Michael Rutter has reiterated his belief that the controversial weight penalty placed on the Ducatis in recent rounds of the Bennetts British Superbike Championship is not fair.
All Ducati 1098 bikes were forced to have their base weight increased from the
Snetterton round onwards, a decision that almost prompted GSE Racing to pull out of the championship altogether, while it also raised serious doubts from Michael Ruter's North West 200 team too.
Nonetheless, although Ducati have since won all four of the ensuing races, Rutter maintains that it isn't fair to penalise all of the Ducati riders when he believes the crucial difference in the dominance Shane Byrne is in fact Byrne himself and not the bike.
“I don't think it's fair,” he told
Crash.net Radio. “That's how the rules were at the beginning of the season and I think Shakey is just riding well.
“If they want to get in all that, then they should start weighing everything, like the riders, because I am quite a bit taller than many people and maybe I should get a benefit that way. The championship has been run so well for many years they should have just left it alone.”
With an additional ten kilos to spread around the bike, Rutter, a veteran of 289 BSB races, claims it has been giving the team headaches regarding how to race around it in equal conditions.
“If you lift ten kilos of weight off and walk around for ten minutes, then you'll feel it,” Rutter added. “So it does alter the bike and we have been moving it around several places, so it does change it to a massive degree.
“We're getting on top of it, but we need to be on the podium more regularly. We need to be fast over 30 laps.”
