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The first World Superbike race was decided on aggregate over the two races. The winner was Marco Lucchinelli (39), while Joey Dunlop (3) got third. For round two, points were awarded per race
i n d e ta i l Where did World SuperbikeS come from?
American ex-racer Steve McLaughlin championed large-capacity production racing in the States. By 1976 he’d started a national championship called ‘Superbike’ which over the years featured everything from BMW R90s to Suzuki GS1000s. McLaughlin saw the opportunity of a global race series for big bikes that looked just like the ones you could buy in dealers. And he managed to make it happen. WSB’s roots are more complex. Formula 750 (1977-79) was meant to be a WSB-type affair, but ended up as a one-make series for TZ750s when Yamaha homologated 200. TT Formula 1 – started in 1977 – mixed 1000cc four-strokes with 500cc two-strokes and was mostly held on road circuits that GP riders were too scared to ride. But it ended up being a prototype class dominated by the RVF750 and was replaced by WSB.
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e y e w i t n e s s
The first-ever World Superbike race by John Westlake PhotograPhy by bike archive
t h e w i t n e s s e s RogeR BuRnett The GP rider. Was riding a Honda in 500GPs – beating the likes of Eddie Lawson. Lost his ride and landed a Honda Britain RC30 in World Supers. Now manages James Toseland.
Paul Iddon The F1 rider. Came second in the 1987 F1 World title on a Skoal Bandit and then raced a privateer Bimota in WSB. Now famous for being dad of world class supermoto rider Christian.
adRIan goRst The paid mechanic. Worked for Steve Parrish’s team, spannering a Yamaha-powered Bimota YB4 for Keith Huewen. Is now chief mechanic for Cal Crutchlow in BSB.
ChRIs PIke The kid. At 21, he got his chance as a race mechanic, looking after Andy McGladerry’s Suzuki GSX-R750. Is now chief mechanic for Leon Haslam’s Fireblade in BSB.
JulIan RydeR The journo. After working for mags including Bike, Ryder was editing Road Racer magazine in 1988. Now a Eurosport commentator, prolific beard grower, author and racing sage.
On a dreary April morning in 1988, 15,000 spectators gathered at Donington Park to watch the first-ever World Superbike championship. Few would have predicted WSB’s rise to glamour and success. The Japanese factories left WSB to privateers, but Ducati and Bimota waded in with factory teams. American-style superbikes were getting done over by proper race bikes, which were blowing up because none had sufficient development. It was carnage. But it was entertaining carnage... Roger Burnett: I’d come from a year in the Rothmans Honda GP team so I felt confident. I felt I was better than most of the people in the championship and that I had the potential to win it. Chris Pike: I was a volunteer – I worked as a mechanic for free. I got free beer and food and that was it. Adrian Gorst: It was my first weekend working with Keith [Huewen – ex-GP rider, now commentator] who was riding for Loctite Yamaha. We were using Bimota YB4s. The new Eurolantic race [like the Transatlantic, but Europeans v Americans] was on the same weekend and Keith fell off in that and dislocated his shoulder, so he was riding hurt. It must have been the
Easter weekend because I remember giving him an Easter egg – that was probably the highlight of his weekend. CP: It was my introduction to racing. Being 21, I thought I knew it all, but obviously I didn’t. It certainly opened my eyes to the world, hanging out with that lot. I’d hardly been out of Herefordshire before going to Donington, but two weeks later I was driving out of Budapest with the rest of the teams and everyone was throwing food at each other’s vans. Paul Iddon: Until Christmas I was going to be in the Bimota factory team. Everything was agreed. But the Italians strung me along until Stephane Mertens paid for his ride – about £100,000 was the rumour. I was gutted. That was the bike that had won the F1 championship the year before and it was the bike to win the World Superbike championship on. CP: We were running a GSX-R750. We had a corner of a garage at Donington, which we shared with eight other teams. It was like being on a trackday today. PI: A privateer with a good package could be competitive with not a lot of money. My team was me, a mechanic and my girlfriend. But that was normal. In those days you decided you wanted to go racing and got on with it. You had your bike and your van and went. RB: It was a great start, because it took racing off the roads. The F1 was in effect a road championship that not many people wanted to contend so there was no quality and depth of field. At the
what happened next?
After Donington there were eight more rounds of WSB in 1988, with Fred Merkel ending up overall winner on the Honda RC30. The series was a success. The idea of two races a day turned out to be inspired, not only because riders with problems in the first race could make amends in the second, but also because fans had fewer support races to sit through. And it wasn’t dominated by any one manufacturer or rider. Besides Honda, Bimota and Ducati winning races, Kawasaki won in Hungary and Suzuki followed in Japan (where race two was won by a certain Mick Doohan). The second year was tricky, with sponsor problems, but the rider quality was sky-high and the series scraped through with Merkel winning again on the RC30. After that life got easier in terms of sponsorship, and harder if you weren’t on a Ducati... www.bikemagazine.co.uk noVembeR 08 55
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Holy water> Clothes in a neat pile on the beach, a mile of deep water and no one else around. My mid-life crisis starts here By steve rose PhotograPhy By chiPPy wood
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Daft.
Choppers Daft bikes
Because if bikes were just transport, we’d all be riding Honda Deauvilles
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Variety, they say, is the spice of life. And life doesn’t get much more varied than a sportsbike at one side of the garage and this mad chopper at the other. The perfect garage? Only when there’s a TDR250 as well. My first chop was an accident. A part-exchange against a ropey GS1000 I was struggling to sell. It was crap and brilliant at the same time. Hilarious to ride, always entertaining to turn up on, but badly put together and occasionally dangerous. But I grew up seeing cool kids who I wanted to be like riding choppers. And it stuck. Maybe it’s me, but I never got the ‘sportsbikes are cool, choppers are lame’ thing. All bikes are cool (well, most of them) and variety is the spice of life. Chopper number two was Ramessess II. Bought for £1700, aged 39 from a 42-year-old fella who’d bought it aged 39, from a 41year-old. Get the picture? This bike had been the expression of a load of male mid-life moments and, boy, did it make me happy. Built in the early ’80s as a show bike, Ramessess was very much of its time. CB750K6 engine, very long, very low and with a beautiful crackly paintjob, the patina of a bike with a history and a teeny prism tank that held just under a gallon. Springer forks and tiller bars made the handling interesting for the first few corners and you had to approach T-junctions at an angle because of the length of the forks. The tank range was 34 miles. But I loved the attitude, noise and effort it took to ride it. Every journey was a riot – no tassels, no club patches, no pretending to be anything other than me, having the time of my life. And because it had been properly built, it kept on going. Summer commuting and the odd (very odd) Sunday ride. Always alone (no kidding), I even set off to do a lap of the old Bike 440 test route before realising it would probably take two days. I sold it, aged 42 to... yes, you guessed. And I miss it like mad.
>>CHOPPER MYTHS BUSTED
They’re all owned by back street heroes Er, no. Many of the blokes I know who ride them are as ordinary as they come. Maybe with more facial hair and faded tattoos. And there are plenty of middle-aged, middleclass, middle managers spending money on professionally built bikes. Ten years ago they were buying Ducatis. They don’t handle Not strictly true. They do handle, but in the way a chopper handles, not a sportsbike. It takes a while to acclimatise and some preparation for corners is required, but on most of them you’ll spend far more time worrying about the electrics and carburation. People will think I’m gay Maybe if you buy a Suzuki Intruder or Virago 535, but on a proper one-off chop most people will just think that you smell funny, still listen to Hawkwind and eat bats. I’ll have to learn that funny handshake... Don’t worry. Make up your own, act with confidence and hold your nerve. ...and go to rallies It’s only a bike. If you want a change of life and weekends in fields, then go for it. Otherwise, just carry on as normal. They’re desperately uncomfortable Obviously, but probably no worse for the average mid-life sufferer than a Daytona 675.
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Ramessess managed 96.5mph, 0-60 in 9.7secs and a 51.6mph lap of Bruntingthorpe’s handling circuit. Professional Stig-a-like Bruce managed three laps, a forced smile and then disappeared for a lie down
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Daft.
Daft bikes
Turbo
Hayabusa Bike’s road test editor Mike Armitage has ridden everything. But this is the most bonkers of the lot
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Summer 2002 and a colleague and me are at RAF hardening as it lunges for the horizon, lifting the front and Woodbridge in Suffolk. Built for World War II, the painting black lines through the first four gears. airfield was designed to accept stricken bombers Today isn’t our day. The wind’s not playing ball, but watching returning from blowing chunks out of mainland Jack hanging off the side of bike like an enthusiastic sidecar Europe, and so is suitably enormous: the 2.2-mile passenger through the speed trap at 217mph only reinforces my runway has an additional 500-yard grassy run-off at each end, respect for this ballistic motorcycle. I find bike and rider in the and it’s five times the width of a regular landing strip. And, makeshift paddock and ask what it’s like trying to use that much because it’s a standby strip, should the Space Shuttle need to make performance. ‘Here, try it yourself,’ isn’t the expected reply. an emergency landing, the surface is maintained in pristine, Fast? Yes. As devastatingly overwhelming as you’d expect; a gravel-free condition. sense-warping, boundary-shifting phenomenon that wheelies in All of which makes it ideal for today’s assault top gear at 5000rpm on just half throttle. At on the Elvington Production Records. These are 130mph. The sheer force required to simply hold The exhaust exits the proper, ACU-sanctioned land speed deal, the on is surpassed only by the extraordinary where it should, it’s average of flat-out runs in two directions with acceleration that devours this enormous airfield. not stretched out like speeds for the assorted standing and flying It’s like trying to ride your road bike flat out a limo, and the quarter miles and kilometres measured by round your back garden. fuelling is as smooth serious-looking official types. It isn’t the outright performance that makes and predictable as We’ve an eclectic assortment of metal, the biggest impression, though. Twenty years it should be gadding about on everything from Gilera 180 ago when they started to take off, aftermarket scooter to Suzuki GSX1400 and Kawasaki turbos were invariably borrowed from other ZX-12R. But although it’s warming to personally beat four 750cc vehicles or too big for the application, lumbering bikes with nasty records on a GSX-R750, it’s the British National Outright record fuelling, all-or-nothing response and lumpy running. Stubby, we all want to see tumble. open, side-exit exhausts only further hindered usability. Legal? This is the Big One. Already held by Jack Frost of Holeshot Reliable? No. Racing at a staggering two-way average of 222.19mph, he wants to But Jack’s Hayabusa is as usable as the stock bike. The exhaust go faster still on his 400bhp Hayabusa. Not only that, the bike’s exits where it should, it’s not stretched out like a limo, and the running 19 tooth and 34 tooth rear sprockets to give a theoretical fuelling is as smooth and predictable as it should be. Keep revs 250mph, with a favourable breeze. And observed from the safety below 5000rpm, go easy with the throttle, and it’s a softy you of the sidelines it’s a gloriously violent spectacle. Driven cleanly could ride to work everyday. It’s like any bike really – it goes as fast off the line at low revs, the turbo Suzuki becomes a loosely-guided as you ask it to. brute as the motor hits boost, revs spiralling and exhaust note But when you do ask, it’s like nothing you’re ever ridden.
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Daft.
‘Listen lads, I’ve got a
idea’
great
History is littered with them. The wide-eyed we-knowbest products that were, in hindsight, so daft they should never have made it beyond the marketers Venn diagrams. Bike celebrates the best of the worst
Doesn’t matter how good the bike was (and truth be told it wasn’t that bad for a Japanese cruiser), the idea of calling anything an Intruder is patently a bad one. Suzuki have traditionally had the most comical names: Freewind, Address, Van Van, Tempter and who could forget the slower-than-walking 650cc single-cylinder, the Savage. Oh, you had, sorry for bringing it up again.
>> Suzuki RE5
‘I know, let’s build a touring bike using a radical new engine that’s less reliable than a two stroke, weighs more than a four stroke and will cost a fortune.’ Back in the mid-70s Suzuki needed an edge. Their two-strokes were past it and their four strokes were a couple of years down the line. The RE5 was their take on the heavyweight, tourer – an answer to Honda’s all-new Gold Wing. Rotary engines have been the future of motorcycling almost as often as hub-steered front ends. But the RE5 told the real story. Expensive to produce, hard to maintain, slower than American football and never reliable enough at the kind of performance levels we wanted from a road legal bike
>> Yamaha BT1100 Bulldog
Bike’s first law of motorcycle marketing: never build a road bike and boast about how the engine came from a cruiser. Simple. Asking mainstream riders to even tolerate cruisers is like giving Norman Tebbitt an invite to the NUM reunion dinner. The Bulldog concept bike was gorgeous, the production version,
powered by a Virago engine was bland, flaccid and more expensive than a Suzuki Bandit 1200. Five years later Yamaha did it again with the MT-01. ‘It’s a £10,000 sports bike using the engine from a cruiser, boys.’ Cue tumbleweed and three years heavy discounting. What they should have done was launch the MT (which is a great bike) first at a smarter price and then launch the cruiser version as a hot-rod muscle bike using the engine from an MT-01.
>> Tailgunner exhausts
Aftermarket end cans with a spinning tail section that resembles a machine gun in action (see p175). Surely as naff as anything can possibly be? Yes, probably. Except there is one saving grace. Riding with a set of tailgunners brightens up the day of a large percentage of those you overtake on the way to work. If I can brighten the day of half a dozen people every ride, I’m well on the way to a sainthood. If being the coolest kid in school matters, stay well away, but if your life is one big giggle, buy some.
>> Aftermarket motorcycle alarms
Let’s make a product that buggers up your bike’s wiring, needs a GCSE in lateral thinking to use and is fitted to a vehicle that’ll change hands every 18 months. So the third owner has a system with only one key fob, no instruction manual and a bunch of corroded fittings where it was installed by a monkey. It’ll go off in all eventualities, except when someone tries to nick your bike because most thieves know that it’ll be fitted under the seat and a
illustration by cameron law
>> Suzuki Intruder
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Giant killers Ease of use, character, style and above all the ability to slay on averagely ridden GSX-R on Sunday morning. Mild-mannered? I don’t think so. Honda’s Hornet faces Aprilia’s hi-tech Shiver, Ducati’s new Monster 696 and Triumph’s immensely popular Street Triple By Martin Fitz-GiBBons PhotoGraPhy By ChiPPy Wood
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Clockwise from above: crashed? Get a mutant replacement ride here; the space for speed; beautiful Castellane; hairpin number 1645 on the N85
the route napoleon
The best riding road in the world, in an area of unsurpassed natural beauty, running down to the Cote d’Azure. What’re you waiting for? The Route Napoleon (N85) runs between Grenoble on the western edge of the French Alps to Cannes on the Cote d’Azure, covering some 200 miles as it does so. Opened to traffic in 1932, it earned its name over 100 years earlier when Napoleon Bonaparte returned from exile and led 1200 troops through the Alps to march on Louis XVIII. Ride it and it’s easy to imagine columns of weary soldiers winding their way through the hard terrain, their tunics soaked in sweat and thick with dust. Now beautifully paved from top to bottom, the N85 is used as a scenic alternative route – traffic more concerned with arrival times and making progress uses the A51 motorway. AA Route Planner puts the journey time between Grenoble and Cannes at a full four hours and very little of that’s chaff – it’s a full day at a leisurely pace, or the most intense afternoon you could wish for.
As the last kilometres of motorway tick down on the approach to Grenoble, I can barely contain myself. After a morning of straight lines, to be in the mountains at last is a huge relief. The air’s still warm but the altitude brings breezes and a welcome cool. The first few miles of the N85 are a taster of what’s in store, the road climbing immediately in a fantastic sequence of third-gear corners with a crawler lane on the right for the slow stuff. Careening around lumbering Renault Meganes and Scenics, the last of this morning’s motorway blues are banished. I stop for lunch in the mountain town of La Mure and spend an hour trying to take in the splendour of the landscape in full bloom. On the bike again and the GSX-R600 and I are soon completely immersed in the N85. The variety of corners, cambers and speeds is astonishing, the challenge of the unyielding terrain considerable. If you love to ride, to have to really think about every move you make, every line, every gearshift and throttle movement, then this is heaven. In the wet and cold, or at night in a hurry, it’d be hell – as each of countless corners demand to be judged perfectly. Overtakes must be planned like an assassination. Other than for fuel, I can’t bring myself to stop. I know I should, to rest my brain, to drink water and to take pictures – why rush through a place like this? – but I can’t. Every time I do, the need to ride again has me pacing restlessly. I manage an hour wandering the mountain town of Gap but soon momentum forces me on. It’s
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