BEARS Stands for British European American Racing Supporters. The main requirement in order to race with the BEARS is that you must be racing a bike from one of those locations.
In terms of classes and where each bike sits, in 2023 we made updates to our classes to move towards a power to weight ratio based classifying system.
This change makes it more transparent and predictable for our members when trying to understand which class their bikes fit into. This new classification method applies to all formulas, except Formula 4 (Formula 4 remains a historic class not based on power to weight). This has been in effect since then and it is still the way we classify bikes today.
The way we calculate this is we take the stock power – crank horse power (HP) as reported by the manufacturer and divide this by the dry weight (KG) to come up with the power to weight ratio.
The threshold for each class is as follows:
- Formula 1 – 0.96 to unlimited
- Formula 2 – 0.959 to 0.725
- Formula 3 – 0.52 to 0.724
- Formula 5 – 0.01 to 0.519
Although this has changed how we classify bikes, we have not seen any significant changes to previous years of which bikes fit within each class. It has however provided a much more transparent and predictable way for existing and new members to understand where their bike fits and why.
We have included a few examples below of a number of popular bikes for each class and their power to weight ratio as a guide.
This is not an exhaustive list and if your bike does not appear in this list, you can look up your bike on https://www.motorcyclespecs.co.za/ and find your specific bike, locate the specified crank HP and dry weight then calculate your own power to weight ratio.
This website was the predominant website the committee used for creating the power to weight spreadsheet.
To download the class calculator below, click HERE. If you have any questions regarding this, please reach out to the committee.
