Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 39 SEPTEMBER 30, 2014 P43 they have to go out and race, which they already know how to do. All the other things need to be more closely in line. So what are the classes go- ing to be? We want to make the Super- bike class the premiere class. That has the most interest, that's the class I came through. There's not a lot of participation there at the moment for a lot of teams for probably a variety of reasons. What we are going to do in the immediate future is we are going to introduce a stock 1000 class to race with the Superbike class. We will put them on slicks. They will be scored separately but will race at the same time. We will be able to fill the grid up with those bikes and I think a good team, with a well-prepped stock 1000, can get close to some of the Su- perbike guys. If you have a good rider who is aggressive, young and wants to go for it and get no- ticed, there should be a class to do that. And support classes? At the moment, we are go- ing to have 600 Supersport, which will have a little bit of a rule change on the engine package, and we'll put those on slick tires. And we'll have a 600 Superstock and those will be kept on the DOT tires. They will be scored separately, obviously. One is for the guys with more experience, the other for the up-and-coming guys. And we want to make the rules to where other manufactur- ers can compete. We will also have two other support classes. Right now we're in negotiations with Vance & Hines regarding the Harley class. It's been there, those guys like it so we'll know more about that shortly. And we're also going to have a new class that we're going to introduce and we're excited to see what that new class will bring to our series. We're not quite ready to announce that yet, but we're getting close. Everyone wants a sched- ule – the fans and the teams. What sort of timetable are you looking at before you get that out? Again, we know this is one of the first things people want to know: Where are we racing and when? When we were able to announce this, we immediately began contacting tracks. We're contracted to race in at least sev- en venues and we've contacted Is that going to be a spec class? Yes. Rumors started at the end of last year when we heard that you were working on this that Moto2 would be a part of the program… We were thinking about a Moto2 class, but with the late announcement it's not going to happen yet. Do the classes have names yet? Not officially yet, but we have an idea. I know they have always been confusing in the past and we are trying to make it less con- fusing. I, for one, was confused by the past names so we are try- ing to make it a little bit less so. 10 and have gotten responses back from all 10. I think it's safe to say we will have eight or nine and we'll be racing at the two Mo- toGP races and also at the World Superbike race. That's the plan at the moment and those are the races we'll run that are tied in with the World Championship. At those world rounds, can you run a full slate of classes? No. At the MotoGP events, they already have their three classes so we will only bring two. We will bring Superbike and our 600 class – the performance classes we have inside MotoAmerica. The performance classes are what we want to get back to. We want to align ourselves to getting back to being known as a series " The fans are the main thing and we need to make sure that they are satisfied. If they are satisfied, we are doing our jobs. The bottom line is we just need to make this mean something again. "

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