How to fix MotoGP and World Superbike

A few weeks ago I was riding outside London when I spotted a Suzuki GSX-R1000 coming the other way. It was the first superbike I’d seen for a while, so I thought I’d do a little experiment: I’d count the next 49 motorcycles I saw, not including scooters or small-capacity bikes.

Over the next few days of riding and driving through Surrey, London, the Midlands and North Wales the next 49 bikes I counted were all adventure bikes, naked, retros and tourers. Not one more superbike – and zero 600 supersport bikes – which suggests that superbikes account for a tiny percentage of motorcycle sales, while the supersport market is basically extinct.

Not so many years ago the roads were full of so-called crotch rockets: from young bucks riding to their office jobs in central London on Ducati 916s to mad hoons zooming around the roads of North Wales on GSX-Rs, ZX-Rs and everything else.

Honda launched its latest Fireblade with inbuilt downforce wings in 2020 and I have yet to see one on the road. I’ve never seen a Panigale V4R on the road either.

The whole point of superbike racing is that racers use the same motorcycles that everyday riders use on the road. That’s how superbikes started and that how it was for several decades – CB900s, Z1000s, VF750s, ’Blades, GSX-Rs and 916s were everywhere.

But the world (certainly the West) has moved on: there are too many speed cameras on the roads and motorcycling is an ageing demographic, so today’s older riders have little interest in crunching themselves into a racing crouch. Instead of buying crotch rockets they buy adventure bikes, nakeds and so on, which are so advanced that most riders will get from A to B as fast as they would on a superbike. And they’ll save a fortune on osteopaths too.

Baggers are MotoAmerica’s most popular class

So what’s the point of racing production bikes that no one buys?

Many laughed when the King Of The Baggers class – for huge Harley and Indian touring bikes – was introduced to the MotoAmerica series a few years ago, just as many laughed when superbikes first arrived in the 1970s (some purists nicknamed them stupid-bikes).

But now baggers are MotoAmerica’s most popular class, attracting new spectators to events, so much so that the bagger races have been moved to the end of the day, because too many fans were heading for the exit after they’d watched these monsters do their thing, leaving the superbikes to circulate in front of a reduced crowd.

And now baggers are coming to BSB and Europe. Last week BSB promoters MSVR signed a deal with MotoAmerica to run bagger races on this side of the Pond.

There’s a huge lesson for race promoters here: fans are ready for something different. And if you want your championship to survive and thrive you need to give fans what they want.

And what they don’t seem to want is the same identikit 1000cc and 600cc sports bikes riding around in circles, like they’ve done for the last couple of decades.

So here’s my bright idea…

Replace the World Superbike and Supersport classes with categories that better reflect the public’s interest. That means classes for naked bikes, adventure bikes, baggers, retros and super-hooligan bikes, another new category recently included in MotoAmerica. Because people want to see bikes just like their own being thrashed around racetracks.