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POTENTIAL PITFALLS TO THE PLAN

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Obviously, such radical changes would not be without its hurdles. Here are some of the looming problems that I struggle to appropriately answer.

Maintaining Manufacturer Relations

The manufacturers have long propped up the AMA Superbike Championship, paying the salaries, writing the rulebooks, buying the television ads, and self-sponsoring the high-budget mega teams.

The current situation, both the good and the bad, is what you get when you allow the manufacturers to have an extreme amount of influence over a series. However, there may not even be an existence if not for their heavy involvement.

DMG has to walk a fine line where they keep the manufacturers sufficiently satisfied and interested, while simultaneously stripping them of their control over the rulebook and creating an environment where their factory team models, if not rendered wholly obsolete, at least find themselves existing in a new reality where they are no longer guaranteed to outgun their ‘civilian’ competition.

Not an easy task. Superbike racing is a resilient formula, and while others may rush to fill the void in their absence to a degree, DMG can’t risk an outright manufacturer rebellion and expect to bounce back as successfully or as quickly as World Superbike.

Traction Control

I was once a supporter of traction control. While I felt that TC clearly negatively impacts the ‘single bike spectacle’ in Superbike racing (i.e. the sliding and the drifting), I figured on the flipside, by making the bikes easier to ride, it should increase the ‘multi-bike spectacle’ (i.e. closer racing).

Along with this, TC didn’t necessarily lower the amount of skill required to win a race, it just shifted the focus from a ‘rider vs. track’ skillset to one based on ‘rider vs. rider’ abilities (racecraft).

I was more than happy to accept this new paradigm. However, that hasn’t been the case in practice as the era of advancing traction control appears to actually be damaging the spectacle in both regards.

And even in a very restricted spec tire/tight regs environment, traction control provides another potential avenue of creating ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ which was so carefully rooted out elsewhere.

I don’t have a simple solution because traction control is notoriously difficult to police, and making it illegal opens the door for an even more uneven situation where teams with the best rulebook grey zone magicians can find an even more sizable advantage.

DMG needs to consider a number of alternatives, including paying close attention to how things play out in F1 this season, as well as what solutions FGSport and Dorna chose to implement in World Superbike and MotoGP, respectively.

Self-Proclaimed ‘Super’ Status

Unfortunately, this one may be undoable, but the biggest source of confusion among potential fans is almost certainly the wildly overused term ‘Super’ regarding professional motorcycle racing.

Superbike, Supersport, Superstock, Supercross, Supermoto, etc. It’s nearly unexplainable to the uninitiated, and I know from experience that at least three out of every four non-fans who first learn of my job assume I’m speaking about Supercross rather than Superbike.

DMG could make things a bit simpler by renaming Supersport (perhaps something as simple as AMA 600s), and they even have control over the name Supermoto (a sport with such low visibility that a name change wouldn’t damage it that much as long as the new moniker was backed up by some real marketing), but they can’t do anything about Supercross, not too mention World Superbike, World Supersport, FIM Superstock, British Superbike, etc.

WHAT PATH WILL THEY FOLLOW?

There you have it, one man’s rough draft of a plan of attack to help launch AMA Superbike racing to the next level. Certainly it is far from perfect and not without its potential failures.

Just how close or far away DMG’s actual plan may be is anybody’s guess at this point, most likely including the men guiding DMG.

Roger Edmondson stood before the audience at Daytona filled of confidence. Now’s the time to live up to his promises and lay out a future that will see the AMA Superbike Championship finally live up to its vast potential and emerge a true motorsports powerhouse. The opportunity to make substantive change for the better exists, however, and now is not the time to tip toe into the future.