Forget MotoGP or even World Superbike. The most dramatically entertaining and closely fought international category in road racing today is the so-called Post-Classic Superbike category.
This has caught on bigtime around the world in the past decade, catering for air-cooled multi-cylinder son-of-streetbike racers from the late 1970s and early 1980s. While simply spectacular in its own right, this post-Classic class recaptures the variety and thrills of Superbike’s early days, when Honda, Kawasaki and Suzuki fours grappled with BMW, Ducati and Moto Guzzi twins in a tight struggle for sportsbike supremacy.
Strangely, though, today’s post-Classic grids around the world are practically devoid of BMW Boxer twins which, besides winning the world’s debut Superbike title in 1976 courtesy of Reg Pridmore in the USA, were strong contenders for success in the Battle of the Twins, the category which was invented in the USA in the early 1980s to cater for the American and European twins which had been left behind by the pace of Japanese four-cylinder Superbike development.
Yet BMW Boxers dominated the early days of BoTT racing, with only the Reno Leoni Ducati ridden by Jimmy Adamo preventing Dave Emde on the San Jose BMW and John Long on the Udo Geitl/Todd Schuster Boxer Superbike from completing a BMW clean sweep of the first-ever US National series back in 1981.
But then the Bavarian bikes gradually became less competitive, even in eight-valve MKM-Krauser guise, as Harley and the Italian Mob took over, tyres got wider and stickier, and power outputs escalated. It was the same story in Japan, where BMWs initially dominated the category when BoTT racing started there in the 1980s – BMW Japan even sponsored the January Battle
