How wsbk started

[Cajun]

A race track in California in the early 1970s. A young racer called Steve McLaughlin is wondering what to do. Like most of his contemporaries he races a Yamaha two-stroke, but as his father is a Honda and Ducati dealer his sponsorship has dried up. The Big Bore Production class, started by the AFM club to get away from the Yamaha-dominated pure-race-bike classes, is about to go out and McLaughlin notices that everyone in the pit lane has stopped to watch the Honda CB750s, Ducati V-twins and Guzzi Le Mans do battle with the Norton Gang on their hot Commandos. The seeds of a big idea are sown.

In a surprisingly short space of time Big Bore Production would grow into a worldwide racing class called Superbike. It would attract factory teams from all of Japan's big four manufacturers, completely turn around the commercial fortunes of the ailing Ducati factory, make stars of its leading men, like the charismatic Californian Fred Merkel, and turn Carl Fogarty into not just Britain's best-known bike racer since Barry Sheene, but a genuine household name.
As with most things, what America does today the rest of the world does tomorrow. And so it was with Superbikes. The American tradition was to race bikes based on road-going (or 'production') machinery, even the American Motorcycle Association's Grand National Championship, the majority of which was raced on dirt ovals rather than tarmac. Harley-Davidson's and Indian's factory teams duelled through the 1920s and '30s in the top division, Class A, but gradually Class C for non-factory bikes (first introduced specifically for amateur riders in 1933) took over as the most popular formula.

This is why Indian built 50 special 648cc Scouts in 1948 just to stay competitive; they even won Daytona with one in 1954, a year after the factory had ceased production. This is why Harley-Davidson stayed a power in the land for so long with their antiquated side-valve motors. This is why Triumph won the Daytona 200 with a Tiger 100, why various homologation specials were built by Norton and Matchless to try and get their Manx and G50 racers into American competition, and why in the heyday of the British industry the Norton Commando was the privateer's weapon of choice. It was quite natural for American riders to race the new generation of bikes coming out of Europe and Japan in the late '60s and early '70s.

The word 'Superbike' had been coined to describe that quantum jump in road-going technology, the Honda CB750, when it was unveiled at the Tokyo Show of 1968. By the early '70s, that taste-free decade's tendency to stick the word 'super' on the front of everything had become a habit, and anyway it was better than Formula 750 or Formula 1. McLaughlin remembers that the first race he saw actually billed as a Superbike event was at Laguna Seca in 1973, promoted by Gavin Trippe and Bruce Cox, who would go on to invent and promote the Transatlantic Trophy. Many Australaian racers were visiting the States at this time and McLaughlin recalls spending a lot of time with Warren Willing, who told him about an Australian class called Superbike, full of Kawasaki 750s, that stopped in 1971. They talked a lot and gradually McLaughlin formed the basic outlines of the new class's regulations. As the rider's representative on the AMA (American Motorcyclist Association) for eight years, he was well placed to put his ideas into practice, and together with tuner Jerry Branch he drafted the first set of Superbike rules for the AMA.

The trouble was that the word 'Superbike' meant different things in different countries. In the USA the class started out as Production Superbike, becoming simply Superbike in 1976 when it became an American Championship class. The first AMA Championship Superbike race was run at Daytona as a support class to the main event. McLaughlin, already well on the way to earning his 'Motormouth' nickname, won the race on a BMW R90S in a photo-finish with his team-mate, expatriate Englishman Reg Pridmore, with American journalist Cook Neilson third on his legendary Ducati 750SS, the 'California Hot Rod'. Neilson won the race in 1977, but the Japanese bikes would soon take over.

In the UK the Superbike label was attached to a championship that allowed the works two-stroke triples from Suzuki and Kawasaki to compete, but excluded the overbored 350cc TZ Yamahas that had a habit of winning everything they were allowed to enter—including the Daytona 200. Two nations divided by a common language.

British fans got their first look at real Superbikes in the Transatlantic Trophy events of the mid and late 1970s. A team of Americans would visit Britain for a series of six-match races on three different circuits over the Easter weekend and pull in enormous crowds. The top Grand Prix men - Barry Sheene, Kenny Roberts - would be at the front on GP two-strokes, but there in mid-field was the American Wes Cooley on a big, high-barred Yoshimura Suzuki Superbike based on the road-going GS1000S. It wasn't competitive with the two-strokes, but it was faster than any production-based bike had a right to be, and it sure looked good. McLaughlin also won at Daytona on one of them.


It's important to realize that there had been other World Championship formula loosely based around the idea of a big-bike class to run separately from the established Grands Prix. The first shot at this was Formula 750, which ran as a World Championship from 1977 to '79. Although intended as a series based on production machinery as proposed by the ACU (Auto Cycle Union, the governing body of the sport in the UK), which saw it as a way of getting the British Triumph/BSA triples into World Championship racing, it turned into a Yamaha TZ750 series when Yamaha made more than the required homologation limit of 200 bikes. Neither Suzuki nor Kawasaki contested the full series as factory teams—indeed, in the first year only two of the 47 points-scorers weren't on TZ750s! The series provided good racing, albeit in some strange places, but it never had the confidence of the public or of the sport's international governing body, the FIM. Strangely, it did do one thing that the non-GP series had always been intended to do: give privateers a chance. In two of its three years, the F750 title went to a privateer, not a factory Yamaha rider.

The second attempt was also inspired by Britain. As compensation for the Isle of Man TT losing its status as a Grand Prix, and therefore ceasing to be a World Championship event, three new races were run at the 1977 TT meeting with a World Championship on offer for the winner of each. The top class, Formula 1, went on to expand well beyond the parochial boundaries of Mona's Isle, while F2 and F3 faded quietly away—at least as World Championships. More properly known as TT Formula 1, the F1 regulations allowed four-strokes from 500 to 1,000cc and two-strokes up to 500cc. Bikes had to retain the main engine castings of the homologation street bike, but the choice of chassis, suspension and fueling system, among other major considerations, was left to the constructor. F2 was for four-strokes of up to 600cc and two-strokes of up to 350cc; and F3 400 and 250cc respectively. You can detect here without too much trouble the origins of the Supersport classes.

[Cajun]

Leaving aside the quaint idea that someone can call themselves a World Champion after just one race, TT F1 was a qualified success. The one-race championship didn't last long, but F1 did confine itself mainly to the closed-road circuits shunned by the Grand Prix establishment, or the less popular and less safe venues about which they were equally cool; places like the street circuit of Vila Real in Portugal and the round-the-industrial-estate track at Kouvala on Finland's border with Russia, as well as the traditional strongholds of the roads in Ireland and the Isle of Man, with only the occasional foray to venues like Speedweek at Assen, which also hosted the Dutch Grand Prix. The series was a home-from-home for British riders, notably the great Joey Dunlop, who won the title five times in a row from 1982 to '86.

TT F1 regulations spread, first to the Endurance World Championship, then on to national championships in most important racing centres including the USA and Japan. Because of the nature of the technical regulations, important championships were dominated by factory bikes. Honda's ultimate F1 bike, the RVF750, was a technical masterpiece; a four-stroke GP bike as far removed from the street bike on which it was allegedly based as a Formula 1 car is from a Touring Car. The Honda dominated the World Championship, but important and innovative bikes such as the Yamaha Genesis and the hub-center-steered Elf were only able to race and be developed under the comparatively free F1 rules. But by then the Superbike writing was on the wall.
Steve McLaughlin had retired from racing in 1980 and left the bike scene completely for the TV industry in Los Angeles. But when Superbike became the class for the Daytona 200, track-owner Jim France got in touch. France is a key figure in the genesis of Superbike as well as being the man who invented Battle of the Twins and an ex-racer who used to compete under a pseudonym. France's problem was that half of his entry came from Europe—and Europe was blissfully ignorant of all things Superbike. Worse still, by tradition Daytona does not pay start money.

The solution, says McLaughlin, was to put him on a plane to Europe, where he organized a series of package deals that kept up the standard of entry for the Daytona 200 and introduced European racers to Superbikes. It wasn't an easy job and ironically McLaughlin got most help from Mike Trimby, General Secretary of IRTA (the International Racing Teams' Association) and no friend either of 'Motormouth' or Superbikes. It was an important step towards allaying Europe's traditionally patronizing attitude towards racing based on production machinery; the Grand Prix classes were all for prototype machinery designed from first principles with the sole purpose of racing. Anything else was regarded as inferior—not real racing—but on the world stage, and certainly in terms of numbers of competitors, it was Grand Prix racing that was in the minority. In 1960 the 500 GP championship was run over just six races, and all of them took place in Northern Europe apart from a race at Monza. As recently as 1980 there were just eight races, none of them outside Europe.

In 1985 McLaughlin based himself in Paris, linking up with an old friend, French journalist Philippe Debarle. They detected more than a little antipathy towards TT F1, which was seen in the wider world as something only of interest to the British, a contrivance to compensate them for the Isle of Man's loss of status. 'It became obvious,' says McLaughlin, 'that there should be a World Championship, or at least that people should think there would be a World Championship.' That way everyone would be working to the same set of rules, not inventing them as they went along to suit local conditions. There were plenty of people in the FIM's corridors of power who agreed, notably Luigi Brenni, the highly popular (at least with the riders) President of the Road Racing Commission, and men of influence on the Technical Commission like Mitsuo Itoh of Suzuki, with whom McLaughlin had raced, and Michihiko Aika of Honda. The American FIM representative, Ed Youngblood, worked long and hard on the idea of a Superbike World Championship, but crucial aid in getting the proposals through the labyrinthine committee politics of the FIM came from an unexpected quarter, the ACU. Its patrician President, Vernon Cooper, renegade Honda dealer and TT aficionado Bill Smith, and Donington Clerk of the Course Colin Armes, all helped to convince the Japanese, who strangely enough were worried about the TT's future viability - then took care of a lot of the detail work in the regs. None of these men could by any stretch of the imagination be called natural allies of McLaughlin, yet they played an important part in getting Superbike off the launch pad.

In 1986 UK fans had seen triple American Superbike Champion Fred Merkel and a young Kevin Schwantz duel their way through the Transatlantic Trophy run for the first time under Superbike regs; the following year Schwantz again did battle with a Honda rider—this time Wayne Rainey. In 1987, after much political wrangling, Superbike finally deposed F1 as the blue riband of the American championships in readiness for the first Superbike World Championship the following year.

Ironically, the Formula 1 World Championship was just starting to gain credibility outside the closed-road ghettos. In '87 the tiny Italian Bimota factory took the title with their YB4EI; this was based on Yamaha's FZ motor but with their own chassis and fuel injection, and ridden by ex-500 Grand Prix star Virginio Ferrari, who would later go on to Superbike prominence as Ducati's team manager. F1 would continue as a World Championship for two more years and give the wider world advance notice of Carl Fogarty's talent, but from now on the four-stroke spotlight was firmly fixed on Superbike. At least non-Americans now knew what a Superbike was.

British fans had been amazed at how stock Merkel and Rainey's Hondas looked--at least until you got close to them. And that was just the idea. Superbike is a production-based silhouette class intended to enable the fan to relate the bikes on the track to the bikes in the showrooms. 'Race on Sunday, sell on Monday', as one Honda engineer put it, echoing sentiments first expressed in sportscar racing, Superbike's closest relative on four wheels. The fundamental differences between Superbike and F1 are that in Superbike the racer has to keep the frame and fuel system of the road bike on which it is based. The silhouette of the road bike is also preserved by the regulations' insistence that the shape of the original fuel tank, seat and fairing be retained.

However, things are very different inside the motor, where the tuners are given free rein, and in the suspension department, where the original equipment, as well as the swinging arm, can be replaced provided it is of the same type as the original equipment (ie telescopic, leading-link, etc). Crucially, the motor can be overbored up to the class limit; in fact, the only thing about the motor's internals that can't be touched is the stroke. The requirements for retaining the standard carburettors are particularly rigorous: the size, type and number of detachable jets and manufacturer's part numbers have to be listed on the homologation documents along with dimensioned drawings of the inlet tracts. For the first season, the Japanese manufacturers homologated all their 600 and 750cc four-cylinder bikes plus Honda's unlikely Transalp and Africa Twin, Bimota their YB4 and Ducati their new 851 V-twin.

The idea of Superbike as affordable racing that wouldn't be dominated by the factories' teams was yet again outflanked by the Japanese factories, which did what Yamaha had done to F750 and manufactured their way around the regulations. Honda drew on their experiences with the RVF750 and built a barely disguised racer with lights on called the RC30. In the UK this retailed for an astonishing £8,499 on its launch in March 1988, and £1,000 more by October thanks to the strength of the yen; a Honda VFR750 would have cost you £4,249. Yamaha set a trend that would later be taken up by Kawasaki, by bringing out a homologation special model alongside the pure street-bike version of their 750. The big flat-slide carbs (as opposed to the emissions-legislation-orientated constant-velocity types on the mass-produced model), close-ratio gearboxes and single seats made the R-models--as in FZ750R as opposed to plain old FZ750—highly unsuitable for street use, but a good starting point for a racer. The Japanese factories did, however, stay away from any direct works team involvement with the new championship, preferring to leave any commitments to local importers.

Ducati's 851 had seen the light of day for the first time at the Bol d'Or 24-hour race at the end of 1987, and was the first of a generation of liquid-cooled fuel-injected twins that would rebuild the factory's fortunes on and off the track over the following years.

[Cajun]

Building completely new bikes may seem a rather extreme, not to say expensive, reaction to the regulations, but the class had a long and honorable history of bending the rules. Some ten years after the ?California Hot Rod', Cook Neilson related how he used to dream of getting the AMA Superbike teams round a table and in turn own up to one way in which they'd each deceived the scrutineers. He'd start off by admitting that he got the 'California Hot Rod' through the noise test by fitting a rev counter geared to read way above the speed at which the engine was turning. A caption in Cycle magazine read: 'Slow hand, quick needle'. With a four-cylinder motor, the best way to get under the noise limit was to close up the electrodes on one cylinder's spark plug; this shorted it out and prevented that cylinder from firing and therefore making any noise.

On the chassis front it was often difficult to equate the positioning of engine mounting lugs with those on the relevant street bike. An Antipodean, who'd better remain nameless, once remarked to the author how strange it was that you could get the cylinder head off a standard Kawasaki Z1000 with the motor in the frame, but you couldn't do the same with a certain Superbike racer—the implication being that the team had shortened the frame's down-tubes to raise the motor and increase the ground clearance.

By the start of the first World Superbike Championship that sort of crude cheating would have been impossible and unnecessary, simply because the technology of top-of-the-range street bikes had moved on so far that they had almost become racers themselves.

McLaughlin's regulations set an upper limit for four-cylinder motors of 750cc, and 1000cc for twin-cylinder bikes. The twins also got a lower minimum weight limit, 140kg as opposed to 165, adouble whammy that would cause some controversy in years to come. However, the fact that the regulations remained unchanged for seven years shows just how well-thought-out they were. Of course no one thought that the small manufacturers of V-twin motorcycles, as opposed to the big four Japanese manufacturers of four-cylinder bikes, would be able to take advantage of these generous allowances; the idea was to compensate for the antiquated designs of the Ducati 900SS, BMW Boxer, Moto Guzzi Le Mans and any Harley-Davidson you care to mention. The small factories were also given a much lower production limit for homologation; Honda and the rest of the Japanese had to make 1,000 units to qualify for Superbike, Ducati and the rest of the minnows just 200 bikes.

But even Honda had their doubts about being able to sell 1000 RC30s. Aika-san, who'd supported McLaughlin at the FIM and championed the Superbike cause within the company, announced with some trepidation that the order book would be opened. They received 5,000 orders on the first day.

Production was hastily doubled, the first 1,000 bikes being earmarked for Japan and other prospective purchasers going into a ballot. At least there was no doubt about Honda producing the required number of bikes for homologation. When it came to Ducati McLaughlin had his doubts and said so. Loudly.

Ducati's brilliant designer Massimo Bordi had produced a new fuel-injected four-valve-head motor for Ducati's new owners Cagiva. He got permission to build the 200 homologation machines, but with the warning that his job was on the line if they didn't sell. McLaughlin's view that Northern Italy--especially Bologna--was run by the communists was shaped by experiences in the family's Ducati dealership. 'Capitalist-running-dog Americans got engines that self-destructed the first time they were started,' he says, with only a trace of exaggeration, 'and then they took eight months to supply spares.' He announced that he and Debarle would be arriving one morning to inspect production of the new bike. An unplanned bout of partying at Virginio Ferrari's meant that they had to make a few excuses, and eventually turned up at 6.30pm to find the whole of the sales department formed up outside the factory. Bordi hadn't let them see the bike yet. With exquisite manners Bordi then proceeded to torture his visitors with an extended tour of the factory: he showed them crankcases, he showed them pistons, he showed them everything but what they had come to see. The fact that Debarle was in plaster and on crutches only added to the torture. Eventually the visitors--not the sales department--were ushered through a locked door and the sheets were theatrically removed from two bikes. There were the prototype Ducati 851s with white-painted frames and the word 'Superbike' on the fairing. Debarle broke into tears and there was much Latin arm-waving and hugging. The World Superbike Championship really was going to happen.

ENDS
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taken from http://www.superbikeplanet.com

[MotoGirl]

You have too much time on your hands! :D

[Cajun]

You have too much time on your hands! :D

CRTL + C and CRTL + V are my friends.

But interesting write up none the less, learnt a few things that i did not know.

[MotoGirl]

It appears you're not the only slacker!

[sugilite]

My understanding is Steve McLaughlin is a born n bred kiwi who went to the states to find his fortune, so one of our own :yes:

[Toast]

Good read, cheers!

Speaking of Fred Merkle, is he still living in NZ and running those training days?

[Cajun]

Good read, cheers!

Speaking of Fred Merkle, is he still living in NZ and running those training days?

last i heard he was still in nz, around taupo area.

[owner]

that was bloody good read, cheers

[roogazza]

Ex Stokes Valley boy, Dave Hiscock was either first or third in F1 in about 83 if I remember correctly ?? Merv, where are you ? Gaz.

ps. the result still wasn't good enough to stop the Poms giving the Heron ride to Mick Grant( a pom).

[F5 Dave]

That's why they built the Plastic Fantastic & preceding ally monocoque to give Dave a go in F1 to get noticed. The Kevlar bike was made in 83 which is one reason why it isn't post classic eligible (some syndicate dredged up some idea that it may be a few years back).