2005 World Superbike & Supersport Championships - Round 1

Honda's top finisher in the both races was Chris Vermeulen. The Dutch Honda TenKate team has Australian duo Chris Vermeulen and Karl Muggeridge, and both were suffering from the flu and significantly curtailed pre-season testing on their Honda 1000 machines.

Interestingly, Vermeulen got it all together in the latter stages of the second race, and finished fourth, lapping much faster than anyone else on the circuit and had the race gone another lap or two, he would have picked up third place from Corser.

Vermeulen won four races on the Ten Kate Honda last year - the only non-Ducati rider to win a race in the last two years. He did so in his first season of Superbikes, on a machine that was under development and he represents excellent value at 5/1 from the bookies for the title at this stage. Now sitting fourth in the championship fight, Vermeulen will figure in the overall championship result.

Similarly, Muggeridge has no fear, no regard for reputations and by the time the Ten Kate CBR 1000RR reaches Phillip Island it will be a far more sorted machine with the customary turn of speed the boys at Ten Kate seem to always be able to extract from their bikes. Indeed, the Honda CBR 1000RR is for our money, the most likely bike to win the title this year - apart from the Ten Kate duo, Honda also numbers amongst its riders Pier Francesco Chili, Ben Bostrom and

A much improved performance from the young Aussie, winner of four races for Honda last season, saw him fourth in race two, and rookie Max Neukirchner who was a remarkable fifth in qualifying prior to superpole, in his first superbike race.

Chili will benefit from what will possibly be the fastest bike in the field by mid-season, and Bostrom certainly has the talent to win the title, having been the American Superbike Champion in 1998 and having many wins under his belt for Ducati. An inexplicable loss of speed saw him dropped from the Ducati team and if he can regain his form of 2000/1, he would be a force to be reckoned with.

KAWASAKI

The only one of the big four to fail to show a turn of speed in the first round was Kawasaki. With a fabulous, powerful and light ZX10 roadster to begin with, the best result on the weekend was Giovanni Bussei's eleventh in the first race. Kawasaki's failure to put a top flight rider on the machine might cost it valuable publicity during the year - the bike is fast enough.

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