Nah, I personally don't like the 4 cylinder scream, I prefer the deep, booming sound of a twin, but the new 3-1 firing order of the R1 has the booming sound of a twin, with the free revving of a 4, and it sounds awesome.
They were talking about the firing order on eurosport, how the race bikes usually fire differently from the road going counterpart, but this time the firing order was passed down from the road going bike iirc.
Yes, the bike they mentioned was an old even firing order, flat-plane crankshaft R1 that had its ignition and camshafts rephased to fire 2 cylinders at once, making it more akin to a parallel twin with a 180 degree crank (180-540 firing order). No special crankshaft requred, except maybe for some extra strengthening.
AFAIK this kind of firing order change was not a common practice outside of MotoGP.
Good races. Shame they had to focus on the front 3 so much for SBK race 2, seems like there was a lot more action slightly further down the order.
There is a conspicuous absence (as always) of onboard camera footage, which is a real shame.
WSS was cracking though, great race from lights to flag.
MotoGP usually has quite a bit of that. I remember seeing an onboard from the tail cam of Casey Stoner flying around Misano (IIRC) in qualifying. The rate at which he gets that thing over on his knee is just incredible, and then the corner speed...
The superbikes do have worse coverage than MotoGP. Which is a shame because the races are really nice. The bikes are really tiny on the screen, and as said there isn't any onboard action which makes MotoGP so awesome to watch most of the time.