Are you still racking your brain over what to get that special motorcyclist in your life for Christmas (or Chanukah, for our Jewish readers)? Was the Paul Bird Motorsports MotoGP race bikes that are for sale a bit too spendy for your holiday budget?
Then we have a more budget friend proposition for you: the Bimota BB3 WSBK-Spec race bikes that were raced by Team Alstare in the 2014 World Superbike Championship.
As was expected, Bimota has been officially suspended from the remaining World Superbike rounds, in a statement by the FIM. The suspension comes after Bimota failed to meet the initial 125 unit volume, the FIM’s new magic number for superbike homologation, as it pertained to the Bimota BB3.
Despite the small size of the company, Bimota has shown itself to be a strong contender in the EVO class of the World Superbike Championship. And though none of the company’s results have counted to date, as the Italian brand had failed to meet the initial 125 quota by the start of the 2014 season, Bimota has kept forging ahead.
This is because Bimota got a special dispensation to race the first part of the 2014 WSBK season, as the FIM allowed the company four months from its first race day to meet World Superbike’s initial homologation standards, which is 125 street bikes.
Unfortunately however, even with that extra time, Bimota has been unable to meet the 125 unit volume (only 40 or so machines have been built), and thus is not expected to continue racing the rest of the season.
After just one year of a two-year deal, Alstare and Ducati have agreed to terminate the contract between the Belgian Alstare team and the Italian Ducati Corse World Superbike effort. Today, the two parties made it known that they would not be continuing their collaboration, citing financial problems at Alstare and the loss of a major sponsor as the reason.
The split has long been expected, as Alstare team boss Francis Batta had made no secret of his unhappiness with the collaboration between his team and Ducati, not to mention the performance of the Ducati 1199 Panigale RS13.
We love us some concept bikes here at Asphalt & Rubber, and we have featured more than a few pieces of stunning design and imagination on our pages. Though, we can’t remember the last time one of these works of art were brought to us by a legitimate racing team, but that is what we have here with the Team Alstare Superbike Concept.
A nod to the former Suzuki team’s return to the World Superbike Championship as the Ducati factory squad with Carlos Checa and Ayrton Badovini, Alstare has enlisted the help of designer Serge Rusak of Rusak Kreaktive Designworks to ink the shape of its futuristic Superbike concept, while Tryptik Studios handled “bringing the form to life” with its 3D modeling prowess (video after the jump).
All the conjecture about Ducati’s factory World Superbike team can now come to a halt, as the Italian brand has announced that Francis Batta’s Belgian organisation, Team Alstare will take over the reigns of the company’s new WSBK effort.
At the helm of the Ducati 1199 Panigale RS13 will be former WSBK Champion Carlos Checa, who will be joined by Ayrton Badovini. Handling Ducati’s World Superbike campaign for the next two years, Alstare takes over from Althea Racing — a move that made headlines just a week ago.
UPDATE: On 2/10/2012, the FIM released an updated homologation list, which includes the 2012 Ducati 1199 Panigale S for racing in the World Superstock 1000 Cup.
The regulations for the 2012 World Superbike Championship are out, and two names are noticeably not present from the homologation lists for World Superbike and World Supersport: the Ducati 1199 Panigale and the MV Agusta F3. That’s right, the two biggest motorcycles to debut in 2012 have not yet been blessed to compete in this season’s two premier production motorcycle racing classes.
You can’t keep a good race team down, as talk in the World Superbike paddock this week has been swirling around the Alstare Racing team. One of several teams to be on the receiving end of Suzuki’s withdrawal from the major racing series, Alstare found its factory-support from Suzuki draw to a close at the conclusion of the 2011 WSBK Championship season. We use the words “factory support” loosely of course, as Alstare Suzuki had been developing the Suzuki GSX-R1000 almost exclusively in-house, receiving only production OEM parts from Suzuki when needed.
As Suzuki shut its doors to WSBK and MotoGP racing, in the hopes of saving money to buy its stock back from minority shareholder Volkswagen (among other things), the Alstare Team Principal Franics Batta vowed that he would race with the Japanese manufacturer, or not race at all. News then came out that linked Team Alstare to possibly taking over the Kawasaki Factory WSBK team, which would later be handed to World Supersport’s Provec Motocard Kawasaki team. Other rumors linked Batta as interested in campaigning with MV Agusta, though the Belgian team owner could not get a callback from Varese.
Progress has seemingly been made on that front though, as Alstare Racing is reportedly closing in on a deal with the Italian company to campaign an MV Agusta F3 in World Supersport, with the relationship possibly growing to include an MV Agusta F4 RR in a seaon’s time.