Ahead of the Acerbis Italian Round, Yamaha have taken the wraps off a modified R1 machine that they’ll race for the remainder of the 2024 MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship. The most obvious change is the addition of wings, following the likes of their rivals, but speaking at the Cremona Circuit, Yamaha Motor Europe Road Racing and R&D Manager Andrea Dosoli gave more information about the changes. Yamaha will race with the bike for the final four rounds of 2024, collecting valuable data. Check out images of the new bike in the gallery at the top of this article!

Discussing the changes, Dosoli said: “I'm really glad that from tomorrow, our riders will be able to fully exploit the potential of this new package. I'm looking forward to seeing our riders racing during the weekend with this bike. The production bike is an important step which generates a bit of downforce and stabilises the bike, better front-end feeling entering the corner and braking and less wheeling out of the corner. This will make a bit easier the life of our customers, and they can exploit better the power of the crossplane engine. We improved the front end quite a lot, a big step with the front fork and also an improved braking system. We are sure that this new model will help our riders at a national level, where we cannot modify the bike so much, so we'd be a step ahead, but of course, also the world stage. Our engineers from Germany, Italy and in Japan are working day and night. There is a gap to close with our competitors. We believe that this could be already the first step and it’s important that we succeed, to implement this bike in racing with four races to go, because then we can collect data that will be closer for 2025 where we expect another step in terms of development in the performance of the bike.”

Speaking during FP1 on Friday at Cremona, Yamaha WorldSBK Technical Coordinator, Riccardo Tisci, said: “The target of new parts is mainly to increase the downforce in order to have less wheelie, better and faster corner speeds. I think we are continuing with the bike development and really trusting on this bike. This is just the beginning of a new era of the R1. We have to see how this new bike will be against all the competitors but from the numbers, it looks like we’re in a good way in terms of handling and downforce without sacrificing too much drag.”

When asked whether Yamaha could be more competitive now than at the start of the season, Tisci said: “I hope so, but the most important thing is we want to be more competitive every race and starting the 2025 season in good shape.”

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