What Does Kawasaki's Departure Mean for WorldSBK?
25/04/2024 17:20
This week, Kawasaki dropped an oddly-shaped bomb that it would be leaving the WorldSBK series as a factory effort at the end of 2024, and that its factory team would now run Bimotas. To be clear, the Bimota in question will use the engine of a ZX-10RR and a frame built by the Italian company.
49.9 per cent of Bimota was acquired in 2019 by Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI), which has since lent the Italian company Kawasaki Motors' KX450 to make a BX450 enduro bike, and its supercharged Ninja H2 to make a Tesi H2 hyperbike, for example.
Kawasaki's decision to throw its WorldSBK effort to Bimota, in combination with Yamaha's recent announcement of the discontinuation of the R1 as a European road bike, means that manufacturers are finding less value in WorldSBK, and therefore that WorldSBK itself is changing.
Since 2019, WorldSBK has been transformed by the Ducati Panigale V4 R, which has dominated the previous two seasons with monstrous straight line speed and tremendous tyre conservation when in the hands of Alvaro Bautista. The Panigale is a low-volume motorcycle which Ducati doesn't directly make money on, and therefore it can be as expensive as the €44,000 upper limit for WSBK machines dictated by the rules. Ducati, and perhaps more importantly the Volkswagen Group of which it is a part, accepts the loss on the Panigale itself because it knows that by dominating WorldSBK it can sell more Multistradas, Scramblers, and Monsters, for example, while also knowing it will at least sell the Panigales it does make even at the high price point thanks to the value in the Ducati name itself.
The problem for a manufacturer like Kawasaki is that it cannot justify making a €40,000, low-volume motorcycle itself because it doesn't have the branding to do so. Kawasaki, like all of the Japanese brands, has made its space in the motorcycle world by selling affordable, practical, reliable bikes.
Yamaha's answer to this issue was to make the R1 a track-only bike in Europe, which will allow Yamaha reduce volume and increase the price of the model. Kawasaki's answer, on the other hand, has been to fall on its European partner, Bimota, to make something, presumably, like the Panigale: very expensive, very exclusive, and (they will hope) very high performance.
Kawasaki could make that bike itself with a new-generation ZX-10RR, but it evidently doesn't want to.
Instead, Bimota is going to make a €40,000 superbike with its own frame and a Kawasaki motor and bank on its European name helping to sell it better than if it was painted green.
The question then turns to what the benefit is to Kawasaki and its own motorcycle range? Where is the marketing benefit to Kawasaki Motors of having Bimota run in WorldSBK? Or perhaps Kawasaki doesn't see that WorldSBK is helping it sell more Versys', Z1000s, or Eliminators.
There must be some value remaining in the championship, or KHI would have just pulled the plug altogether, and perhaps it thinks that keeping Kawasaki in the team name (Bimota by Kawasaki Racing Team) will still achieve a marketing objective.
Ultimately, this change is because people aren't particularly interested in buying high-performance superbikes anymore. They're too expensive for most ordinary people, and they're uncomfortable and impractical. Add into that an ageing motorcycling demographic, and that young people perhaps don't see a vehicle as a way to have fun (at least on the road) so much now as in the past and you have a recipe for a difficult market for a product category whose whole point is excitement.
So, if no one is buying superbikes anymore, and the costs involved in building a superbike capable of winning in WorldSBK is becoming too high for some manufacturers to consider it a viable marketing tool for the other bikes in their roster, the question eventually has to be asked of does WorldSBK have a future? With such uncertainty surrounding the future of performance bikes and evident reductions in manufacturer interest, it's hard to know. Which is an unfortunate level of uncertainty to have lingering over it, because its actual racing product is comfortably the best racing on the planet at the present moment.
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