Rea beats the Motogp bikes
WSB champ Rea, riding his WSB Kawasaki, beats Motogp stars. Remarkable, but true…
Jonathan Rea on WSB Kawasaki faster than Motogp riders at Jerez test.
IT WAS GREAT to see World Superbike champ Jonathan Rea beating all those Motogp bikes to top the time sheets at the Jerez test. There were some big Motogp names there – Iannone, Petrucci, Pol Espargaro – and if you’re one of the top guys in a factory Motogp team you don’t want to get beaten by someone on what is, let’s face it, a modified road bike. They will definitely have their noses out of joint. There was talk of Jonathan using an ultra sticky qualifying tyre, but that still doesn’t detract from his remarkable achievement. A WSB bike should never be able to beat a lighter, more powerful Motogp bike. I think it’s great for WSB itself too, to show how fast the bikes can go, especially as Dorna seem to continually drop the ball with the championship. The race-a-day idea does not work and while we had 11 different winners in Motogp, how many did we have in WSB? Three? Four? That’s not Kawasaki or Jonathan’s fault, it’s down to Dorna – the rules aren’t level enough. They have to be designed to put on a show with brilliant racing. And to do that you need to level things up by, first of all, having a standard ECU. That is the biggest problem – it costs so much time, money and effort to develop electronics that can compete with Kawasaki that even Honda and Yamaha find it difficult. Once the ECUS are standard, then I’d slow the faster bikes with, say, a 5kg weight penalty. Interestingly, whenever I talk about this I get team managers complaining to me, telling me to keep my nose out. But at the end of the day it’s not all about the manufacturers, it’s about creating a race series where you don’t know who’s going to win every week. If it carries on like this you’ll just get fewer and fewer people watching, and then what? I sometimes wonder if Dorna actually just want WSB to wither away so they can concentrate on Motogp. But it is possible to level up a race series. Just look at what they did with British Superbike – people complained when they changed the rules, but they’ve now got a fantastic show.