Cycle News

ROUND 8/JULY 21, 2013 MOSCOW RACEWAY/MOSCOW, RUSSIA WORLD SUPERBIKE P100 WORLD SUPERBIKE CHAMPIONSHIP Tom Sykes' Kawasaki caught fire and he lost his lead in the World Championship. JOHAN SODERDAHL: ÖHLINS Swedish suspension company Öhlins has a near stranglehold on the World Superbike paddock's top teams now, with the exception of Kawasaki. As with most other technologies, the teams usually use innovations first seen in MotoGP, but in terms of the most recent MotoGP-derived 48 mm front forks, there has been a divergence in World Superbike. Some have tried the bigger forks, but most do not get on with them in World Superbike. Johan Soderdahl, from Öhlins spoke about this at Moscow Raceway. "In terms of the size of the front forks I would say at the moment all our clients are using the 42mm ones. Marco Melandri has tried the bigger one and used it in a few races, and then tested again recently where he came off the 48mm fork. We had winter tests where he had the chance to test both of them. At that time he wanted the 48s, but all the other ones tried the 42s." There are sound tech reasons for this, according to Soderdahl. most fallen at the same time and at the same corner as Laverty and Haslam, so he counted his points for fourth and found then 13 was more than zero. Rea said, shortly before heading off to Suzuka for the 8-Hour direct from Russia, "We had good enough pace for the front few positions, but when Ayrton Badovini came through I could not go with him so there was a point where I had to let my ego take a back seat and collect some points." Michel Fabrizio was fifth on his Red Devils Racing Aprilia. In the championship, with the "We have not pushed people to use the 48mm forks because we know that it is not as easy to fit the big forks on these types of bikes, because they are based on the production model. You do not have the same freedom when you design the bike whereas with the MotoGP bike you can do basically what you want. We have had some thoughts and ideas that this bigger sized fork may not suit this kind of tire so maybe the 42mm fork is better suited to the Pirellis. But the same technology can apply. When we develop the stuff we do not separate at all the two, the same technology can apply very well in both disciplines. "All of the products that we sell are the twin-tube concept [TTX] but some of them have a piston shaft that is through, and some is non-through. It is a performance point, and also we have to take into account that some of the products require more frequent service, so we cannot just hand out the top models to anyone. Those are designated for the factory teams and those ones come with a technician from us. We can maintain this high level of function all the time."

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