How to fix MotoGP and World Superbike

In 2014 MotoGP fuel tanks were reduced to 20 litres, down from 24 litres in 2002, the inaugural four-stroke MotoGP season. This was supposed to reduce performance and force the manufacturers to work harder at developing lean-burn engines.

Both perfectly reasonable ideas but in fact a great way of making the racing more dangerous. When engineers need to save fuel, where do they try to save it? During full-throttle acceleration? Of course not. No, they try to save vital drops of fuel on the overrun.

The problem here is that if the engine doesn’t burn fuel consistently at low rpm on a closed throttle it may die, lock the rear wheel and trigger a disastrous corner-entry highside. There were many such crashes during the 20-litre era. (Current fuel capacity is 22 litres.)

So the MSMA and Dorna must consider other ways of slowing the bikes, perhaps reducing the width of the tyres or reducing the number of gears. All other ideas gratefully received.

They will also need to reduce downforce aerodynamics and ride-height devices, through this will require change from the very top, from the Grand Prix Commission and the Grand Prix Permanent Bureau, who must somehow do away with the MSMA’s unanimous voting system, which allows one manufacturer to overcome the wishes of all the others, which is a daft way to run anything.

But whatever they do will squeeze the MSMA and Dorna between a rock and a hard place.

“If we make MotoGP bikes a second or two slower they will be slower than World Superbike machines,” Dorna management tell me.

This would obviously be ridiculous, like touring cars out-performing Formula 1 cars, which would make premier-class prototype racing redundant. Therefore it can’t be allowed to happen.

So far this year MotoGP and WSB have both raced at only one track — Assen — where the fastest MotoGP lap was 1min 33.065sec and the best WSB lap was 1min 34.133sec. That is not a big difference and among other things underlines the insanely high performance of the latest road-legal superbikes.

My experiment suggests the supersport market is basically extinct.

So what to do?

There is 100% no doubt that MotoGP performance must be reduced, which means that superbike performance must also be reduced.

There’s already talk of reducing the WSB cost cap, which demands that production versions of all WSB bikes must cost no more than 45,000 Euros, which just happens to be a few Euros more than the cost of a Ducati Panigale V4R.

There’s also talk of running WSB under lower-spec Superstock rules.

But how about getting more radical than that?

A few weeks ago I was riding outside London when I spotted a Suzuki GSX-R1000 coming the other way. It was the first superbike I’d seen for a while, so I thought I’d do a little experiment: I’d count the next 49 motorcycles I saw, not including scooters or small-capacity bikes.

Over the next few days of riding and driving through Surrey, London, the Midlands and North Wales the next 49 bikes I counted were all adventure bikes, naked, retros and tourers. Not one more superbike – and zero 600 supersport bikes – which suggests that superbikes account for a tiny percentage of motorcycle sales, while the supersport market is basically extinct.

Not so many years ago the roads were full of so-called crotch rockets: from young bucks riding to their office jobs in central London on Ducati 916s to mad hoons zooming around the roads of North Wales on GSX-Rs, ZX-Rs and everything else.

Honda launched its latest Fireblade with inbuilt downforce wings in 2020 and I have yet to see one on the road. I’ve never seen a Panigale V4R on the road either.

The whole point of superbike racing is that racers use the same motorcycles that everyday riders use on the road. That’s how superbikes started and that how it was for several decades – CB900s, Z1000s, VF750s, ’Blades, GSX-Rs and 916s were everywhere.

But the world (certainly the West) has moved on: there are too many speed cameras on the roads and motorcycling is an ageing demographic, so today’s older riders have little interest in crunching themselves into a racing crouch. Instead of buying crotch rockets they buy adventure bikes, nakeds and so on, which are so advanced that most riders will get from A to B as fast as they would on a superbike. And they’ll save a fortune on osteopaths too.

Baggers are MotoAmerica’s most popular class

So what’s the point of racing production bikes that no one buys?

Many laughed when the King Of The Baggers class – for huge Harley and Indian touring bikes – was introduced to the MotoAmerica series a few years ago, just as many laughed when superbikes first arrived in the 1970s (some purists nicknamed them stupid-bikes).

But now baggers are MotoAmerica’s most popular class, attracting new spectators to events, so much so that the bagger races have been moved to the end of the day, because too many fans were heading for the exit after they’d watched these monsters do their thing, leaving the superbikes to circulate in front of a reduced crowd.

And now baggers are coming to BSB and Europe. Last week BSB promoters MSVR signed a deal with MotoAmerica to run bagger races on this side of the Pond.

There’s a huge lesson for race promoters here: fans are ready for something different. And if you want your championship to survive and thrive you need to give fans what they want.

And what they don’t seem to want is the same identikit 1000cc and 600cc sports bikes riding around in circles, like they’ve done for the last couple of decades.

So here’s my bright idea…

Replace the World Superbike and Supersport classes with categories that better reflect the public’s interest. That means classes for naked bikes, adventure bikes, baggers, retros and super-hooligan bikes, another new category recently included in MotoAmerica. Because people want to see bikes just like their own being thrashed around racetracks.

And don’t tell me that it’s impossible to race a naked Kawasaki Z1000R, a KTM Super Duke or a BMW R1250GS. Anyone can race anything, as proven by the baggers and Asia’s underbone championships.

When superbikes first became a thing in the late 1970s the fastest machine was BMW’s R90 twin, basically a sports tourer. When BMW’s British-born star Reg Pridmore started beating the more powerful Japanese fours he fitted saddlebags to his R90, just to madden his rivals some more. Pridmore did later switch to a Kawasaki Z1000.

I rarely watch World Superbikes because I spend a lot of time covering MotoGP, so when I have a weekend off I want to think about something other than motorbike racing. Also, why watch WSB when it’s pretty much like watching MotoGP, because modern superbikes are essentially street-legal MotoGP bikes, so they look pretty much the same, sound pretty much the same and go around racetracks pretty much the same?

On the other hand, if WSB had a bunch of top riders racing nakeds, baggers and adventure bikes I’d definitely watch, because that would be a sight to behold.

It was the same in the early years of superbike racing in the USA: fans were soon turned on to watching pimped-up road bikes, because they were bored of witnessing races dominated by identikit Yamaha TZ750s and TZ350s.

My new WSB classes would run under superstock-type rules – a lowish purchase price cost cap, limited modifications and so on. And the headline classes would change every few years, to keep fans interested and to discourage manufacturers from investing too much money in transforming their production nakeds and adventure bikes into full-on racers.