back to the Ducati cup days

Well,

First round of the 08 SBK has been run and it looks like a return to the
Ducati cup days.

2nd race and, although a 1098 (or should I say 1199) didnt win, the
model filled 6 of the first 7 places. Not bad for a completely new
motorcycle...and a one/two in the first race to boot.

 

Not exactly that simple, though... in a number of ways, the weekend's
races were a bit strange...

How would race 1 have panned out had Haga not highsided himself when
he took his left hand off the bar to shake his fist at Biaggi?
What's going on with the Suzukis when it's a couple of what are
normally midfield runners - Max Neukirchner and Fonsi Nieto - being
their top finishers?
Was Honda's mid-pack finish due to the new Blade needing more
development, or was that all the bike's always been capable of when it
wasn't Toseland riding it?

As the bunched runs down the start/finish straight by the leading
group in both races showed, the Yamaha and the Suzuki, at least, still
have more top-end than the Ducatis.

 

The new blade certainly needs more development.
My point is that for an all new motorcycle, its doing very well first up.

 

Very true, but then they are fairly good at this by now, it's not like
the 1198 is a huge departure from the preceding model, and the 1098
was run in Superstock last year so they had a year's worth of
development on it already.

JL

 

Honda/Yamaha/Kawasaki also have many years of race bike building behind
them but you dont see them filling 6 of the first 7 spots.

 

Points to the 90's and early 2000's in motogp which could have been
renamed the Honda Cup...

Besides which the rules in WSBK have changed very little in the last
10 years for Ducati until this year so they've been incremently
improving what they had, and the 1098 isn't a particularly radical
departure from the 999, the 06 to 07 R1 had bigger engineering
differences. They spent a year in superstock getting the 1098 right
and then they launched it - I'm not terribly surprised it's
competitive - the MotoGP development R&D certainly wouldn't hurt
either.

The japanese may have more dollars to throw at this sort of thing but
it's R&D that's a lot more thinly spread across far more model types.

JL

 

...and anyone who's seen the V8 supercars will have noticed over the past
few years, if your car is just slightly better than your competitors,
and you have 50% of the cars on the grid, it's very easy to dominate
qualifying, race wins and turn the series into the "Commodore Cup".

Nev..
'07 XB12X