Copyright 2002, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.

In an AMA Pro Road Race Advisory Board meeting Friday night at VIR, factory team representatives voted to reverse proposed 2003 Supersport and Superstock rules that would have allowed machining of parts to increase compression.

The proposed rules were designed to give private riders and teams the ability to better compete with factory teams by eliminating the the “fast-enough, legal-enough” guessing game now played out in AMA tech on a race-by-race basis.

Although existing rules ban any machining of parts to raise compression, no competitive machines are actually stock and AMA Pro Racing officials do not publish the deck height specs submitted by manufacturers on AMA homologation forms.

The advantage manufacturers have by virtue of the fact that they supply unpublished deck height figures to AMA Pro Racing can be seen by comparing radar speeds of factory machines versus non-factory machines.

The Kawasaki ZX-6R Supersport racebikes ridden by Tommy Hayden and Tony Meiring have been especially fast when compared to private Kawasakis at most AMA events.

Representatives of the Honda, Kawasaki and Yamaha factory teams voted against the proposed rule change.

The Road Race Advisory Board is non-representative of the AMA paddock as a whole, notably lacking any representation of private riders like Brian Livengood, Michael Hannas or Tyler Wadsworth. The majority of riders in the paddock do know not who is on the advisory board; the exact composition of the advisory board has never been published by AMA Pro Racing.