WHEN the World Superbike Championship started in 1988 it was just another race series.

But 15 years on it is one of motorcycle sports biggest crowd-pullers.

For the past three years the biggest one-day crowd for a UK sporting event has been at the Brands Hatch round of the World Superbike Championship.

Even without the attraction of four-times champion Carl Fogarty, there were still more than 100,000 fans attending the famous Kent circuit.

The original concept for a Superbike series was for a production-based silhouette class, thus enabling the race fan to relate the bikes seen on the track to those in the showroom.

As one Honda engineer put it Race on Sunday, sell on Monday.

This format still applies today with a road version of Colin Edwards 2002 winning machine the Honda SP2 available from showrooms across the country.

World Superbikes the First 15 Years is a new all colour book. It's the latest edition to the best selling title first published by Haynes in 1997, and offers a fact packed history of the World Superbike Champ-ionship.

The book is in a convenient year by year format and provides information on the riders, the machines, the politics and of course the results.

From Fred Merkel being crowned the first World Superbike Champion back in 1988, onto the intense rivalry between Fogarty, Russell and Kocinski in the mid-nineties, it charts Fogarty's dominance in the late nineties through to the dramatic showdown of the 2002 season which saw Colin Edwards and Troy Bayliss competing at Imola, in what must be considered one of the greatest World Superbike races ever.

World Superbikes the First 15 Years really is a must for all fans of this race series. It offers a fascinating year by year account along with some stunning photography.

You also get an insight into the origins of the class along with an extensive appendix of results showing every points-scorer in every race.

Following this seasons climatic showdown the World Superbike organisers have suffered a series of setbacks, not only have both Edwards and Bayliss signed to GP teams for 2003 but some factory teams, most notably Honda have decided against entering into next year's campaign.

This has lead to a few people questioning the future of the event. But World Superbikes has suffered similar setbacks before and has always come back with great racing and more emerging talent.