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Two of the biggest names riding motorcycles that aren't the ones on which they built their winning reputations. The defending champion riding injured. New rules, including a partial step toward penalizing lighter riders by making them add ballast. An impressively fast rookie, new talent coming in from outside the series, and even a new class for women riders only.
There's a lot to consider in looking ahead to the 2024 Superbike World Championship as racing begins this weekend with the Grand Ridge Brewery Australian Round at the spectacular Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit. With so many changes, this season will certainly bring some surprises.
WSBK: You can't tell the riders without a program
One combination dominates the WSBK record books: Jonathan Rea and the Kawasaki ZX-10R. Once he got on the Ninja, Rea ran off a string of six consecutive championships from 2015 through 2020 and shattered Carl Fogarty's all-time wins record. But even the most successful pairing in championship history doesn't last forever, and for 2024 Rea, now 37, has switched to the Pata Prometeon Yamaha team to see if a fresh start can bring him one more title.
Just as Rea was known for riding a green bike, it seemed normal to expect three things from Toprak Razgatlıoğlu: an exciting riding style that would have him consistently near the front, the best celebratory stoppies in the paddock, and riding a Yamaha YZF-R1. Razgatlıoğlu has made an equally bold switch for 2024, riding for the Rokit BMW team on the M 1000 RR, a machine that has shown potential in race trim but has not yet proven it can consistently contend for race wins.
Why are two top riders leaving the teams where they found so much success? Because they're searching for a way to catch Álvaro Bautista. Bautista returned to Ducati and won the championship the last two years. Last year, he rode his Aruba.it Ducati Panigale V4R to 27 wins in 36 races and took the title by a 76-point margin over Razgatlıoğlu. Seeing Bautista win so many races pushed Rea and Razgatlıoğlu to leave the comfort zone and take on a new challenge for 2024.
Will switching horses pay off? Before we speculate, let's quickly look at some of the other changes happening in 2024.
New rules, new faces, and a league of their own
Bautista's winning ways reignited one of the old debates in roadracing. The rules set minimum weights for the motorcycles, but should there be a minimum for the combination of rider and machine? Should the rules compensate for the advantage in braking and acceleration a lighter rider has? WSBK is taking a step in that direction for 2024 with a new formula, voted on by the teams and approved by organizer Dorna, that will require the lightest riders to add some ballast to their race bikes.
The rule sets a standard weight of 80 kilograms (176 pounds) for the rider with leathers and all protective gear in place. Riders who weigh less than that will have to add half the difference to their bikes, up to a maximum of 10 kilograms (22 pounds). So a rider who weighs 70 kilograms (154 pounds) geared up would have to add five kilograms (11 pounds). Bautista is one of the smaller riders on the grid and his team has reported that about six kilograms of ballast has been added to his Panigale V4R to comply with the new rules. Bautista has also altered his training somewhat. Riders usually train in a way that builds strength but not bulk, but in Bautista's case, adding muscle bulk is a good thing, because it means less dead weight that must be added to the motorcycle.
Is it a fair rule? There are arguments both ways. On one hand, the series regularly tinkers with rules to maintain competitiveness among different kinds of motorcycles, such as setting different rev limit restrictions, so why not use the same "balancing formula" approach to the rider-motorcycle combination? On the other hand, an inevitable part of sports, especially at the professional level, is that some competitors always have natural-born advantages. That's why they're playing, for example, in Major League Baseball instead of the Sunday recreational softball league. Does the NBA impose a rule saying that any center who is more than seven feet tall has to wear lead shoes to offset his height advantage?
My personal perspective is that the weight issue is overblown. Sure, lighter weight provides a tiny advantage in acceleration and braking, but it also means the rider has less weight to shift around to alter the center of gravity to improve handling. And roadracing is so much more complicated than getting on and off the gas, especially in an age where aerodynamics and tire performance at target temperatures are critical. We've seen cases (example: Dani Pedrosa in MotoGP) where light weight turned out to be a disadvantage.
Another invisible rule change for 2024 is a requirement that 40% of the fuel must be from non-fossil sources, as World Superbike, like MotoGP, moves toward fuel from sustainable sources.
Two newcomers to the series and one young rookie will be interesting to watch. After vying for championships in Moto2, the Elf Marc VDS Racing Team and rider Sam Lowes have packed up their paddock and will be racing a Ducati Panigale V4R in WSBK this year, joining Sam's twin brother Alex, who is back for another season on the Kawasaki Racing Team. Another intriguing entry to watch will be Andrea Iannone on a Ducati V4R for Team GoEleven. The former MotoGP Ducati rider and race winner is returning to competition after a four-year suspension for use of an anabolic steroid that was on the prohibited list under anti-doping rules and he's sporting an appropriate message on his helmet.
But the newcomer who has raised the most eyebrows in preseason testing is 2023 World Supersport champion Nicolò Bulega, who joins Bautista on the Aruba.IT Racing Ducati team. Coming off a season in WorldSSP where he won 16 of 24 races, Bulega has been atop or near the top of the time sheets at every pre-season test session, despite being new to Superbikes. (More on those test results later.)
Another new interesting addition to World Superbike this year is an entirely new class, the FIM Women's Circuit Racing World Championship. The series will consist of six rounds beginning in June, with one race on Saturday and one on Sunday at each race weekend. Racers will compete on identical race-prepped Yamaha YZF-R7s. A 24-rider field has been selected for WorldWCR and the early favorite has to be 2018 World Supersport 300 champion Ana Carrasco. There's one rider from the United States in the field, Mallory Dobbs. U.S. race fans have probably seen her competing in MotoAmerica support classes.
What we've seen in pre-season testing
Turning back to the premier class, what can we expect to see in 2024? Bautista, Razgatlıoğlu, and Rea won 35 of 36 races in 2023, but it seems unlikely that 2024 will be a three-man-only show. An even bigger question than how Rea and Razgatlıoğlu will adapt to their new rides is the issue of Bautista's fitness. He crashed in a post-season test last year but still went on to compete as a wild-card entry at the Malaysia round of MotoGP, where he finished nearly last, unable to ride the bike properly in lefthand corners. Afterwards, further medical exams revealed he had suffered more damage than originally thought in the testing crash. Displaced discs in his spinal column were causing weakness and pain in his left arm, and the problems dragged on through the winter.
Even now, months later, the rider who easily won the title last year is still far from fully fit, and pre-season testing shows it. Bautista's best lap times left him outside the top 10 at previous tests, and at the final test this week in Phillip Island, at a track he favors, he did creep into the top 10, but not the top five.
Of last year's three dominant riders, Razgatlıoğlu has clearly looked strongest, putting the BMW atop the field in a way no one else has been able to do so far in WorldSBK. Not only has he been able to lay down a fast single lap to grab the headlines, but he has also shown consistent pace when doing race simulations. In Tuesday's test, six riders broke the lap record for a Superbike at Phillip Island, which has been newly resurfaced and provides more grip, and Razgatlıoğlu was the fastest of all.
Rea is having a harder time coming to terms with Razgatlıoğlu's old Yamaha than Razgatlıoğlu is having with the BMW. He needed the full day of testing time at Phillip Island this week, but his day was interrupted by a mid-day high-side crash that left him bruised and unable to ride at full strength the rest of the day. His teammate, Andrea Locatelli, was one of three riders able to break into the 1:28 range on the grippy new surface.
The rider who has most consistently challenged or outpaced Razgatlıoğlu in most of the test sessions has not been Rea or Bautista, but Bulega. Showing he deserves the ride on the factory Ducati, the Superbike rookie has topped several sessions and consistently been in the top three. He finished Tuesday's test day with the second-best time, less than a tenth of a second behind Razgatlıoğlu.
Garrett Gerloff carries the flag as the only U.S. rider in the premier class of a roadracing world championship. Entering his fifth year in WSBK, he's still looking for his first win and a breakthrough season. Last year was something of a disappointment for the Texan, because while he got his first ever World Superbike pole position, it was also his first season without a podium finish.
With the top 12 riders all finishing the last test within one second of Razgatlıoğlu's leading time, it seems likely that 2024 will see a much wider variety of riders on the podium than 2023 did.
At the latitudes where I live, motorcycling joys are few in late February, but seeing Superbikes circulating the dramatic and beautiful curves of Phillip Island is a great way to begin believing that spring will truly arrive, delivering me from another winter of my discontent. Racing is just hours away.
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