What is the point of the Superbike World Championship? Yamaha takes issue with Ducati and BMW

Ducati has produced a technical masterpiece with the new Panigale V4R: Aruba factory rider Nicolo Bulega has won all 21 races so far this year – and 25 across both seasons! His team-mate Iker Lecuona secured a one-two finish on 18 occasions. Of 63 podium finishes, only seven did not go to Ducati: four were claimed by BMW works rider Miguel Oliveira, two by Axel Bassani and one by Alex Lowes, both on a Bimota.

Ducati’s dominance is so overwhelming that the current balance regulations are no longer sufficient, and the manufacturers are therefore discussing other potential adjustments behind the scenes.

Dosoli: “The sport should follow the market”

“We are no longer in a situation where a manufacturer can develop a specific motorbike for the Superbike World Championship because the market is changing so rapidly,” said Yamaha racing director Andrea Dosoli in an exclusive interview with SPEEDWEEK.com. “Today, some manufacturers build two models: one for the road and one for the Superbike World Championship. In my view, it should be exactly the other way round: the technical regulations of the Superbike World Championship should follow market developments. We need to look closely at the market and consider where it is heading. And we must develop the future technical regulations accordingly. If manufacturers are forced to build a specialised motorcycle for the World Championship, then we’re heading down the wrong path and moving more in the direction of MotoGP.”

Then we’ll be heading down the wrong path and moving more in the direction of MotoGP.

Andrea Dosoli

Of the six manufacturers currently competing in the World Superbike Championship – Bimota, BMW, Ducati, Honda, Kawasaki and Yamaha – only Ducati, Honda and Yamaha also compete in MotoGP, so their views and approaches naturally differ. However, it’s not a black-and-white issue, as Ducati – despite competing in MotoGP – shares the same view as BMW and has no objection to fielding technically highly advanced and expensive special-edition Superbike models.

Andrea Dosoli

Foto: Gold & Goose

Fundamentally, the question arises as to whether the Superbike World Championship should continue to serve as a platform for technological development. For BMW, for example, it is very important to be able to use the championship for this purpose – particularly in the field of electronics – as this is a powerful argument for securing the board’s approval for motorsport initiatives.

Lengthy and costly development

“With today’s emissions standards such as Euro 5+ and so on, almost nothing we learn in racing can be transferred to a production model,” Dosoli counters. “If this story – this justification for investment – were true, then we would have seen far more developments on the Kawasaki ZX-10, for example. But the reality is that this motorbike has remained unchanged for 15 years. We should avoid making this misjudgement. Sometimes, however, we do so because the manufacturers’ representatives on the committee are engineers. They love to develop new things and tell this story. We should involve more people from sales and marketing – staff with a much broader perspective on the company. They have a much deeper understanding of why we race; what racing means to us and why we spend millions on it.”

I doubt it has any benefit for series production.

Andrea Dosoli

“I understand BMW because they aren’t in MotoGP,” says Dosoli. “I find it hard to understand Kawasaki; we should have seen far more developments from them. Developing a new model, or implementing new technologies into an existing model for road use, requires enormous effort, time and development costs. Because everything must always comply with road traffic regulations. I therefore doubt that anything can be developed on this platform that would be of any benefit to series production – even if there may be exceptions. It used to be different in the past.”