The feature class of the Bridgestone Canadian Superbike Championship will qualify a little differently in 2025, as the series has confirmed a new process for setting the grid order in the GP Bikes Pro Superbike category.
The opening 40-minute session of every weekend – previously just free practice and now referred to as P1 – will offer an automatic entry into Q2 for the top five finishers in that session, bypassing Q1 later in the day.
The aforementioned Q1 session will then feature the rest of the grid in pursuit of the final five entries into Q2. Once the final Q2 portion of qualifying begins, the format will run unchanged from the past, with a top-ten time attack used to determine BS Battery Pole Position and the rest of the grid for the weekend’s races.
Previously, all practice sessions had no official bearing on the qualifying process, with the entire Pro Superbike grid entering Q1 and the top ten riders advancing to Q2.
The qualifying process for the other six national classes will remain the same as 2024, with one session for all riders to determine the grid order.
Under the revised Superbike format for 2025, the five riders who get up to speed quickly on Friday morning will be rewarded with a direct entry to Q2, skipping the Q1 session while their counterparts battle for the final five spots to join them later on.
Meanwhile, the change means Q1 will provide added exposure and attention to the riders further down the order, as they try to capitalize on the extra track time and earn their way into the second part of qualifying.
This system is largely inspired by the successful format seen in MotoGP, where the top ten riders from P1 advance directly to Q2 and the rest of the field battles for the last two spots in Q1, forming a final 12-rider time attack.
Despite the added pressure to P1, the format would not have had a significant impact on the grid for the 2024 opener, where Friday morning’s top-five of Ben Young, Jordan Szoke, Sam Guerin, Trevor Dion, and Connor Campbell also finished as the top-five runners in both Q1 and Q2.
Young took BS Battery Pole Position on four occasions in 2024 and has captured the season-long award in four consecutive seasons, a run he will try to keep going under the revised format this year.
The new system will be seen in action right away when the 2025 campaign opens at Shannonville Motorsport Park in under two weeks, May 16-18, just an hour east of Kingston, Ontario.
