News Release
Over Achiever Suzukis GSX-R1000
01 February 2008
In the hands of Craig Shirriffs and Robbie Bugden, Suzuki’s GSX-R1000 has totally dominated New Zealand Production Superbike racing so far this summer.
Shirriffs got the ball rolling, winning five races from as many starts at Wanganui’s Boxing Day races in a celebration of the seventh anniversary of the Suzuki’s world début win – on the same track. (The 999cc Suzuki’s inaugural world race win came when Hawera’s Shaun Harris took the first model GSX-R1000 to victory in the Chris Daws Masters race on Wanganui’s Cemetery Circuit on December 26, 2000).
In the years since then, Suzuki’s GSX-R1000 has been very much the bike to beat in production-based racing right around the world, and 2007 was no different.
In the United States, Texan Ben Spies dominated in the AMA Superstock Championship, a class which allows little modification to the standard models. In this class, Spies wrapped up the title at the eighth and penultimate round, at Braselton, Georgia, allowing him to then concentrate on defending his Superbike title at the final round at Laguna Seca in California.
There he and Yoshimura Suzuki team-mate Mat Mladin did what they had done in US Superbike racing all year – completely dominated, battling for the win, and the championship between them.
In the finish, Spies took the win, and the title, in a record setting season that saw the Texan and Aussie Mladin between them take pole position and win every race in the tough 19 race series.
It was the first time in the 30 year history of the AMA Superbike Championship that a single manufacturer had dominated every race. And in one of the closest championship finishes ever, Spies clinched the title by just one point from Mladin, 652-651.
Behind them in the final race at Laguna Seca, Aaron Yates finished third on a GSX-R1000 backed by basketball star Michael Jordan to make it a Suzuki 1-2-3 sweep of the final race.
The Yoshimura Suzuki team’s domination in 2007 followed a brilliant 2006 season in which the GSX-R1000 won all but one race of the AMA Superbike Championship.
Meantime, on the opposite side of the Pacific, 1 Atsushi Watanabe clinched the All-Japan Superbike Championship from Honda’s Takashi Yasuda, 152 points to 143 on his Yoshimura Suzuki, marking the first time the Yoshimura team had won an All-Japan Championship since 1989 when Texan Doug Polen did the honours.
Proving it is not only in sprint racing where the 999cc Suzuki is the bike to beat, the French Suzuki Endurance Racing Team (SERT) clinched its third successive World Endurance Championship with the GSX-R1000 Suzuki in 2007, wrapping up the title with a race in hand.
Actually, the potent GSX-R1000 has been the bike to beat in endurance racing since its introduction. In 2001, it took a 1-2-3 sweep of the Super Production Cup in the WEC and since then Suzuki has won another five World Endurance Championships.
While Northern Hemisphere racing is in its off-season, Suzuki is keeping the winning tradition going Down Under. Defending champion Robbie Bugden has taken pole position at each of the first three rounds of the NZ Production Superbike Championship run so far, and won six races from six starts, setting lap records at Ruapuna and Teretonga along the way.
Although Bugden missed out on setting a lap record at Levels Raceway, Suzuki still went into the record books with the lap record at the Timaru circuit courtesy of Shirriffs, emphatically underlining Suzuki’s slogan for the GSX-R range: “Own The Racetrack”.
Castrol New Zealand Production Superbike Championship
Points after three of five rounds:1, Robbie Bugden (Suzuki GSX-R1000K7) 1502, Gareth Jones (Yamaha YZF-R1) 102
3, Andrew Stroud (Suzuki GSX-R1000K7) 98
4, Craig Shirriffs (Suzuki GSX-R1000K7) 905, Damian Cudlin (Yamaha YZF-R1) 59
6, Hayden Fitzgerald (Honda CBR1000RR) 50
7, Jon Lowther (Yamaha YZF-R1) 50
8, Ray Clee (Suzuki GSX-R1000K7) 459, Carey Brier 29
10, Brendan Booth (Suzuki GSX-R1000) 29
