The 2024 British Superbike Championship decider is as good as motorsports gets

A points gap between the two main title contenders which was smaller than the gap in points awarded for first and second place, countless overtakes for the lead, straight-line contact, and a last lap pass for the win — the 2024 British Superbike Championship finale had it all.

Coincidentally, last week — after MotoGP’s Japanese Grand Prix snoozer — I’d begun to think that all final round deciders were destined to be underwhelming.

Let’s face it, this year’s MotoGP World Championship, dubbed the “championship of mistakes” by reigning champion and Japanese GP winner Francesco Bagnaia, is not really a classic. The points are close with four rounds to go, but the battles are weak, there’s the persistent topic of tyre pressures, and the two main contenders — Bagnaia and Jorge Martin — are far more likely to crash than overtake each other. 

But even the good MotoGP title battles tend to end in fairly anticlimactic conclusions.

Think about some of the best championship battles of the past few years.

The 2017 MotoGP World Championship was packed with excellent races, especially between Marc Marquez and Andrea Dovizioso, such as the Austrian and Japanese Grands Prix. But Marquez went to Valencia with 21 points over his rival, the championship was basically over, and the finale was saved by a pass-less last lap battle between Dani Pedrosa and Johann Zarco for the victory after Dovizioso had crashed out, sealing the title for Marquez with five laps to go.

2013 was quite similar. Marquez grabbed hold of the championship that year after mid-season collarbone breaks for both Dani Pedrosa and Jorge Lorenzo and, even though he handed the latter a lifeline in the championship battle when he was disqualified from the Australian Grand Prix, Marquez — in a year where three riders were realistically capable of finishing on the podium — took a lead to the final round which meant all he had to do was finish on the podium to be crowned champion. 

That year, there wasn’t even the inconsequential (as far as the championship was concerned) race victory battle that 2017 had.

Even if you go back to 2006 — it was a great battle for the championship, with late-in-the-season drama at the penultimate round in Estoril, the dominant champion of years past having a tricky start to the year, and of course that dominant champion crashing in the final race to decide the championship, but that race was hardly a phenomenon.

A classic finale, sure, because a well-liked guy — Nicky Hayden — won his first title when it had looked certain he would come up short to then-seven-times champion Valentino Rossi. And the result of the race is memorable for Troy Bayliss’ win as a wildcard, but there was no classic last lap battle.

All of those years had great title battles — and you can throw 2015 and 2023 in, too — but none had deciders that were, or are, memorable for anything other than the result.

This isn’t even just the case in MotoGP. WorldSBK in 2013 was an excellent season-long battle for the title between multiple riders, but the final round in Jerez was a dud, despite Eugene Laverty’s all-time around-the-outside pass on an injured Marco Melandri for Race 1 victory, as Tom Sykes wrapped up the title with little difficulty.

WorldSBK’s 2021 title fight was arguably the best-ever. Six-times champion Jonathan Rea battled Toprak Razgatlioglu, with occasional interjections from Scott Redding. Their battling saw them take each other to new limits, and was so often on the very edge of disaster but almost always remained on the correct side of that line. But the title was wrapped up by Razgatlioglu in Race 1 at the final round in Indonesia.

You can even take to the dirt. MXGP entered its final Grand Prix of 2021 with Jeffrey Herlings only three points behind Romain Febvre. With Herlings finishing Race 1 at the MXGP of Citta di Mantova first, and Febvre in second, they entered the last race of the year tied on points. But Herlings is a better sand rider than Febvre, so the result was essentially a certainty before the gate dropped, and Febvre simply didn’t have the speed to go with Herlings in that final moto.

MXGP’s 2021 battle was probably not helped by the fairly bizarre decision to end the season on a Wednesday (something which is being repeated by World Supercross this December), but even this year’s 2024 season — also decided in the final race — was ended by a sterile finale, because Jorge Prado simply proved to be much faster than Tim Gajser at the MXGP of Castilla la Mancha and basically had the title won after the first corner of Race 2 in Cozar.

Head over to the AMA Pro Motocross series in the US, and its 2022 450MX title battle between Eli Tomac and Chase Sexton was also fairly forgettable. An unbelievable season between the two saw them regularly battling for the lead against each other with 30 or more seconds back to the ‘best of the rest’. The final race saw Sexton show blistering speed but also crash four times, and Tomac took his fourth 450MX title having barely come into contact with Sexton throughout the final race.

Even think outside of motorcycle racing. F1’s 2010 season was phenomenal; the racing was trash but four drivers went to the final race in Abu Dhabi with a mathematical shot at the title, and it was the third-placed of those that ultimately clinched it. But the most memorable thing about that race is Fernando Alonso spending 30 laps glaring at the rear tyres of Vitaly Petrov’s Renault, totally incapable of making a pass.

Then, there’s 2021. By more or less any measure, the best title battle in F1 history, but the entire thing was tarnished by comical officiating in the final laps of the final race. High drama, but poor quality.

BSB isn’t immune to that, of course. Bradley Ray didn’t win the 2022 title until the final round, but both his main rivals — Tarran Mackenzie and Jason O’Halloran — had both essentially crashed out of contention at Oulton Park, and Ray’s run to the title was ultimately about as straightforward as was possible in the last year of the old Showdown format.

In 2014, Shane Byrne and Ryuichi Kiyonari went into the final round split by only 12 points, but a broken collarbone sustained in a crash on Saturday morning for Kiyonari effectively handed the title to Byrne before the lights went out for Race 1.

The year before, Byrne was involved in a season-long fight with Alex Lowes which went down to the final race. Lowes passed Byrne for the lead around halfway through the final race, and Byrne was unable to respond. Another solid finale, but not a classic race.

BSB tops it all

That’s the magic of this year’s BSB finale. I’m not even sure the title battle itself, over the course of the season, was that special. Bridewell was super-consistent, while Ryde relatively struggled at the beginning before coming on strong in the second half of the year to close his points gap down.

But they never really battled hard with each other until last weekend at Brands Hatch. Bridewell tried to go with Ryde in Race 1 at the penultimate round at Donington Park, but ultimately didn’t have the pace down the stretch, and, other than that, the reality of BSB is that there are always more than the two main riders in contention for the podium and victory.

If those MotoGP title battles previously mentioned had something, it was a compelling and easy-to-follow story created by the series’ relative lack of parity: the title contenders regularly fought against each other directly with little input from others outside of championship contention.

The unfortunate reality of a championship with strong parity between technical packages and a grid of riders fairly evenly matched in terms of ability is that you lose the simple building of characters created by the appearance of superiority.

But the 2024 BSB Brands Hatch finale was not only an incredibly tense conclusion to a championship, with a battle for the race victory between the two title contenders with winner-takes-all ramifications for the title, but it was also a straight-up all-timer race.

They were both pushing the limit so hard for so long, even to just get to the end of that race was an achievement, let alone to get to the end having also won the battle.

The final race was even preceded by Race 2, which essentially foreshadowed Race 3. There was no outside interference, just two guys giving all they had.

Plus, there was the added flavour of the pair being on two different bikes with very different characteristics (and, from a visibility perspective and considering that that race will probably be shared by every motorsports-focused Instagram account in existence for probably all eternity, handily painted in essentially opposite colour schemes). 

Each rider and bike had their own strong and weak points, and there was even the totally counter-intuitive scenario of the Yamaha being the faster bike in the straight thanks to Bridewell’s difficulties with wheelie.

In MotoGP, where only the Ducati riders can win, it’s impossible to have such a dynamic battle. 

In WorldSBK, only the coincidence of a wrong tyre choice for Toprak Razgatlioglu and a long final corner could give Nicolo Bulega the chance to snatch victory on the line in Estoril last weekend; and, before Razgatlioglu jumped on the BMW and Alvaro Bautista was given an extra 5kg for the racing crime of being short, World Superbike races were just watching Bautista with his person version of F1’s DRS blasting by guys in a straight line.

There’s a predictability to other series which doesn’t exist to the same extent in BSB. Sure, the Yamaha R1 has won three of the four post-Covid titles, now, and you have to go back to 2018 for the last time a conventionally-firing inline-four-cylinder bike won the title, but if Bridewell and Honda proved anything this year it’s that that’s not necessarily been down to the R1 or an uneven firing order being a dominant package in the championship.

2024’s was also the second BSB decider in two years to be decided by less than two points. This one was decided by one, last year’s by 0.5, with a marginally less exciting final race for the simple fact that the gap between the two contenders — Tommy Bridewell and Glenn Irwin — on that occasion meant that, for Irwin to overturn his deficit to Bridewell, he’d have needed a rider between him and Bridewell, so it wasn’t all in his hands.

When the 2011 BSB decider happened between Tommy Hill and John Hopkins, it was reasonable to expect that you’d never see a race that good again, But, possibly for the fact that, where Hill and Hopkins were battling for second (a few seconds behind Sahne Byrne) back in 2011, Ryde and Bridewell were fighting for the race win, 2024’s decider might even top it.