Cycle News Lowside
COLUMN
Wherefore Art Thou One-Make Series?
I’ve had a lot of fun racing motorcycles over the past two decades or so. A lot of fun. However, when I really think about it, the most enjoyable season I had was in 2008 during the Australian Yamaha FZ6 Cup that ran alongside the Australian Superbike Championship.
Perhaps it was such a memorable year because it was my first on the national circuit. Or getting to see the country. Or making a few racemates that I’m still in contact with, even though I now live on the other side of the world.
Or, perhaps, it was the fact we were all on the same motorcycles, on the same tire, this traveling bandwagon of Yamaha gypsies wreaking havoc on Australia’s racetracks wherever we went.
The racing was so close, so intense, it was impossible not to get exponentially quicker as a rider and better with bike setup at every passing race weekend. Because if you didn’t, you ran nowhere the next race.
One-make series bring out the absolute best racing imaginable because they close down nearly every performance gap between the haves and the have-nots, which can often mean the difference between winning and losing.
We have no one-make series here in America. None. The closest we have is the Junior Cup in MotoAmerica, where pretty much the entire field is on a Kawasaki Ninja 400, interspersed with the odd KTM and, from next year, a horde of new Aprilias. And this is for primarily teenage kids, although MotoAmerica’s daft rules allow for 28-year-olds to race in the Junior Cup as per the FIM Supersport 300 regulations.
The last time we had a one-make series of any note was the KTM RC Cup at the end of the 20-teens, the series that helped launch the careers of Brandon Paasch, Ashton Yates and Anthony Mazziotto, to name a few. There was hardly ever a race in which the margin of victory was over one second, teaching all these youngsters how to race hard and close without tripping over the line, as kids so often do.
Dunlop supplied the tires, KTM gave discounts on the bikes, and everyone was on the same equipment. It was a win-win for everyone, from riders to gear suppliers to race promoters.
One-make championships have been successful across the globe for decades. Great Britain is a huge proponent of one-make championships with series like the Yamaha YZF-R6 Cup, the Ducati Challenge for 848/959/V2 machines, and now the BMW F 900 R Cup. These all ran alongside British Superbike and gave the everyday man a chance to play on the same stage as the big guys of BSB at a fraction of the price.
In Australia, we had the FZ6 Cup and later the R15 Cup for youngsters, a bit like the RC Cup out here. That R15 Cup was a boon for not just Yamaha but the aftermarket, as all the kids were in AGV helmets and Ricondi leathers, with Yamaha supplying discounted, race-prepped bikes, oils/spares, and Dunlop handing out discounted tires, of which the riders were only allowed a certain allocation to keep costs under control.
In South Africa, they have the Kawasaki ZX-10R Masters Cup, which I believe is the perfect one-make series anyone has yet come up with. As the name implies, this is for elder riders with three classes on offer. Masters is for any rider over 30, Veterans is open to riders 43 and older, and Extreme is the class for any rider over 51 years old.
The Kawasaki ZX-10R Masters Cup, obviously, is for Kawasaki ZX-10R/ZX-10RRs from 2012 through 2024, and the supplementary regulations state, “In the spirit of the event, no changes are allowed to any motorcycle except minor technical modifications in accordance with the regulations.”
Those modifications include a cartridge kit for the standard Kawasaki fork, an aftermarket shock with valving and spring rates to suit, racing bodywork, crash protection, a slip-on exhaust (stock headers must be retained), a race air filter, standard race lock wiring for fluid-holding screws, and the ECU can be flashed with a control map and password provided by the race organizers.
The tires are supplied by Bridgestone in their R11 soft compound slick. You can use as many tires as you want on Friday, but, “The same set of tires is to be used for qualifying, race one and race two. Tires are to be marked before qualifying by the series Technical Control,” according to the sup regs.
What you have here isn’t Superbike or even Superstock racing. It’s Stock racing—arguably what Superbike was intended to be when it was first invented in the 1970s—designed to showcase a given manufacturer’s performance chops while enabling more established and, dare I say it, mature riders to have a go without burning their wallets to ash. No one said motor racing was cheap, but the costs in recent years have gotten so far out of hand, that something like this Kawasaki ZX-10R Cup could and should be a blueprint for North America.
The big issue we face in this country is the sheer size of it (travel expenses are a major factor), plus the myriad of race organizers/clubs that all seem to have different ideas as to what a specific class is and what it should be called.
There’s a definite contest between rival clubs that is to the detriment of the sport in North America. Just imagine, God forbid, that a few of the clubs on each side of the country got together, held two or three races each per year in their local jurisdiction, and then got together for a national final somewhere.
It could be a rotating deal where one year the East Coast hosts the final, the next it’s on the West Coast, the following year somewhere in the center of the country. Tell me that wouldn’t be a good thing? Or MotoAmerica could take control and slot in five or six races for an over-30s one-make series themselves.
People want to race, but the cost of racing, especially the insane amount people need to spend on tires, scares a lot of people off. Much of these costs can be fixed if a manufacturer wants to step up and make a class that reflects their machine’s performance. What about a KTM 990 Duke R Cup? A Suzuki GSX-R1000R Cup? A Yamaha MT-09 Cup? Or just swipe the ZX-10R Cup from the South Africans?
We can only dream. But I’d really love this dream to become a reality.CN
Click here to read the Lowside Column in the Cycle News Digital Edition Magazine.
