When the American Motorcyclist Association decided in the mid-1970s to add production classes to its long-standing structure of professional Novice, Junior, and Expert pro classes, you could for a time bring your hotted-up RD350 Yamaha to AMA events. But it quickly became clear that the only production class anyone cared about was the big one–Superbike.
Very briefly, Superbike was a do-it-yourself class for American two-wheeled hot-rodders. Th’ow in a big cam. Jack the compression. Bore the carbs. Now you’re ready to race. Optimists were sure that hot drag-race-proven aftermarket parts would make the new 1000s into missiles. Talk of 15,000-rpm could be clearly heard.
But power wasn’t enough, and the rules for surviving 1320 feet and 50 miles were different. More sure-footed European bikes–BMW, Ducati, Guzzi–were faster even on the straights. How could this be? Because European bikes remained stable at their maximum speeds, while the powerhouse hot-rods wobbled and weaved. Kel Carruthers had said it at Talladega in 1974; “In future, chassis are going to need at least as much work as we’re now putting into engines.”
The manufacturers realized this was an opportunity to promote the very bikes they most wanted to sell–big-inch streetsters. Very quickly, construction of Superbikes became professionalized, with as much as 35 pounds of extra chassis reinforcement necessary to make bikes go straight. This era began around 1980 and ran through the 1983 season. Hardly anyone had dynamometers save for the importers, so that was where engine development took place. Failure was a way of life. One Wednesday morning at Daytona, I counted five blown-up crankcases outside one factory garage, and three outside another. In 1982, Honda had blown up in practice all the 1025cc engines they’d built, and had set up build stands in front of their garage where mechanics were at work building fresh ones from parts. The big air-cooled engines of that era weren’t designed for the stress of racing and they showed it.
Races showed three tiers of entries. First came the factory bikes, running well at the front. Then came last year’s factory bikes, now in the hands of privateers who could afford them. And bringing up the rear: the few drag-race-inspired homebuilts, referred-to by a prominent team manager as “smoking junk”.
The lesson was clear. Homebuilders had no chance, and it took major importer expenditure to make these first-generation Superbike designs handle close-to-acceptably, and to make their engines survive even 30-to-50-mile events without exploding.
Honda led the way into the next era by designing a race-qualified motorcycle, the 750 Interceptor, but it at first failed to prevail because Rob Muzzy at Kawasaki had developed a highly effective operations system for racing. Kawasaki’s Ninja models became raceworthy, and Suzuki responded with their GSX-R750s.
With this new availability of production bikes which could be raced without access to fabricators and precision machinists, club racing offered classes for these bikes in minimally modified form. These classes took on the name ‘Supersport’, and their affordability gave clubmen a way to race that was cheaper than the capable but ever-more-expensive Yamaha TZ-250s that had carried so many clubmen since 1965.
In response, importers began to offer contingency money for top placings in clubman racing. Semi-professional riders lived a gypsy life from track to track, collecting this money. Racing at last did not have to be a pure drain on a rider’s income. He might even come close to making a living.
When Roger Edmondson brought his Championship Cup Classes to AMA, pro racing took on a new form. The only Superbikes were factory-entered for two reasons. First, prize money within reach (10th place? Maybe 8th on a good day?) could not possibly cover construction of a privateer full-build Superbike, so nobody built them. Instead, the new Supersport warriors entered their workhorse contingency bikes in Superbike.
Now AMA Superbike took on a two-tier structure–factory Superbikes filling top positions, followed by privateers on their Supersport bikes. There was still some junk–when I was a tech inspector in this period I sent back a bike with no engine bolts, a couple with no swingarm bushings, bikes whose steering heads were loose. But on the whole, the general level of equipment was much improved–pro-built bikes up front, followed by contingency racers who had learned through experience to build for reliability.
This was a stable system through the 1990s and early 21st century. But it did not survive the double blow of 2008-9. Transfer of racing from AMA to Daytona Motorsports Group (DMG) allowed a perhaps well-intentioned but misguided attempt to “return racing to the grassroots”. It caused Honda and Kawasaki to leave the sport and many participants to quit in disgust. The 50-60-percent drop in motorcycle sales resulting from the Depression of 2008 put an end to contingency programs and by impacting personal income, cut the number who could afford racing of any kind.
Now MotoAmerica is our top level of sport, and the nature of Superbike has changed again. Because there was no longer the active fleet of Supersport/contingency riders, the four genuine Superbikes entered by the remaining factories Suzuki and Yamaha have to be combined with a Superstock 1000 class to achieve a decent grid. The idea of “grassroots builders” has receded even farther from possibility.
Such builders once existed, in the form of those who assembled Triumph and Harley racing parts into engines reliable enough to finish races. Constant exercise of such engines on the dirt tracks that were then (1950s, ‘60s) everywhere quickly showed intelligent mechanics what worked and what didn’t. Racing in those days had many participants and a fair number of them could scratch out a “pick-up truck living”.
The coming of more complex and much higher-performing engines, and the very selective availability of racing parts soon made race engine building much more specialized and expensive. For one thing, there were almost zero aftermarket parts for Hondas, and for another, Superbike kit parts from the other makers were priced for European World Superbike teams. Care to pay $12,000 for a radiator? Racing had once been a business in which small operators had a place, but it has hugely outgrown that. The only rational answer is now the spec classes that are emerging, allowing use of only specified parts to solve particular durability problems (such as allowing aftermarket rods where necessary). But racing has had to give up the fiction that a privateer can afford an airflow shop, a fabricating shop, an electronics shop, and a machine shop, backed by a full-time test team.
This is how it has to be. Motorcycles have evolved into raceable form, and commercial realities set their prices within reach of many. Let’s accept that we must use near-stock machines for racing, because that is realistically all we can afford.