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/464773
VOL. 52 ISSUE 7 FEBRUARY 18, 2015 P97 still be precious. Determined to continue with the perimeter disc brake they have now tried conventional dual discs back-to-back with their own design. Probably more horses in the 1200cc V-twin engine now than before, but the primary tuning improvement in 2015 will be the reduction in power of the best four-cylinders ranged against them. The EBR is still up against it, but pushing back harder. This mix of India and the U.S. on two wheels is, again, more than welcome in the paddock. H O N D A Not so badly affected by the lack of tuning freedom as some, the Pata Honda team think they may even start the season with more or less the same power from the CBR1000RR SP as they had in 2014. Given that the talented Jonathan Rea won four races on this seemingly ancient device in 2014, maybe recent World Champion Sylvain Guintoli can equal or beat that score. Rules on cost limitation of special parts help a relatively streetbike oriented Superbike like the Fireblade, as does the ability for the team to keep their ride-by-wire split throttles. Some drastic weight loss and a much kinder engine graph promise some good times for Honda again, despite losing Rea. A championship contend- er? A pre-Jerez crash, Guintoli certainly thought so. They do their own electronics, and so far only supply themselves. K A W A S A K I Champions of 2013, Kawasaki now has two riders with abnor- mally high winning hormone lev- els in their bloodstreams, not just one. With Tom Sykes joined by a much more potent threat in the form of Jonathan Rea, the talk at pre-season testing was that the Ninja would have its crossed swords blunted by the new rules. It seems they too have made a nicer engine response at the expense of 15 less horses at the top end. Losing crank weight freedoms and some chassis libertarianisms was supposed to be the end of the Ninja as a top two machine. It seems it will be at least as good as anybody else's in 2015. New Magneti Marelli electron- ics will all be in place sometime, but even now it seems to be working well for the factory squad. They will have to share many of their Showa and general KRT secrets with the paddock this year, as there are so many privateer Kawasaki entries on full Superbikes. M V A G U S T A Now that there is a genuinely po- dium-capable World Superbike rider on the new homologation F4 (and it has been factory de- veloped all the way since around Misano last season) the newly revamped four should boot out as much power as anybody else at some stage. With a potentially sweet handling chassis and the same limits and opportunities as anyone else this time around, the in-line radial-valve F4 makes over 200 horses in stock trim. Last year was a political morass in the early stages, and on a bike with basically an Evo engine. A development year in 2014, and then some, we have yet to see the proper perfor- mance of it. A small but dedicated team of engineers, including a few well- known faces in the paddock, should see it right. Camier now has so much experience finding a set-up after last year's multiple saddle- swaps, he is already leading them in a good direction. S U Z U K I Every season a year older, the Suzuki finds new parts of its make-up to exploit. This bike is made for the new tech rules; in that it needs to change little to meet them, such has been its previous relative lack of top end power. With less of a peak to chase, the initial reports of the new en- gine response from the Yoshimura technical partner have been glow- ing. Randy De Puniet joins Alex Lowes in 2015 and he should be as combative in World Superbike as he has been in GPs. If the Suzuki is now—partly through its recent and unexpect- ed adoption of Magneti Marelli electronics—a player in World