This year marks the tenth anniversary of the British Superbike Championship as we know it. In that time, it's gone from being a second-rate, mostly non-televised race series with crowds of just 3000 to being the world's premier domestic championship. With ITV now having agreed to televise every round live to 3.5 million people and crowds of more than 30,000 expected at each event, Visordown asks BSB's champions of the last ten years to tell us what's made British racing great again and what their titles mean to them.
The British Superbike Championship has never been bigger. With ITV announcing it is to show all BSB races live for the first time, the racers will be performing to their biggest ever audience. From Sky's typical viewing figures of around 100,000, ITV expects around 3.5 million viewers to tune in on a regular basis.
And those viewers will be watching a world class series. In the last five years, the British Superbike Championship and its supporting classes have produced no less than five world champions. Troy Bayliss, Neil Hodgson and James Toseland have all gone on to be World Superbike champions while Chris Vermuelen and Karl Muggeridge have both won World Supersport titles and are now front-runners in WSB.
The financial stakes in British Superbike racing have increased dramatically over the last decade, with Niall Mackenzie estimating that all the top teams now have an annual budget of over £1 million while in 1996 a team could have run at the front for around £300,000. Riders' earnings have also increased. With personal sponsorship deals included, a top man ten years ago could have earned up to £100,000 while today's front men can bank up to £250,000.
The turnaround for British bike racing which came in 1996 was long overdue. The old and confusing tradition of running various championships for Superbikes under different titles (the H.E.A.T. Supercup series was the closest to BSB as we now know it) was scrapped and the new, single series called BSB was introduced.
What's more, the series attracted big name riders, sponsors and teams, and the promise of BBC television coverage from every round - as opposed to the occasional and haphazard way bike racing had been shown on TV before. Here's what the champs of the last ten years really think about BSB.