Last year, the Voltcom Crescent Suzukis of Eugene Laverty and Alex Lowes finished 10th and 11th, respectively, in the World Superbike standings. Both men were fast, but the GSX-R1000 is an old design. Laverty has moved to MotoGP , but Lowes and his Suzuki finished testing earlier this week at Phillip Island on top, .070 seconds under last year’s race lap record. Previous series champion Tom Sykes was fourth fastest on his factory Kawasaki . How did Lowes manage this? First, Lowes is fast, but he was slowed last year by injuries. Part of the explanation is surely the big change in technical rules. This year, all machines must meet the “EVO rules” that only a few teams built for last year. EVO rules have arisen out of British Superbike (as did Lowes himself), where the concern has been to cut expense while creating a more level playing field. BSB has been successful in attracting full grids, while SBK has seen the same shrinkage that was such a problem in MotoGP. The old NASA saying applies: If you can’t afford to do it, don’t do it. 
SBK had to move closer to production, and the path chosen was to allow head modification but not welding and use of high-quality stock-weight connecting rods but stock pistons. Pistons are a big deal because they are exposed to both mechanical and thermal stress. Piston cracking is accelerated by both higher rpm and higher temperature. In the past, teams shaped pistons to allow higher valve lift while preserving squish areas that speed combustion. With stock pistons, fewer tuning options are available, possibly reducing engine-build cost and making competitive power less exclusive. Yes, we all want to win, but once everybody is paying $50,000 per cylinder head, where is the advantage? In that situation, people are spending just to stay even and are unable to gain any advantage from it. Racing then becomes what I call, “bowling with gold balls.” Agreeing to use plastic balls makes sense. Maybe, under these new rules, the age of the Suzuki design becomes a kind of advantage, as it is a bike very well understood. Converting the super-fast Kawasakis and Aprilias to “plastic balls” may be harder than it looks. When the actual racing starts, we’ll know more. 
One of the controversies attending the new rules is the concept of “zero-tolerance frame inspections.” This seems to be based on the idea that all production chassis from a given manufacturer are identical and that any one of them may be pulled off a showroom floor and used to make an inspection jig that will fairly determine whether any other frame carrying the same part number has been “improved” in any way. One day at a past AMA Superbike event at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, Rob Muzzy beckoned me over. “Come have a look at this. I think it will interest you.” He pointed to the upper surface of the steering head of one of his racebikes. The top bearing race was clearly off center to one side in the head tube. “We have to re-machine every frame,” he said. When you ask around the industry, errors of a few millimeters such as Muzzy demonstrated often pass factory inspections. Zero tolerance? Best of luck. 
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