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Takanao Tsubouchi

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For the 2015 season, the World Superbike Championship is to officially adopt the current EVO rules, in an effort to reduce costs within the premier production motorcycle racing series. Meeting this week at Catalunya though, the Superbike Commission has agreed to amend the 2015 “EVO” regulations, in order to ensure more parity amongst the variety of machines competing in the series.

As such, new stipulations regarding the 2015 World Superbike rules have been released. The new rules largely clarify what can be altered in a Superbike engine for 2015, as well as outline how OEMs can continue to develop their electronics packages (WSBK is the last World Championship to allow electronic development). For the full breakdown on rule changes, read after the jump.

This may very well turn out to be the biggest week in MotoGP since the decision to replace the two stroke 500s with large capacity four stroke machines. This week, Dorna CEO Carmelo Ezpeleta is set to have meetings with each of the MSMA members at Motegi, to hammer out once and for all the technical basis for the 2014 season.

If they succeed, the ground will be laid for a set of technical regulations which can remain stable for the long term, the goal being at least five years. If they fail, then one or more manufacturers could leave the series, reducing the number of factory bikes on the grid and potentially removing two of MotoGP’s top riders from the grid. There is much at stake.

So much, in fact, that neither side looks prepared to back down. On the one side is Dorna, who see the costs of the championship spiraling out of control thanks to the increasing sophistication of the electronics, and the racing growing ever more clinical as fewer and fewer riders are capable of mastering the machines these electronics control.

On the other side are the factories, for whom MotoGP, with its fuel-limited format, provides an ideal laboratory for developing electronic control systems which filter through into their consumer products and serves as a training ground for their best engineers.

Dorna demands a spec ECU to control costs; the factories, amalgamated in the MSMA, demand the ability to develop software strategies through the use of unrestricted electronics. The two perspectives are irreconcilable, at the most fundamental level.