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Yoshimura Suzuki teammates Mat Mladin and Ben Spies (Photo: Brian J Nelson) » More Photos
Ths is the first in a five-part series of articles on the changes that might take place when the AMA announces the sale of commercial rights to their professional roadracing program.
The best that can be said of AMA Superbike is that it has the support of well-funded factory teams and has a level of production-derived machinery equaled only by the World Superbike, All-Japan Superbike, and British Superbike championships. The worst that can be said is that the racing has become so excruciatingly predictable that you have to look back to June 20, 2006, to find a race not won by one of the Yoshimura Suzuki riders.
Yoshimura Suzuki has won the last 27 Superbike races in a row and has only lost one race in the last two seasons. In fact, Yoshimura Suzuki has won 51 of the last 55 races over the last three seasons. No other major Superbike series suffers from anything like that kind of domination.
In World Superbike James Toseland won the title on a Honda, and took seven wins out of 25 starts. Yamaha, with Noriyuki Haga and Troy Corser, won the manufactures title. Max Biaggi was the best Suzuki rider, third in points and with three wins. In the British series it was a Honda-Ducati battle finally won by Honda-mounted Ryuichi Kiyonari with Honda and Ducati riders splitting the 25 races between them, 15 for Honda (Kiyonari nine, Jonathan Rea five, and Shakey Byrne one) and the other 11 to Ducati (Gregorio Lavilla seven and Leon Haslam four). In the All-Japan championship, Yoshimura Suzuki won the title with Atsushi Watanabe who won two of seven races.
Nowhere was there anything like the Yoshimura hegemony in the USA. It is like 500 racing back in 1997 when Reposl Honda, Mick Doohan, and Jeremy Burgess dominated with teammates Alex Crivillé and Tady Okada there to pick up the three of 15 that got away from Mick that year.
But that is a talent and machinery problem that is -- unless you are Bernie Ecclestone or Brian France -- really beyond the power of the sanctioning body and promoter to fix. There are, however, other problems that ought to have been addressed. While it is true that the championship holds many of its races on circuits that are so far beneath European safety standards that only two current US tracks, Miller Motorsports Park and Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca, meet FIM homologation standards, the biggest negative for AMA racing has been the perception, gained from even a cursory glance
AMA Superbike is not my beat, but as an American journalist and TV commentator working in Spain, I often find myself asked to explain the goings-on of my fellow countrymen in AMA racing. This is especially true now that the AMA is looking to sell commercial rights to a professional promoter, following the pattern that the FIM began in 1988 when it leased the rights to its fledgling World Superbike championship to a New Zealand sports marketing company led by American ex-racer and entrepreneur Steve McLaughlin. By 1990 the New Zealanders had been replaced by the Flammini Group and, under the guidance of Maurizio and Paolo Flammini, World Superbike has, in spite of some ups and downs, survived and more often than not prospered.
In 1992 the FIM sold TV and other commercial Grand Prix rights to the Spanish sports marketing company Dorna although a team revolt led to those rights being held jointly by Bernie Ecclestone's company Two Wheel Sports until Dorna finally gained the temporary confidence of the teams and emerged during 1993 as sole leaseholders. They had to survive a final team revolt in the mid-nineties, but since Grand Prix racing has grown and gained in prestige under Dorna's guidance, and IRTA (the teams organization), after their failed second coup, have become the submissive paddock logistics section led by Mike Trimby. It's a major change from the past when Trimby was once a raging rebel who held Maurizio Flammini's feet to the fire in 1987, refusing to roll the trucks carrying the top Grand Prix teams from Germany to Italy until Flammini, then the Italian organizer in the pre-World Superbike days, had lived up to previously negotiated agreements regarding paddock accommodations. Although most young journalists see the big IRTA truck as a kind of mobile police station like those that British authorities park near soccer stadiums to control hooligans, IRTA was once a militant organization fighting for rider and team rights who played a decisive part in wresting dictatorial powers away from the FIM and the circuit owners during the bad old days…but that is another story that Trimby and MotoGP Race Director Paul Butler will write when they have finally handed in their all-access passes.
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