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A key talking point as the MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship headed to the Circuito San Juan Villicum for the Motul Argentinean Round was the introduction of the new ‘super concessions’ system. Announced by the Superbike Commission on Monday ahead of the Argentinean Round, it was announced that this would feature a ‘revised points system’ and would be calculated every three events in order to get a better balance of relative bike performance.

The new concept allows manufacturers to make further changes to their machine in order to, hopefully, move further up the grid and become consistent challengers for both podiums and wins. While concessions in the past allowed changes to the engine, the new super concessions system would allow the manufacturers who are entitled to super concessions to make changes to their chassis.

Detailing how this would work, FIM WorldSBK Technical Director Scott Smart said: “We’ve arrived at the point where the engines are working reasonably similarly or have been. The biggest restriction for some of our manufacturers is the chassis. Now, there are a lot of tyres that are used, different brands, used on the standard street bikes. The chassis are developed around what the street bike is going to use. Now, we’ve got the finest honed setups here in WorldSBK and you’re racing against bikes that are designed around the Pirelli tyre. We’ve actually needed to open up the settings for a couple of the manufacturers to have a little bit more scope to find the right setting to work with the control tyre. It’s nothing hugely new, it just opens that setting scope.

“In the regulation, you’re allowed to add bracing to the chassis, but you’re not allowed to remove anything to increase or decrease the flex of the bike. You’re only allowed to adjust, for example, the steering headstock or the swingarm pivot inside a certain range. You don’t have a huge amount of flexibility. What a super concession allows you to do is extend that setting range. Instead of being allowed, for example, to move 6mm for the headstock you’ll be allowed to move, for example, 20mm for the headstock. Hopefully that puts the right setting in the scope in the different manufacturers.”

The new points system for concessions looks at the race times in order to get a reflection of where bikes are in comparison to each other, with the best 75% of laps taken for this comparison; meaning the opening laps, where there is often a lot of jostling for position, and last laps can be discounted from the equation. During Free Practice 1 at the Argentinean Round, Smart explained more about the new points system.

He said: “We’ve also changed the way you earn super concessions, so it’s a little bit more of an open system where we still use concession points and it’s still the difference to the fastest bikes, but we make an analysis after every three events. You can become a super concession team after you’ve earnt a certain amount of tokens. Basically, across these three events, you’ll earn a certain amount of points based how your performances across race distances. In that race distance, we take the 75% of the fastest laps. We delete the slow laps at the end. If you’ve got a massive lead and you slow down, and also in the first few laps where everyone is battling for position, the lap times can be all over the place.

“That gives us a really good idea of the performance of each manufacturer and we basically take the top three runners, the podium, and use their 75% of best laps and calculate an average race time for the podium. Then we compare that to the two best of each manufacturer so we’re getting a really, really good reference. We have the best two from each manufacturer versus what you need to do to get on the podium. That is what earns you concession points.”

While the system will be used initially by the manufacturers currently competing in WorldSBK, Smart revealed there was also thinking for if and when new manufacturers would enter WorldSBK. Going deeper on this, Smart said: “It’s also to make a more accessible proposition to other manufacturers that aren’t currently in WorldSBK. If, for example, another brand wanted to come, they need the ability to change more things like the chassis and the engine. It’s trying to open it up to more manufacturers as well, get the seed in their heads in case they want to come in the future.”

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