Among the glamour and skilled racing in the World Superbike championship there have been some stunningly successful racing motorcycles.
The Ducati 916 is perhaps the most iconic of all those that have raced in the WSB championship since it first kicked off in 1988, and there have been many others too. The Honda RC30 and RC45 and the double-championship-winning VTR1000 SP-1 and SP-2 are but two. The racing exploits of the Kawasaki ZXR750 and ZX-7RR, Suzuki GSX-R750 and GSX-R1000, have all added a sprinkle of magic dust over their road going cousins, as have the most recent variants of the Kawasaki ZX-10RR, today’s dominant machine and from the brand that has powered Jonathan Rea to five consecutive world titles.
But there have been some howlers along the way too. We’ve picked a selection of five bikes that were some of the worst to grace the WSB grid.
BIMOTA SB8K – One win, the less said about the rest, the better!
The now famous image of Australian racer Anthony Gobert airborne while his heavily-smoking Bimota SB8K is laid flat and appearing to levitate after a huge crash at Sugo in Japan, is all you need to know about this bike and it’s level of success in WSB in 2000.
While the fearsomely-talented Gobert won a race in Australia in mixed wet and dry condition, the rest of the time the Bimota ‘factory’ effort circulated tracks was a litany of engine failures and crashes caused primarily by things going wrong with the bike.
The single bike sported 501 race number because of sponsorship that was supposed to have been sorted by Levi’s jeans. That money was likely never real and certainly never appeared! The funding gap was never closed up and the almost untunable Suzuki TL1000 derived V-twin engine, combined with a poorly funded Bimota team, was not what Gobert needed.
He suffered an endless stream of mechanical issues, and despite an incredible win on home soil at Phillip Island that year, the rest was a disaster.
The famous massive highside was the result of a blown oil cooler that sprayed oil all over the back tyre and catapulted him into the air.
At Monza later that year Gobert said: “It’s a bit hard to go faster when you spend half your time looking backwards for the next oil leak.”
The team collapsed at the end of the 2000 season, although Bimota did make a racing comeback in 2014. Unsurprisingly that didn’t go well either, and they were removed from the results after failing to make enough bikes to meet homologation rules.
SEASONS RACED: 1 RACES: 30 WINS: 1 PODIUMS: 1 POLE POSITIONS: 0
BENELLI TORNADO TRE – If styling determined winning, Benelli would have been champions
The Benelli Tornado Tre was a breath of fresh air both as a road bike and a racing bike. It was radically styled and as a road bike had cooling fans mounted under the rear seat unit to draw cool air out from the radiator.
Styled by British designer Adrian Morton it burst onto the WSB scene in 2001 with veteran Australian Peter Goddard signed to ride. Headline sponsorship from globally know kitchen appliance brand Indesit, whose owners, the Merloni family, also ran Benelli.
If racing success could be measured in style points, Benelli was already half way to getting a hand on the world championship trophy. Unfortunately, the WSB series needs bikes to actually record racing success for them to count towards any kind of championship and while the Benelli looked amazing, it was a dog of a racing bike.
The bike managed to combine most of elements that make for a terrible racing motorcycle; it was slow, unreliable, lacked enough power and was racing on customer specification Dunlop tyres when at that time, the best tyres were Michelins. The three cylinder engine was novel in racing, with a 900cc capacity theoretically meant to give it parity with the 1000cc twins and 750cc fours. Sadly, it was slower than both.
After 12 races in 2001, Goddard had just seven points to show for his efforts. Improvements were hard to come by and the following year he managed 17 races but just 23 points. The plug was pulled and the team folded and one of the most distinctive of WSB racing bikes ever seen faded from view.
SEASONS RACED: 2 RACES: 29 WINS: 0 PODIUMS: 0 POLE POSITIONS: 0
FOGGY PETRONAS FP1 – The most expensive failure in WSB history?
The Foggy Petronas FP1 was launched in a blaze of expensive hype as it took the then most successful WSB racer in Carl Fogarty and hired him to front an all-new racing effort backed by the state-owned Malaysian oil company Petronas.
The bike was developed by some of the most talented people around and key staff were poached from all over the racing world. The bike looked great, had an all-new reverse-head three cylinder engine and it sounded amazing. The team took corporate hospitality to unseen levels in the WSB season when it kicked off in 2003 and it drafted in former world champion Troy Corser (pictured) and British rider James Haydon to ride the bikes.
Despite all of the promise, the project had a faltering start and the bike was beset by reliability issues from the outset. Excess heat was so bad from the reverse-cylinderhead engine design that the bike couldn’t keep heat under control and it had a habit of setting fire to itself while the rider was still on the bike.
The FP1 registered two podium finishes in 93 races before the whole project was canned after four seasons. The bike did gently improve but the problem was it was always hobbled by the fact it was a 899cc three-cylinder bike built in line with previous racing regulations. Against 1000cc V-twins and four-cylinder bikes it was hopelessly outgunned in performance turns. On the plus side, it did handle well! When it wasn’t catching fire.
SEASONS RACED: 4 RACES: 93 WINS: 0 PODIUMS: 2 POLE POSITIONS: 2
KAWASAKI ZX-10R – Failure to deliver
What? Surely some mistake! You may be familiar with the utterly dominant run of racing success by Jonathan Rea and the current factory Kawasaki Racing superbike team which has run from 2015 to today. Rea has taken five consecutive world titles to become the most successful WSB racer of all time with fiercely fought titles and a bike that manages to be both fast and reliable.
But it wasn’t always this way.
For a long time Kawasaki was the poor relation of Japanese manufacturers in WSB. The original ZX-10R effort by Kawasaki arrived in 2004 but was very different to today’s bike and had no factory backing at all; even though it was a long-needed replacement for the ancient Kawasaki ZX-7RR, which was about four years beyond pension age already.
Kawasaki was, at that time, utterly committed to the ultra-expensive MotoGP championship and wasn’t going to fund both that and WSB. The combination of almost zero factory help and poorly funded private teams saw nothing positive in terms of race results in the first season of 2004. The following year wasn’t that great with just one third place to take as a highlight. It took until 2006 and a horribly wet Assen race for British rider Chris Walker to finally win the ZX-10Rs first race win.
Things changed radically for the 2013 season with British rider Tom Sykes finishing second overall, winning the title for Kawasaki in 2014 (the company’s first title since 1993 with Scott Russell), before the Rea winning run from 2015 to 2019, helping to erase the memory of the first generation model’s ignominious record.
SEASONS RACED: 5 RACES: 122 WINS: 1 PODIUMS: 4 POLE POSITIONS: 1 (RESULTS TAKEN TO END OF 2008)
EBR 1190RX – so obscure we almost forgot about it ourselves
They say that God loves a trier, and if that is the case the big man upstairs must really have a soft spot for Erik Buell.
Having seen Harley-Davidson shut the doors on his eponymously titled bike company, he dusted himself off and started all over again with EBR (Erik Buell Racing) in late 2009.
Buell’s bikes have always been seen as being quirky, but the 1190 series was a relatively conventional V-twin superbike with over 175bhp in stock form. They competed in American championship racing, with moderate success, but even so it was something of a surprise when EBR entered a team in the 2014 WSB series, with American riders Geoff May and Aaron Yates at the helm. Neither man would score a point over the year, although wildcard Larry Pegram did score two points for 14th at the American round at Laguna Seca on his EBR.
Pegram returned for what was meant to be a full-time attack in 2015, in an Italian run team backed by Indian mega manufacturer Hero. The American scored two more points for 14th place in Australia, while Italian team-mate Niccolo Canepa took a couple of 15th places before the season was cut short after four rounds, when EBR went into receivership.
SEASONS RACED: 2 RACES: 32 WINS: 0 PODIUMS: 0 POLE POSITIONS: 0
