WORLD SUPER CHANGE

Seeing as Dorna is more than willing to throw wacky ideas in WSB’s direction, get your mince pies around FB’s idea for the series. Dorna can thank us later…

WORDS: BENJAMIN J KUBAS CRONIN IMAGES: KEL EDGE, PATA YAMAHA

All change for WSB, please!

The change to 2017’s grid formation for WSB, implemented by Dorna, has been generally well received within the series it seems - but not so much by race fans to the unaware, the grid for Sunday’s second race will comprise of those who finished fourth to sixth starting on the front row, seventh to ninth starting on the second row and the podium finishers on row three. It’s perceived by fans that this is some form of handicap for winning, because there’s nothing wrong with the racing currently. The fans are right, Pretty much, at least in terms of the racing being bang up there. OK, 2016 wasn’t a classic when It came to universal race action, although there were some belters along the way. But in 2015 WSB had more dose finishes than MotoGP and BSB combined. And prior to that, the action regularly outpaced most other series, bar perhaps our domestic series.

The changes Dorna has made are more there to try and break the Kawasaki and Ducati hegemony on race wins. To say those two manufactures put more effort into their WSB efforts than others is true in some ways, but would also be seriously underplaying the work and commitment of others in the series, such as Ten Kate and Crescent Yamaha. There aren’t really any genuine factory teams in WSB, and even in recent years it’s only been Aprilia that played its hand right out of the factory in Noale. Most ‘official’ teams are backed by the European arms of the respective Japanese, but in a case like Ten Kate, all the actual work is done by the team themselves at their own HQ. Yamaha is catching up in this regard, but it’s Kawasaki and Ducati that appear to have the most direct input from their paymasters - and they’re reaping the rewards of this. Fair play, we say.

In many ways, it’s not fair that they get punished for going all out. Kawasaki’s effort, no matter how ‘factory’, still costs about a tenth of a top MotoGP’s team’s annual budget. But Kawasaki believes that it gets a lot more in return from WSB than it would receive by pouring money freely down the bottomless GP cash-pit, often for no or little return - see Aprlia’s history (and Kawasaki’s last foray) in the top flight for a perfect example of this.