R1 rules the world
In 2021 a Yamaha R1 won every major superbike championship on the planet. Yamaha’s racing boss tells Bike how
We have been working towards this for a long, long time,’ says Andrea Dosoli, Yamaha Europe’s race manager, after an R1 won World Superbikes, British Superbikes, Motoamerica, and the All Japan Championship. Despite Ducati honing their Panigale V4, BMW wading in with a new M1000RR, and Kawasaki evolving the ZX-10R, Yamaha whupped them with a bike that’s largely unchanged since 2015. The thing’s so old it hasn’t even got wings. Here’s how it did it…
The base bike is solid
‘The R1 is quite a good motorcycle,’ says Andrea, understating the case somewhat. ‘Especially the latest specification that was introduced in 2020 – this immediately gave confidence to the riders. And the connection of the throttle to the torque [thanks to the crossplane crank] is very helpful for them. Also this helps young riders get used to the big class so they can exploit the bike’s potential. It is a special engine.’
It makes teams’ lives easy
‘When we started developing the R1 we had clear targets. One was affordability, so we worked hard to keep the expenses under control for the teams. Another was that it was easy to handle and all the electronic packages were easy to set-up, so as soon as you arrived at the race track it performed well. In this way our teams and riders could explore the bike’s full potential.’
Send WSB info round world
‘We give access to the latest knowledge and development parts to as many teams as possible. In WSB at the start of the season we started with all four bikes exactly the same, and then as we got more information we speeded up development by making all the information available to everybody – so in BSB the chassis is almost the same as the World Superbike. And it was exactly the same in Motoamerica.’
Evolution not revolution
‘We believe that step-by-step evolution can give better results than bringing in a new bike every year. This is especially true in WSB where the rules favour you working bit-by-bit to remove the weaknesses and exploit the strong points. This is what we’ve done in the five years since we came back to WSB in 2016. Also it has taken us time to recruit the right people to the teams – it has been a long journey. And the potential is still very high. I see a long future for the current R1, especially considering the way the technical rules are written.’