The future of the European Supermono is unclear. After 23 years the European Supermono class seems to end.
The European Supermono Association (ESA) has decided not to organize any FIM Europe races for next year due a lack of riders.
The European Supermono Cup for single cylinder racers was founded by Sir Alan Cathcart in 1995 and since 2002, the European Supermono organization (ESA) has been responsible for organizing the competition.
In the past, manufacturers such as MuZ and Ducati built dedicated racing bikes to participate to the series.
“To make it financially break even, there must be at least 25 entrants per race, but unfortunately we are not gettting that number since a long time, while we need to vouch financially towards circuits for these amounts. We don’t have large sponsors who can cover our losses and organizing the competition itself is purely volunteers work out of love for the sport”, said Evert van de Beek and Serine Stevens, both responsible of the European Supermono Cup organization since their colleague Wim Hendriks stepped out of the organization back in 2015.
The series was made up of 5-6 international double header races each year in a row since 2002 and the regular participants arrived from The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic and Italy. In the recent past, the European Supermono were regularly in the program of many MotoGP, IDM, BSB and WK Endurance weekends.
All Supermono racing bikes are prototypes often handcrafted and build by their pilots, which made the race class so interesting for true lovers of technique and speed.
For instance, the Dutch HTS team and Technical university Delft were for a long time permanent starters and their race team and race bikes were part of their students’ studies.
The organization has an explanation for the lack of participants.
‘Pilots are no longer willing to commit themselves financially for a whole season and pick and choose only for a handful of races, plus there is no national Supermono competition in most European countries, so there’s no flow to the European Cup. In addition, more and more young pilots and their coaches choose a standard Moto3 class. Building a single cylinder prototype race engine costs addition money, a lot of blood sweat and tears, which seems to be getting less and less nowadays”.
In addition to the MotoGP, the Supermono class is the only 4-stroke prototype class and it seems that this will be the end after 23 years for this sympathetic single cylinder community.
