Historic Italian marque looking to taste their first success since Gobert’s victory 25 years ago.
Bimota won the first ever WorldSBK race with Davide Tardozzi in 1988. In total they have won 11 races, with their last victory delivered at the hands of the late, great Anthony Gobert at Phillip Island in 2000. Their much anticipated prodigal return to the championship is different from any other iteration, given that WorldSBK powerhouse Kawasaki is both the public and background hand behind much of the bimota KB998 ‘Rimini’ four-cylinder’s design and motive force. In addition, the seven times WorldSBK champion Provec Racing team members are looking after the on-track aspects of the whole push. With a well-proven and recently win-worthy Kawasaki engine and electronics package powering bimota’s most recent steel tube and alloy rear section chassis, this can only be taken as a serious effort in 2025 from the off.
We are still not quite at the stage of racing for points but the new BbKRT squad unveiled the colours and final image of the whole team – not at Provec’s place in Barcelona but at bimota’s own HQ in Rimini – on Friday 6 February. A real-world physical launch, not a virtual one, which was not live-streamed.
The most striking thing about the final KB998 Rimini, other than its unique electronically controlled winglets, was the white, red and black colour scheme. As one rider, Axel Bassani stated in his official launch quotes, it was “…old school but also with something new.”
The leathers of each rider followed the same basic colour concept of the bike, but the team uniforms were presented in a kind of light dove grey – very much a departure from any regular couture palette in racing.
This launch being held in Italy, passions were running quite high when Pierluigi Marconi, Chief Operating Officer of bimota, said, “Today is a really exciting day. Finally, after many years, bimota can come back to the Superbike World Championship. Just two weeks after this presentation of the new bike and the BbKRT racing team we will start the first race. Like everybody can imagine, this is something that bimota was thinking could happen, but nobody could really believe. Finally, it has arrived. It’s incredible. Also, we can restart our ‘old history. When we began, we just made motorcycles for endurance races. Our aim was to take part in competition and then present the bike for production. Then we could sell the bikes for every customer to enjoy. After 50 years we can come back to our history, with the help of Kawasaki and the Provec team. It is so exciting.”
The final proof of how effective all the pre-season work that went into the new project has been will come about soon enough, at the first round of the championship in Australia, between 21-23 February, at PI.
Sam Lowes – “I am really excited to see what Bimota and Kawasaki can achieve this year. The passion and effort from all the team to get this new project up and running has been massive, so I really appreciate that. From the first laps on the bike I’ve felt good, so my target is to build on 2024 (when he was an official KRT) rider with Provec and fight for the best results possible.”
Axel Bassani – “Today we showed the new livery of the bike, our new team and everything. It is nice because we are at home, near to where I live, so I think it is special. This is a completely new adventure for everyone, for Kawasaki, Bimota and for us the riders. The bike’s livery is old school but also with something new. I think everybody will like the new livery a lot. I also hope to show in the races that we can stay at the front and have the possibility to go very far with this bike. We want to have good races, good results and enjoy everything with the team.”
Pere Riba (Crew Chief) – “To adapt to a new bike brings a lot of things, I was working with a Kawasaki for many years, and we have been following processes year by year to improve, now it’s starting fresh, we are excited because there is lots to do. Even during this winter, we could not try everything we wanted to do because of the rain. We are facing now the first races of the Championship, we will understand race by race the direction we want to go but we are happy with the starting point, both riders showed good speed in Jerez and Portimao and let’s see what we can do.”
