Cycle News

VOLUME ISSUE DECEMBER , P97 one-make championships with series like the Yamaha YZF-R6 Cup, the Ducati Challenge for 848/959/V2 machines, and now the BMW F 900 R Cup. These all ran alongside British Superbike and gave the everyday man a chance to play on the same stage as the big guys of BSB at a fraction of the price. In Australia, we had the FZ6 Cup and later the R15 Cup for youngsters, a bit like the RC Cup out here. That R15 Cup was a boon for not just Yamaha but the aftermarket, as all the kids were in AGV helmets and Ricondi leathers, with Yamaha supplying discounted, race- prepped bikes, oils/spares, and Dunlop handing out discounted tires, of which the riders were only allowed a certain allocation to keep costs under control. In South Africa, they have the Kawasaki ZX-10R Masters Cup, which I believe is the perfect one-make series anyone has yet come up with. As the name im - plies, this is for elder riders with three classes on offer. Masters is for any rider over 30, Veterans is open to riders 43 and older, and Extreme is the class for any rider over 51 years old. The Kawasaki ZX-10R Mas- ters Cup, obviously, is for Kawasaki ZX-10R/ZX-10RRs from 2012 through 2024, and the supplementary regulations state, "In the spirit of the event, no changes are allowed to any motorcycle except minor techni - cal modifications in accordance with the regulations." Those modifications include a cartridge kit for the standard Kawasaki fork, an aftermarket shock with valving and spring rates to suit, racing bodywork, crash protection, a slip-on exhaust (stock headers must be retained), a race air filter, stan - dard race lock wiring for fluid- holding screws, and the ECU can be flashed with a control map and password provided by the race organizers. The tires are supplied by Bridgestone in their R11 soft compound slick. You can use as many tires as you want on Friday, but, "The same set of tires is to be used for qualifying, race one and race two. Tires are to be marked before qualifying by the series Technical Control," according to the sup regs. What you have here isn't Su - perbike or even Superstock rac- ing. It's Stock racing—arguably what Superbike was intended to be when it was first invented in the 1970s—designed to show- case a given manufacturer's per- formance chops while enabling more established and, dare I say it, mature riders to have a go without burning their wallets to ash. No one said motor rac- ing was cheap, but the costs in recent years have gotten so far out of hand, that something like this Kawasaki ZX-10R Cup could and should be a blueprint for North America. The big issue we face in this country is the sheer size of it (travel expenses are a major factor), plus the myriad of race organizers/clubs that all seem to have different ideas as to what a specific class is and what it should be called. There's a definite contest between rival clubs that is to the detriment of the sport in North America. Just imagine, god forbid, that a few of the clubs on each side of the country got together, held two or three races each per year in their local juris - diction, and then got together for a national final somewhere. It could be a rotating deal where one year the East Coast hosts the final, the next it's on the West Coast, the following year somewhere in the center of the country. Tell me that wouldn't be a good thing? Or MotoAmerica could take control and slot in five or six races for an over-30s one-make series themselves. People want to race, but the cost of racing, especially the insane amount people need to spend on tires, scares a lot of people off. Much of these costs can be fixed if a manu - facturer wants to step up and make a class that reflects their machine's performance. What about a KTM 990 Duke R Cup? A Suzuki GSX-R1000R Cup? A Ya- maha MT-09 Cup? Or just swipe the ZX-10R Cup from the South Africans? We can only dream. But I'd really love this dream to become a reality. CN

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