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Jonathan Rea, the winningest rider in Superbike World Championship history, is looking strong. He has a new teammate at the leading Kawasaki Racing Team. And a WSBK rookie on a Ducati — who's very un-rookie-like, because of a long resume that includes MotoGP — is poised to present a strong and intriguing challenge to Rea's domination.
No, we didn't accidentally republish the 2019 WSBK season preview. But it's true that while the names have changed, the story lines are familiar as the 2020 Superbike World Championship begins this weekend with the Yamaha Finance Australian Round at Phillip Island.
While there are new teams, new motorcycles and new riders in the WSBK paddock this year, a new U.S. rider to watch and reason to believe there are more contenders with a shot at wins than in recent years, any World Superbike story still has to start with the man from Northern Ireland.
Kawasaki and Rea, the most successful combination in WSBK history
Rea has obliterated all the old records in WSBK. With 88 wins, he has far surpassed Carl Fogarty's old record. His run of five consecutive championships is unprecedented. But perhaps the most impressive stat is one that's a bit more obscure. Since he moved to Kawasaki, Rea has finished on the podium in 90.1 percent of all WSBK races.
It was that consistency that saved him last year. Álvaro Bautista came to Australia a year ago and stunned everyone by winning all three races on the Aruba.IT Racing Ducati Panigale V4 R. Bautista didn't just win from the start. He won by gaps of more than 10 seconds and he kept on dominating, winning the first 11 races of the season. Many thought the championship was a done deal.
But Rea was calmly and steadily doing his thing, finishing on the podium consistently and never giving up. When Bautista began struggling and crashing, Rea just motored on and came back from an 53-point deficit to wrap up his fifth championship two rounds early. It was an astounding comeback.
For 2020, Rea has a new teammate at KRT, former British Superbike champion Alex Lowes, and a new threat with a MotoGP history. That's Scott Redding, who won the British Superbike championship last year after losing his spot in MotoGP. The BSB title earned him a promotion by Ducati to the WSBK team, where he joins team veteran Chaz Davies and replaces Bautista.
Redding has flirted with the top of the time sheets in some of the preseason tests and as a general rule he's a rider who does not lack for confidence. Redding and Davies, who has lots of experience on the Ducati, are the obvious choices to provide competition for Rea, but there are some other riders who have the look of being poised for a potential breakthrough.
A breakout year for Yamaha?
Yamaha has typically filled out the top five in WSBK in recent years, but has been unable to consistently push Kawasaki or surpass Ducati. The YZF-R1s will be interesting to watch in 2020, however.
Moving up to the Pata Yamaha WorldSBK Official Team for 2020 is Turkish rider Toprak Razgatlioğlu. It's always fun to see a young rider cross that threshold from being fast to being a constant threat to win. It's a sudden leap forward that some riders make and it happened for Razgatlioğlu in the second half of 2019. For the season, he recorded 10 podium appearances and two race wins, and eight of those podium finishes were in the last five rounds. He'll team with the more experienced Michael van der Mark, also a proven race winner.
Another rider to watch who made a big step forward in 2019 is Garrett Gerloff, who makes the jump from MotoAmerica to the world stage. In his second year on the Monster Energy/Yamalube/Yamaha Factory Racing superbike in MotoAmerica, Gerloff found his stride the second half of the season. After a breakthrough first win at Laguna Seca, he was at the front of the field the rest of the year. A mechanical DNF and a crash cost him a shot at the title, but his surge was enough to close the deal on a ride in WSBK. He joined the GRT Yamaha WorldSBK Junior Team alongside Federico Caricasulo, who finished second in the World Supersport championship last year.
Honda hopes a new CBR will deliver it from WSBK obscurity
Honda has not won a World Superbike race since Nicky Hayden's victory in the rain in Sepang in 2016. That has been an uncharacteristic stretch of mediocrity for a marque that built its reputation in large part on racing and winning. For 2020, Honda has a new bike and a new team. But will it be enough?
Preseason testing can be misleading, but what we've seen so far suggests that Honda is not there yet. One of the reasons Bautista found success immediately in World Superbike last year was because his Panigale V4 R was similar in some ways to the V-four-engine MotoGP machines he'd ridden. Now he has to adapt to the inline-four CBR1000RR-R with its different weight distribution and power characteristics.
The fifth manufacturer is BMW, with 2013 champion Tom Sykes and Eugene Laverty riding for the BMW Motorrad WorldSBK Team. It's possible to imagine any of the factory teams for the five manufacturers winning a race.
Can Redding and the Ducati challenge Rea in a sustained way that Bautista couldn't? Will one of the Yamaha riders make the next step up and start winning races regularly? Can Bautista and Haslam sort out the new CBR1000RR-R and give it results that are as good as it looks? Can an American rider finally secure a long-term future in World Superbike?
My favorite thing about February is that it's the month when the roadracing drought ends, Superbikes take to the beautiful curves of Phillip Island and we start getting answers to questions like those.
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