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You know one of the things I love about World Superbike? In recent years, it's usually been the first major roadracing event of the year. In the depths of late February at my northern latitude, race bikes circulating the beautiful undulations of Phillip Island in Australia's late summer is the best possible promise of spring here on the other side of the world.
There are things I don't like about WSBK, such as Dorna's treatment of the series as second-class to MotoGP, the difficulty of following the series here in the United States, and the lack of a U.S. round, but last year the series offered great racing and intriguing storylines, and 2023 promises the same, if not better. The Superbikes are back, testing for two days to start the week at Phillip Island, where they'll race for real this weekend.
Three champs go to battle
While other series gave us two-way battles in 2022, World Superbike gave us a title fight among three riders of different nationalities riding three different motorcycles. The protagonists were Kawasaki Racing Team's Jonathan Rea, a six-time champion and the winningest rider in Superbike history; Pata Yamaha's Toprak Razgatlioğlu, the 2021 champion; and Aruba.it Racing Ducati's Álvaro Bautista, who finished first in the end to get his first WSBK championship. Those three won all 36 races in 2022.
Of course the biggest and most intriguing story of 2022 was Bautista's return to Ducati. Bautista made a huge splash in 2019 when he moved from MotoGP to WSBK and won 11 races at the start of the season. Naysayers claimed it just showed that the Superbike field couldn't measure up to MotoGP talent, but that talk was premature. Bautista suffered a series of crashes while Rea chipped away at his lead. In the end, Rea easily won his fifth title in 2019.
By his own admission, Bautista left Ducati at the end of 2019 not really understanding how it went so wrong. He moved to Honda, which is where Superbike riders go to watch their careers wither. After two winless years, Bautista returned to Ducati last year and came out on top in the terrific battle between the three contenders.
The excellent video below, "Álvaro Bautista: The Return," tells the story of a wiser, more prepared Bautista reuniting with the Panigale to great success. If you didn't follow the 2022 season, it also provides a good round-by-round recap, and it shows the kind of close racing and fierce competition that make WSBK, to my mind, arguably the most fun roadracing series to watch.
Today, all the forces are aligned to push your attention first to MotoGP, to keep it perched top in your mind as the pinnacle of the sport. But if you're just looking for the best racing, WSBK makes a strong argument.
The other contenders
The first group to look at for riders who can potentially break into the level of the top three are their teammates. Michael Ruben Rinaldi at Ducati, Andrea Locatelli at Yamaha, and Alex Lowes at Kawasaki finished fourth, fifth, and sixth respectively in the 2022 standings behind their teammates. While Bautista had the fastest single lap in the two days of testing this week, Locatelli and Rinaldi were second and third.
The other two manufacturers, Honda and BMW, were unable to reach the level of the top three in 2022. Scott Redding on a Rokit BMW Motorrad M 1000 RR was the best finisher last year who wasn't on a Ducati, Kawasaki, or Yamaha, and he stood on three podiums and finished eighth in points.
And then there's the American.
A pivotal year for Garrett Gerloff
Garrett Gerloff has been racing Yamahas it seems like forever. His 2016 and 2017 MotoAmerica Supersport championships came on a YZF-R6, his MotoAmerica Superbike race wins on a YZF-R1, and his six World Superbike podium finishes on an R1, and even before that he got his start on Yamahas. After three years with the GYTR GRT Yamaha team, Gerloff has switched to the Bonovo Action BMW team to ride an M 1000 RR in 2023.
If anyone tells you that the top motorcycle racers aren't really athletes because the machine is doing all the work, share with them this video from Gerloff about his current training and nutrition regime. How hard would you work to lose seven pounds (when you're already at 6% body fat) in hopes of gaining a fraction of a second under acceleration and braking?
There's no question of Gerloff's determination, especially after watching the video, but it's also true he has a difficult task ahead of him. He's on an independent team riding a motorcycle that has not yet proven to be a race winner. The season did not get off to a favorable start when his first test on the BMW took place almost entirely on a wet track due to rain. At this week's two-day test, the BMW showed good top speed but Gerloff, Redding, and Michael van der Mark all turned in best lap times that were nearly identical and put them just outside the top 10, perhaps suggesting that may be the best there is to get out of the BMW at this stage of development.
A U.S. rider hasn't won a premier-class roadracing world championship since Ben Spies won the World Superbike title in 2009 and Gerloff is currently the only U.S. rider competing at that level. Rightly or wrongly, his success or lack thereof, along with that of others who have made the jump to the world championship level, can influence whether the mostly Euro-centric teams look to the United States for future talent.
But while Gerloff is the only U.S. rider in World Superbike, he is just one of three MotoAmerica alumni. After a year in which he finished second in the MotoAmerica Medallia Superbike series behind Jake Gagne but was often frustrated with his Ducati Panigale V4R, Danilo Petrucci is racing with the Barni Spark Racing Team on a Ducati in WSBK this year. Petrucci will have completed the unprecedented sweep of racing in MotoGP, the Dakar Rally, MotoAmerica, and World Superbike in three years. It's a homecoming, of sorts, as Petrucci raced for the same team in the Superstock 1000 class in 2011.
The other MotoAmerica alumnus is Loris Baz, Gerloff's teammate at Bonovo. Baz raced in MotoAmerica in 2021, recording nine podium finishes but no wins. He returned to WSBK in 2022 to ride for the Bonovo team, where Gerloff now joins him.
Another intriguing newcomer to WSBK this year is 2021 Moto2 world champion Remy Gardner, moving to WSBK after a difficult rookie year in MotoGP. Gardner is riding for the GYTR GRT Yamaha team, essentially taking Gerloff's old seat alongside two-time World Supersport champion Dominique Aegerter.
How to watch World Superbike
Following World Superbike in the United States hasn't been easy for a long time and it's generally trending toward more difficult. NBC says it plans to broadcast six of the 12 rounds this year. NBC typically shows taped versions of the Sunday full race and the Superpole sprint race, but not the entire weekend of action. To see all of the races you need to subscribe to WSBK's Videopass, which costs €69.90 for the season.
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