SBK – Assen might be the end of Ducati rpm advantage

Bruno Gomes

April 9, 2019

Dorna will impose a new engine rpm limit for Ducati to try and balance the World Superbike championship.

With nine wins out of nine races held until now, Alvaro Bautista is giving the Aruba.it Ducati team many reasons to smile about in World Superbike, but the smiles might be coming to an end, because Dorna will be announcing a new set of technical rules to be applied from the next race at the Assen TT Circuit, to be held next weekend.

According to the World Superbike rules, as a way to balance competition on the track, Dorna is able to change the engine rpm limits for each manufacturer. That change is done if Dorna thinks they need to do it, every three races, and after the Ducati performance at Motorland Aragón, it’s almost a given fact that Dorna will impose new engine rpm limits to the Borgo Panigale factory.

Dorna doesn’t do all the work by themselves. In reality, the World Superbike organizers rely on an external company to compile and analyze different types of data from each race, and since the start of the season in Australia, data from each manufacturer has been gathered to allow Dorna to understand if there’s a particular manufacturer that has an advantage over everyone else. Max speed, average lap times, final results at each reach are some of the factors taken into account.

Using an advanced algorithm, Dorna has data from the first three rounds of the 2019 season, and they will now decide if the technical rules need to be changed or not.

But if fans seem to think that Ducati has an unfair advantage, the reality might be a bit different. This algorithm takes into account the results of official riders and private riders riding a specific bike model. For example, Ducati might have won all nine races, but up until Motorland Aragón, it was only Alvaro Bautista that was a lot faster than his main rivals on the Kawasaki and Yamaha bikes.

Chaz Davies, Eugene Laverty, and Michael Ruben Rinaldi have been struggling with the new Panigale V4 R, and only at the Spanish round last weekend we were able to see Davies finish on the podium, while Laverty was fighting for a top 5 result. Their results might mean that the rpm advantage the Ducati has, isn’t so unfair as some claim to be.

But, according to some World Superbike paddock sources, Dorna will in fact impose new rpm limits to all Ducati Panigale V4 R bikes: If we take into account that the V4 R engine was capped at 16.350 rpm at the start of the season, and the rules state that each change is done in a 250 rpm interval, this means Ducati could become limited to only 16.100 rpm’s from the Dutch round forward. But the cut can be bigger than that!

As for Kawasaki, the Japanese team should keep the same engine rpm limit as until now (14.600 rpm), but Yamaha, BMW Motorrad, and Honda, especially Honda, could get at least a 250 rpm engine rpm limit increase.

And although everyone is focused on the new engine rpm limits, there’s another change in technical rules that might be even more beneficial for struggling teams like BMW Motorrad and Honda.

This season the World Superbike championship introduces a Concessions Point system. This basically takes into account the results of the best manufacturer results, and those manufacturers that don’t get good results will be allowed to install better updates on their motorcycle engine.

The rules don’t state specifically which updates are allowed, we guess Dorna will decide on this subject according to each manufacturer performance on a given time, but this means that the best teams won’t be allowed to develop the engine, while struggling manufacturers will have more freedom to spice up the engine and obtain better performance, closing the gap to the best World Superbike teams.