Goodbye, Kawasaki. Hello, Bimota! As planned and announced earlier this year, Team Green is backing out of World Superbike, with their Italian friends at Bimota taking over their WSB factory effort—and now we see their first bike.
If you’re wondering how this happened in the first place, remember that Kawasaki now owns a big chunk of Bimota and the Italian boutique bike firm uses their engines and other tech. It’s a great arrangement for Bimota, who has long suffered from supplier shortages due to unstable relationships with other European OEMs. Now they have a rock-solid partner in Japan to work with.
Bimota’s bikes still retain weirdo suspension and other characteristics of the brand (see coverage from the past few years here). But their first WSB entry, the KB998, isn’t bizarro at all. A lot of the running gear and of course the engine are all fairly closely related to Kawasaki’s WSB machine from 2024. Showa fork, Brembo brakes, Akrapovic exhaust—there’s no point in departing too far from a formula that works.
However, Kawi’s bean-counters are keen for that Bimota investment to pay off, so having the brand work as a simple repackaging for Kawi’s Ninjas isn’t the long-term plan. As such, we see the Bimota KB998 getting new bodywork (with winglets at the fairing’s front), and we assume there will be other trickery to come, to differentiate between this and the ZX lineup, thereby justifying a bigger price tag! The deal is that Kawi provides the engines but Bimota does the chassis work. It seems unlikely the BbKRT team (as it’s officially called) will run warmed-over Kawasaki designs for very long.
Remember that WSB is a production series, so Bimota must produce versions of this bike to sell to the public. They will make at least 500 machines in the KB998 series, a task that might have been nigh-impossible using Euro engines. But now that they’re using repurposed Kawasaki ZX-10RR four-cylinders, they should have no problem.
The machine gets its official start tomorrow (October 22) at the Jerez test with Alex Lowes and Axel Bassani as the team’s riders.
