and duly won two World Championships. And spent a fortune in the process. Aprilia also joined in at the top with its rule-friendly RSV Mille, and its GP-tuned twin-cylinder engine. And spent a small fortune in the process. What World Superbike had reached then, was not only a level where lap records were sawed through with metro- I nomic regularity (where MotoGP pace was not just reached but even exceeded once or twice, where Michelin made exponential capital on their increasing technical superiority, year-by-year) the whole World Superbike show also reached budget levels that proved to be unsustainable in the face of four-stoke MotoGP demands. As Edwards and Bayliss proved in 2002, if you didn't have a full factory, highly stressed (read impossible to buy and expensive to run) homologation special V-twin, the best Michelin tires, and a full factory team to fettle things, you were going nowhere. After all the ructions of the most recent World Superbike seasons, we have now arrived at a situation, whereby the list of potential race winners and genuine Championship challengers, has reached its zenith. There were seven different race winners on four different types of machines in 'OS. Almost the only things that matter now are the level of rider talent, the abilities of the team, and of course, getting enough budget to go racing to an acceptably high level in the first place. That latter point will never change, of course, but believe the new truth, that level is not much higher than you need in a very good private team in any domestic championship. Don't take that as any put-down to World Superbike. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. Think of the ability to win in World Superbike nowadays as akin to the combustion triangle; you know, means of ignition, fuel and oxygen. Without anyone of these three things, you can't make fire. In World Superbike - 2005 style - so many other things vital for success in most other series were taken care of, that the new holy trinity - rider talent, bike setup and tire selection· meant that it all came down to who could keep those three juggling balls in the air longest on race day. Everything else was just less important than ever before, because by season's end, what you had was pretty much what the guys next door had. Ironically, given that they are still firmly in a public rage at World Superbike bosses for taking back control of their series on all levels, the japanese bosses are the main guys to thank for the way things were in '05; the way everybody except Petronas got on the podium; the way there were multiple race winners despite the strong Troy Corser and Chris Vermeulen "halves" of the season; the way up to 15 riders could start any weekend with a real hope of a podium finish. To put it simply, the latest batch of japanese bikes are so amenable to toplevel race preparation that they would end the season beating lap records, despite the limits the single-make tire supplier had to work under. (Even Pirelli's rivals admit that with up to 500 of any single-tire spec to bring along each weekend, the need to provide at least three or four choices of those front and rears, and the necessity to develop tires that work equally well for absolutely everyone, you have to err on the side of conservatism and conventionality. In short, absolute lap times in qualifying or race simply cannot be the prime consideration). The ins and outs of Pirelli's 2005 season could run to a short novel, but it ended with the likes of Vermeulen (Honda) and Corser (Suzuki), Lorenzo Lanzi (Ducati) and Noriyuki Haga (Yamaha), and others, battering away at the higher gates of the lap-time castle. Ducati may have been forced to conjureup yet another of its two-cylinder semi-Formula One engines to compete in 2005, but for customers of japan Inc. it was merely a case of tuning the 170 bhp streetbikes you and I can buy for about ten grand, getting the setup right, and then going racing to win. If you had a rider like Corser, and a team as profeSSional as Alstare, of course. Even in AMA or British Superbike, you have to have (for example) Mat Mladin's Suzuki, or Ryuichi Kiyonari's Honda to at least start to compete. Not to mention their 'special' rubber as well. Simultaneously, World Superbike was expanding its pool of competitiveness to, well, pretty much anyone, just because of the rules and regulations. Ironically, 2005 was the year that all the perennially cruel jibes about glorified street bikes actually came true, when World Superb ike race-winning machines were sometimes, more or less, just souped-up streetbikes with some smatterings of backdoor factory angel dust here, and MotoGP suspension hand-me-downs there. And loads of development work from the teams themselves, of course. But even with the budget constraints felt by most, and some unfathomable lack of any factory support in some big name teams, this year's models were still the fastest bikes World Superbike has ever seen. And the most noticeable thing about it all? Even though you can use MotoGP technology to create World Superbike base machines, but not the other way round, none of World Superbike's winning four-cylinder bikes was a diluted MotoGP replica. At heart, they were just RIs, CBRs and GSX-Rs, because the MotoGP road-reps still show no sign of turning up on a highway near you. And this is one of the main reasons why World Superbike is now without question the fairest (if not yet the most closely contested) championship in the entire panoply of top-level road racing. So the reason Corser and Vermeulen strode out there in the points table - was mostly due to Corser and Vermeulen, and their respective teams. The reason Corser won - was simply because of Corser, his team, and Suzuki, the latter realizing that getting all their development work done before the season started was maybe a good idea. (It certainly made the Suzuki the most factory bike out there at the start, but at the end, things were much more even. Consider this, Corser "only" won eight of the 23 races, even with his clear early advantage). World Superbike 2005 wasn't as competitive as we expected in other ways, however. It was hardly in FGSport's ideal script for the season that we should have only one clear Championship winner, arguably unassailable at midseason. Some uncomfortably huge gaps through the top lOin some races showed that just because it was fair, didn't mean that it would always be close. But as we can see, who won World Superbike 200S was not entirely dependent on differential-capacity rules, tire support, relative budgets, engine configuration, or anything else that has predetermined so many Championships in the past. Or so many other Championships, even now. By luck, design, or acts of collective will, World Superbike largely went back to its everyman roots in 2005, pointing the way forward to its long-term growth. It's just a shame America didn't get to see it 4P close this year. eN CYCLE NEWS • DECEMBER 14, 2005 83