The ever-expanding PTR Honda effort in the Supersport World Championship will be attacking the series next year with currently five and potentially six riders under the same organisational and/or technical umbrella, and PTR leading light Simon Buckmaster puts this down to last season's change to a single bike rule. In the days of the freedom to have two bikes, PTR ran only two riders, but last year it grew to four full-time riders, and this year it will be even more, - with potential still left over for customer teams to be supplied with race bikes and tuning packages.

Since 2011 each WSS rider has been limited to one complete machine and one spare engine per race weekend, meaning that there is less outlay required to get onto the grid in the first place, and also reduced transport, logistics and maintenance costs.

Said former racer Buckmaster, "Obviously we could not do this (expand the team again) if you had two bikes per rider, so that rule allowed us not only to compete but to expand last year and again this year. It looks like there will be a lot of bikes on the grid in 2012 but only two years ago it was a lot less, about 18 to 20 bikes on the grid. We can get five or even six bikes and spares into our race truck each weekend, because our team is organised and we make good use of the available space, meaning we do not have to take a second truck."

Buckmaster continued, "We ran quite a few riders last year, and this coming year we will be even more properly geared up to do it. We have some very talented riders, some younger ones of course, and Sam Lowes is set to be a good championship challenger in his second year."