Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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VOL. 53 ISSUE 20 MAY 24, 2016 P129 prototypes, rather than streeters with the indicators blanked off. Not necessarily better riders, although that is how it tends to work out. And not necessarily better racing, however you mea- sure that. Just senior. It is therefore a natural pro- gression for the best riders to gravitate towards grand prix rac- ing. But the route is rather one- dimensional, generally requiring apprenticeship in the Spanish national championship, and/or the Red Bull Rookies Cup, and that you start racing long before that. The path to WorldSBK is similarly restrictive. Their time is served in almost every other national championship, with some supersport thrown in along the way. When riders do reach the pin- nacle of each respective series, it's usually too late to change horses. It's easy for riders to get stuck. In MotoGP, however, they're happy to be stuck. In fact, there has never been a great deal of crossover between superbikes and GP racing, while each has always found ways to look down on the other. But there can be very few SBK regu- lars whose hearts do not hanker after a berth in MotoGP. There're a couple on this year's MotoGP grid who did manage to escape. Eugene Laverty and Loris Baz were both successful SBK jockeys, and now ride two-year-old Ducatis— the GP14.2, a bike with a rather dilapidated reputation. Both are making a good fist of it, with Laverty in particular rewarded by a flukey but nonetheless genuine fourth in Argentina, and another top 10 among points in every race so far. There are others in SBK who deserve but probably won't get a chance to move over—Mi- chael van der Mark just one, not to mention the likes of Chaz Davies. Hopes that the switch from two-strokes to MotoGP four- strokes would help to bridge the gap have yielded little of great glory. Apart from Nicky Hayden's Malaysian win—and that after a journey in the wrong direction. Far from being a stepping stone to GPs, SBK has been more of a retirement home for careers that are inevitably al- ready on a downward slope. John Kocinski was arguably not really on the skids in the conventional sense when he took the SBK title, but there was no place left for him in a GP pad- dock grown tired of his antics. Max Biaggi, on the other hand, was well past his GP glory days when he went in and humbled the production-series stars. Superbikes were set up as a maverick rival to GPs back in 1988 by fast-talking ex-rider and Daytona winner Steve McLaugh- lin, and there were times—espe- cially in Anglophone countries during Carl Fogarty's reign in the 1990s—when the production- based series posed a real threat, especially in terms of race atten- dances and TV audiences. These days were already long gone when Dorna stepped in—at the same time somehow side- stepping any monopoly regula- tions—and took control in 2013. Since then there has been a de- termined effort to avoid competi- tion, and furthermore to increase the technical gulf between the two world championship catego- ries. If MotoGP bikes have been dumbed down, with control tires and electronics and so on, it is all the more so for SBK, with Dorna striving to cut costs and bring the bikes closer to their production roots. One anomaly in the equa- tion is a rung down the lad- der—Moto2 versus World 600 Supersport. The latter enjoy much more freedom in engine development and are generally faster and more powerful than the porcine Moto2s, with their one-size-fits-all CBR600 motors provided by the organizers. So just what has Nicky Hayden proved? Just exactly what has he done? Won a race, that's what. Now let's go to the next one. In both series. CN