Carlos Checa is to retire from racing. The 41-year-old Spaniard had been forced to skip the last four rounds of the 2013 World Superbike season after crashing heavily during practice at the Istanbul Park circuit in Turkey, fracturing his pelvis. That injury, and the lack of a strong offer for the 2014 season, caused Checa to decide to retire.
Bernhard Gobmeier hasn’t even spent a full-year at Ducati Corse yet, though the German’s time in Borgo Panigale will officially come to an end at the end of the MotoGP season. Taking a “prestigious and strategic position within the Motorsport organisation of the Volkswagen Group,” Gobmeier will be replaced by Aprilia Racing’s Luigi “Gigi” Dall’Igna, as was rumored earlier this week.
Dall’Igna brings with him an arsenal of experience in managing Aprilia’s World Superbike and MotoGP efforts, and his first task at Ducati Corse is an obvious one: right the ship.
With Ducati Corse listlessly floating in MotoGP for the past few years, and now hitting a wall in WSBK as well, Dall’Igna’s move to Bologna may be a small one from Noale, but the task at hand is monumental. Ducati Corse explains the move and new hierarchy in its press release is after the jump.
For the past month or so, Nicky Hayden has been telling the press that an announcement on his future should come in the next couple of days.
On race weekends, the press asks on Thursday whether there’s any news, and then again on Sunday, and get the same reply: No, not yet, but it shouldn’t be long.
We know who Hayden will be signing with – Hayden has been spotted going in and out of the Aspar team’s truck so often, that you start to suspect he’s already been given a spare key.
And up until recently, we though we knew what he would be riding, a heavily modified version of the Aprilia ART machine, with a new engine with pneumatic valves and a seamless gearbox, and a new chassis to put it in.
But it appears that that bike has been put on hold, as the most important contract negotiations for 2014 are starting to reach a climax.
That the Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade is getting a little long in the tooth has been obvious for several years now. And that Honda is planning a very special V4 sportsbike to take the Fireblade’s place on the World Superbike grid has also been broadly mooted for the past couple of years.
The existence of the V4 1000 was first publicly acknowledged by Honda president Takanobu Ito, who spoke openly about the bike at the end of 2012.
Since then, there have been constant rumors that the new Honda superbike was to be introduced at EICMA in Milan this coming November. So persistent had the rumors become that Honda Italia last week was forced to issue a denial, sending out a press release to the Italian media insisting that the bike will not be introduced at the EICMA this November.
The future of the World Superbike series is about to undergo a radical change. The EVO class to be introduced from next year onwards is to be the standard for all World Superbike machines from the 2015 season onwards. As the WSBK grids have dwindled over the past four years, World Superbikes have been looking around at ways to stop the decline of the series.
Former owners Infront were unsuccessful at stopping the rot, and now that the series is in the hands of Dorna, the Spanish series organizer has sat down with the manufacturers – previously excluded – and tried to find a way to cut costs drastically and increase participation.
Jonathan Rea and Leon Haslam will return to the Pata Honda team for the 2014 World Superbike season. Both men have extended their contracts for one more season, giving the aging CBR1000RR what is expected to be its last season before a new bike makes an appearance.
The pairing has been plagued by injury this season, and despite increased support from HRC for 2013, the results have not been as the team had hoped.