To balance performance and make the championship more interesting, the rule makers at the WorldSBK series set maximum rev limits for all the entered bikes at the beginning of the season.
This usually isn’t much of a newsworthy event, but with the recent crop of superbikes hitting stratospheric numbers in their homologated street form, it is causing some interesting issues in the WorldSBK Championship.
One of the bikes we are looking forward to the most in 2020 is the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-25R. This mysterious small-displacement machine makes some big promises for a motorcycle of its size, namely because of its four-cylinder 250cc engine, which we now know will spin to 17,000 rpm.
Complete with traction control, riding modes, and a quickshifter, the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-25R is packing some serious tech for a motorcycle that is typically found in the “budget” section at the local dealership.
But, this is all part of Kawasaki flipping the game on its head, and making a motorcycle that is truly unique and special.
Alvaro Bautista came to the WorldSBK championship and has been unstoppable. Since figuring out how to get the right feeling from the front end of the brand new Ducati Panigale V4 R, he has won all six races held so far – four full-length races, and the two new Superpole sprint races held on Sunday.
His winning margins in the four full races were 14.983, 12.195, 8.217, and 10.053 seconds. He won both sprint Superpole races by over a second as well.
Naturally, that kind of domination attracts attention. The WorldSBK series is meant to be a close battle between bikes based on road-going motorcycles, and as modification of the standard bikes is limited, there are mechanisms in the rule book for keeping the disparity between the different bikes racing to a minimum, giving any manufacturer which sells a 1000cc sports bike a chance to be competitive.
To ensure this, the rules have a section on balancing performance between the different bikes competing. The method of balancing performance has varied over the years, but the current rules use only the maximum revs to try to keep the bikes close.
The maximum rev limit is set when each new model is homologated, following a formula described in the rules, and explained by WorldSBK Technical Director Scott Smart in a video on the WorldSBK website. The short version is that the bikes are limited at 1,100 RPM above the point at which they make their peak horsepower.
We just got off the phone with Kawasaki HQ, and it’s official: the 2011 Kawasaki ZX-10R will inadvertently get a power decrease when it comes to the United States because of the EPA’s regulation of noise pollution, confirming earlier rumors from this week. The issue surrounds the EPA’s new methodology for measuring exhaust noise levels, which now involves taking the measurement at a percentage of the total rev range, instead of a specific rpm value.
The result is that the 2011 Kawasaki ZX-10R passes the Euro III standards, but fails the EPA standards in its unadulterated form. To come into compliance with the EPA’s Noise Control Act, Kawasaki has lowered the rev-limit on the 2011 Kawasaki ZX-10R by 750 rpm in order to meet the new criteria. The byproduct of lowering the rev-limiter will reduce the new ZX-10R’s maximum power output, but Kawasaki isn’t saying by how much.
According to Ash on Bikes, BMW has added a firmware patch to the S1000RR that will set the bike’s rev limit to 9,000 RPM during the first 600 miles of use. This limit is reportedly being put into place because of excessive wear on components being used by race teams. As such, BMW thinks it fit to guard against similar wear on its street-bound machines, although there has been no indication that this has been the case.