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.
After Alvaro Bautista’s runaway success since joining the WorldSBK series, winning all six main races and all three Superpole races, mostly by a significant margin, the FIM has made the first move toward balancing out performance.
Starting from the next round at Assen, the Ducati Panigale V4R is to lose 250 revs, while the Honda CBR1000RR, which has struggled badly since the start of the year, is to given an extra 500 revs on the maximum rev limit.
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.
“There’s no replacement for displacement” in racing but what about power? In particular what about peak power and where a bike reaches it?
For WorldSBK purposes, the peak power of an engine is defined as the rev limit on the production machine, plus 3%.
Calculating this takes a little bit more math, as it requires you to average the rev limit from both the third and fourth gears, and then once this has been established, the FIM typically add an extra 3% to that RPM figure.
The rev limits are defined at the start of the championship season, but they aren’t set in stone for the duration of the championship. They can be changed at the discretion of organisers as the year progresses.
Having been introduced to much fanfare 12 months ago, the new limits are of interest again in 2019 because we have new bikes on the grid. The most newsworthy new machine is the headline grabbing Ducati Panigale V4 R, but it should be noted that Kawasaki, BMW and Honda also have newly homologated bikes, and thus also new rev limits.
Our third and final installment (be sure to read the first and second installments as well) in a three-part look at the rule changes made to the World Superbike Championship for the 2018 season. Today we get the perspective of WorldSBK champion Jonathan Rea, the rider with the most to lose from the new rules.
Three years of unparalleled success has seen Jonathan Rea notch up 39 victories, 70 podiums, and 3 WorldSBK titles.
To put those numbers into context, only Carl Fogarty, Troy Bayliss, and Noriyuki Haga have won more races in their WorldSBK careers. It truly has been a historic run of form for Rea and Kawasaki.
For WorldSBK though the achievements have been outweighed by the reaction of fans to these results.
Feeling that significant changes were needed to ensure a more competitive balance for the field, WorldSBK has introduced a wide range of new regulations to curtail the Kawasaki dominance.
The goal isn’t to stop Rea and Kawasaki winning but simply to allow other manufacturers to get on an even keel.
Our second installment (be sure to read the first and third installments as well) in a three-part look at the rule changes made to the World Superbike Championship for the 2018 season, today we get the perspective of Scott Smart, the FIM Superbike Technical Director, who rewrote the WorldSBK rulebook.
Scott Smart has been tasked with writing and rewriting the rule book for Superbikes around the planet.
The FIM Superbike Technical Director has been instrumental in bringing about the recent regulation changes for WorldSBK, and speaking at the season ending Qatar round he explained the philosophy behind the changes.
“There’s a lot of benefits to these changes, but the biggest factor is that we want to find a way to have more exciting racing in WorldSBK,” explained Smart.
“With the new regulations each team on the grid has the chance to run the same specification as the factory teams or to develop their own parts. This gives a private team the chance to have a bike with development work already having been completed by simply buying the relevant parts for their bike.”
The World Superbike championship has moved to address the performance disparities that have seen Kawasaki and Ducati dominate in recent seasons.
The Superbike Commission, the rule-making body for the WorldSBK series, today announced a series of measures to ensure greater parity among teams and factories.
The measures, which will enter into force in 2018, see rev limits replacing weight penalties and air restrictors as a performance balancing mechanism, and a performance-based concession point system for allowing engine updates during the season.
The changes fall into three main categories: the performance balancing system, a system of concession points, and the price capping of a range of suspension, chassis, and engine parts related to performance.
The performance balancing system and the concession points system are aimed at creating more parity between different manufacturers, while the price capping of certain parts is aimed at both limiting costs, and of ensuring that all teams have access to the same parts.
Yamaha have issued an official explanation for the problem they suffered at Mugello, which saw Valentino Rossi’s engine blow up during the race, and Jorge Lorenzo’s engine blow up during warm-up on Sunday morning.
The cause given is exactly in line with the reasoning in our Mugello Sunday post-race round up: the engine overrevving as the rear wheel lifted at the end of the Mugello straight.
At that point in the track, with the bike hitting 350 km/h and nearing peak speed at top gear and at full throttle, when the rear wheel lifts over the crest at the end of the straight, the engine spins up too quickly for the rev limiter to catch.
MotoGP’s Technical Director has rejected KTM’s claim that Honda exceeded the official Moto3 rev limit during the 2015 season.
In an official statement issued today, Danny Aldridge said that he and his technical team had examined the official rev limiter used in Moto3 and verified that it was operating correctly, and that although there had been overshoots of the rev limit, these were very small and very brief.
Aldridge went on to confirm much of what we had found when we investigated the issue at the end of February. Speaking to Peter Bom, crew chief of 2015 Moto3 world champion on a Honda Danny Kent, Bom explained that the issue had been about the way in which Honda had optimized the point at which the rev limiter cut in, and this is what had caused the confusion.
Were Honda exceeding the Moto3 rev limit in 2015? This is the accusation made by KTM Sports Director Pit Beirer in a story on the German-language website Speedweek.
Beirer alleges that KTM came across the issue when talking to riders who switched from Honda to KTM this year, who were complaining of how abruptly the KTM hit the rev limiter.
Beirer further claims that KTM were able to look at the data of the Honda Moto3 machine held by a former Honda mechanic. In that data, he alleges, the Honda ran flat out to the 13,500 RPM rev limit, then gradually tailed off to 13,600 RPM.
These claims, if they are true, would be a massive breach of the Moto3 regulations. Though Beirer does not mention Danny Kent by name, the insinuation was that this may have been a factor in a Moto3 title that ended up being decided by just six points.
We spoke to Peter Bom, crew chief to Danny Kent both this year and last, during his successful Moto3 championship campaign, and a key factor in the Englishman’s title. Bom denied the allegations, and explained that the claims can only be based on Beirer misinterpreting the facts.
The difference between the Honda and KTM Moto3 rev limiter strategies was marked, Honda having invested a large amount of time and money in optimizing both gear change and rev limiter strategies, making the bike as smooth as possible and as easy to ride.
The news that 340mm carbon brake discs are to be allowed once again in MotoGP has rekindled a debate that has been going on behind the scenes for some time.
The move to allow the discs at all tracks, and not just Motegi where they are already compulsory, has come as both power and weight of the MotoGP machines has grown over the past three years. But the real solution lies in reducing the minimum weight.
There was a certain irony in the moment chosen by the Grand Prix Commission to ban carbon discs larger than 320mm. The move – made for reason of cost savings and rationalization – came just as MotoGP was to return to 1000cc, meaning the bikes were about to reach higher top speeds.
Compounding the problem, the minimum weight was also increased. The initial proposal was to raise the minimum from 150kg, the weight of the old 800cc machines, to 153kg. However, to make life easier for the CRT machines, the weight limit was raised even further, in two steps, to 157kg in 2012 and 160kg in 2013.
In the space of two years, engine capacity had been increased by 25%, leading to a power increase of around 10%, while weight had also been increased by nearly 7%. It was a recipe for brake problems, and that is precisely what occurred.