Rennie Scaysbrook | May 29, 2024
Cycle News Lowside
COLUMN
What’s going to happen to Superbike?
The worst-kept secret in racing was revealed a few weeks ago when MotoGP announced it would go to 850cc engines for 2027, plus reduce the much hated (by spectators, at least) holeshot devices and minimize aero, which has absolutely no use in modern street bikes—trust me, your commuter doesn’t need winglets.
1000cc Superbike racing at a national level—things are certainly going to change in the next five years. Photo by Brian J Nelson
MotoGP’s rule change had been on the cards for a while as the top speeds of the world’s fastest racing motorcycles are just too fast for many of the iconic tracks that make up the calendar—Phillip Island, Mugello, Silverstone—and having those drop off the season would be a body blow to a championship that, if new owners Liberty Media play their cards right, could be about to ride into a new purple patch.
Some predictions I’ve seen will have the MotoGP bikes slowing around two to three seconds per lap, which is a monumental drop in performance. I feel this will happen in the beginning, but MotoGP’s ludicrously smart tech boffins will find a way around this conundrum, and the bikes will be as fast as ever by the end of that first 2027 season. Companies like Ducati don’t go racing to go slower than they did last year, regardless of what the rulebook says.
This poses the question: what’s going to happen to Superbike racing? Not just Superbikes, but all of production racing? The entire food pyramid of world racing would be turned on its head and MotoGP’s value as a series would be ripped to shreds if Alvaro Bautista and Toprak Razgatlioglu were suddenly significantly faster on bikes you and I could buy from our local dealer. Prototype bikes should be the fastest things on the track, so the only option for rule makers across the globe will be to slow Superbikes down as well. But how are they going to do that?
Recently I’ve had a number of off-the-record conversations with people in far higher technical places than me on this topic. None of them would stick their neck out and go on the record, so I guess I’ll have to preface the rest of the column by saying this is just what I think, rather than any actual fact.
1000cc Superbikes have seriously fallen out of favor with Japan, the country that built them and created the movement more than any other. The bikes have gotten so expensive and the development has largely ground to a halt. Yamaha isn’t making the R1 Euro 5+ compliant, although you’ll be able to buy a GYTR version for the track for a few more years in Europe. Suzuki’s GSX-R1000 has received no development since 2017 and can’t be bought in Europe, Kawasaki’s ZX-10R had a facelift a few years ago but is pretty much the same bike it was before; only Honda has gone big with a solid revision of the Fireblade for 2024.
That leaves only two manufacturers—BMW and Ducati—having done any meaningful development on 1000cc sportbikes in recent times and those bikes are not selling enough units across the globe to continue to prop the class up. Kawasaki’s recent tie-in with Bimota is great news for lovers of those beautiful Italian bikes, like me, but it’s a way of Kawasaki gradually pulling out of WorldSBK while still being seen as a participating manufacturer.
In the short term, Superbikes will most likely need to go through fuel restriction rule changes to make them more efficient, and less fuel will mean less horsepower, less horsepower means they will, inevitably, go slower.
Again, this is at odds with why manufacturers go racing in the first place and can only last for so long.
Indeed, the Japanese only have themselves to blame for this conundrum. A new Yamaha YZF-R1M costs only six grand less than a BMW M 1000 RR, and it’s effectively a nine-year-old platform, with the R1M receiving no major revisions since 2015. The R1M is still an amazing bike, but the cost of them is not in line with what you’re getting, and the company isn’t selling enough of them, hence not re-homologating it for next year.
An interesting point is that Kawasaki caused a stir back in 2018 when they released the ZX-6R for under $10,000 for the non-ABS version. The company couldn’t keep up with demand, so they sold every one they made because the bike was sold at the price it should’ve been sold at.
I’ll make a prediction that within five years, 1000cc Superbike racing will largely cease to exist in any meaningful capacity. The bikes that will become the new Superbike class will be the current next-gen Supersport machines, an area that has more usage for the manufacturers as they can take a next-gen motor and use it in a variety of production bikes that people will actually buy. Take the incoming Yamaha YZF-R9—this motor comes from the MT-09, and also the XSR900 and the Tracer 9 GT. That’s a good use of technology, especially when compared to the R1’s four-cylinder motor that is also the basis of the MT-10 naked bike, and that’s it.
What will be important for the next-gen rule makers will be to have a widely adopted set of rules for all participating national championships across the globe. WorldSSP should be a higher spec (one that’s still buildable if you have the money) but standardizing the rules for the next-gen bikes at a national level will be vital for the health of the class. When someone looks at a next-gen bike in BSB, it should be the same as the AMA or the ASBK. That way the fans (and riders) know what they’re getting.
If I look further into my fantasy crystal ball, I can see Twins Cup racing changing with the arrival of the Daytona 660 and the class becoming the new Supersport. Junior Cup racing on little Ninja 400s will also change, and new players will enter the fray. It’s all going to change.
What of prototype racing? One of the biggest problems facing the GP paddock is there are no national (aside from Spain) series that run a domestic Moto2 championship, and there doesn’t appear any hurry in which to change it.
For a national Moto2 series to really work outside Europe, there needs to be a base machine that doesn’t cost the quarter million dollars a current Moto2 bike does for it to be viable, and I just don’t see that happening. BSB has tried it over the last few years, but it really hasn’t caught on the way series organizers had hoped.
That recent MotoGP announcement is going to be far more wide-ranging than I think most people realize. Perhaps not a lot will change at a club racing level, but domestic championship racing is going to undergo a big revolution in the next five years. I’m sticking my neck out here, but I don’t think I’m far off the mark with a few of these predictions. CN
