March 28, 2026, Portimao Circuit, Portugal. French driver Valentin Debis drove Zhang Xue’s motorcycle across the finish line, leading the second place by nearly 4 seconds. With two wins in two days, a Chinese motorcycle brand stood on the highest podium of the World Superbike Championship for the first time.
The entire industry is in a state of excitement. Moments are flooding the screen and car fan circles are celebrating. This is a “ceiling” that the Chinese motorcycle industry has broken through in the top international competitions after decades of technological accumulation.
But amid the cheers, a shadow quietly spread.
The day after Zhang Xue won the championship and the screen was all over the place, some of the live broadcast rooms of Excelle Motorcycles suddenly printed a line of big words: “Before you came, we were already the champions.”
These words were like a needle, instantly piercing the newly condensed sense of collective glory.
From “connotative” headlines to forced apology
The timing of the title of the live broadcast room was too subtle – it was the day after the news of Zhang Xue’s motorcycle championship dominated the entire network. It’s not just one or two days apart, it’s the day after winning the championship.
People who know sports memes can tell at a glance that this is the NBA’s “Green Formula” meme. Draymond Green famously said to Kevin Durant: “We were already champions before you came here.” Later, Durant left the team, and this joke became a classic satire on “outsiders” in sports circles.
Now Kaiyue has moved this sentence to the live broadcast room, and it was just when Zhang Xuegang won the world championship. It’s not said in private, it’s broadcast in the live broadcast room for everyone to see.
Netizens took screenshots, forwarded, and discussed, and the public opinion field was instantly ignited.
Some people directly scolded: “The situation is too small.” “Sour grapes mentality.” “You just come to win glory for the country, and you show your connotation and disrespect the results of competitive sports.”
Some people think this is marketing: “It’s just commercial hype, creating topics and driving traffic.”
Others dug deeper: “Isn’t Zhang Xue from Kaiyue? It sounds like it has nothing to do with you that he wins the championship now.”
Excelle’s response came quickly. The official soon released a video statement, saying that the title of the live broadcast room was in response to those remarks that maliciously denied Excelle’s past achievements, and reiterated that Excelle had also won championships on behalf of Chinese brands. Due to the word limit, the expression was incomplete and caused misunderstandings. I sincerely apologize for this and promise to express it more rigorously in the future.
Excelle made it very clear in its statement: “It has never been denied that Zhang Xue was the soul of Excelle. From the beginning, Zhang Xue has accompanied the growth of the brand, injecting the core gene of focusing on performance into it and laying the foundation for development. This friendship and contribution will be forever remembered.”
But an apology is an apology, and public opinion has exploded. A large number of users who claimed to be “prospective Excelle owners” or “potential buyers” began to express their dissatisfaction. Some people posted screenshots of unsubscriptions, and some were inquiring about other brands of models. This sentiment spread from online to offline. Some dealers revealed privately that among the customers who came into the store in those days, three or four out of ten would ask about it.
The incident has calmed down on the surface, but the question marks left are getting bigger and bigger.
The “past and present life” of “Zhang Xue” and “Kaiyue”
To understand this turmoil, we must first turn back time.
Zhang Xue is the co-founder and technical soul of Kaiyue. Since he was a 14-year-old motorcycle repair apprentice, this man has only one thing on his mind: to make Chinese motorcycle engines roar on the world’s racetracks.
During her time at Excelle, Zhang Xue held 35.88% of the shares and was the company’s largest individual shareholder. He led the team to complete the Dakar Rally for the first time for a Chinese brand, turning Excelle from a tool motorcycle brand into the mid-to-large-displacement recreational market.
But the contradiction existed from the beginning.
Zhang Xue firmly believes that “without a self-developed engine, it will be stuck.” When Excelle’s annual revenue reached hundreds of millions, he proposed to mortgage all assets and even borrowed more than 10 million yuan in his own name to tackle the three-cylinder engine, promising that “if the technology is completed, it will be returned to the company, and if it is failed, the debt will be shouldered by myself.” In his eyes, only by mastering core power technology can Chinese motorcycles compete with giants such as Honda and Ducati in the international arena.
Investor representative Yan Kai (actual controller of Kaiyue) advocates “optimizing the existing platform first, establishing a firm footing and then making breakthroughs.” The company’s net assets are only 30 million, and the engine development cycle is long and the failure rate is high, which may drag down the company’s cash flow. Shareholders prefer to use profits for iterations of existing models and dividends to shareholders, rather than betting heavily on unknown technologies.
These are two completely different entrepreneurial logics.
Zhang Xue’s craftsmanship logic is that “building the world’s top Chinese motorcycles” requires All-in technology, and short-term losses are acceptable. The new brand Zhang Xue Motorcycles founded after he left will have a loss of 22.78 million in 2025, with R&D investment accounting for 9.33% of the output value.
The business logic of the capital is that enterprises need to make profits on a large scale, and technological investment must match the market return cycle. Yan Kai later said frankly: “There is no right or wrong, it’s just a different path.”
The conflict broke out completely in early 2024. Zhang Xue submitted the engine research and development plan late at night, and received a text message reply with the word “no” from Yan Kai early the next morning. After the board of directors rejected his proposal, Zhang Xue was demoted to vice president of R&D and eventually eliminated.
In March 2024, Zhang Xue chose to leave the house, giving up all 35.88% of his shares (valued at more than 200 million yuan). He did not even take away the engine drawings he designed, and left only with personal research and development debts. He officially announced his “naked resignation” in the circle of friends, writing that he left because of differences between his dreams and the interests of investors.
When he left, he said something: “Go and pursue my stars and the sea. You will be friends and rivals in the future.”
This sentence, looking back now, seems like a prophecy.
After the separation, the two roads began to extend separately.
Excelle continues to compete in the competition. In October 2024, it won the SSP300 road race championship in Jerez, Spain. In October 2025, it won the annual championship in the SSP300 category, becoming the first Chinese brand to win the annual championship in WSBK.
But changes are happening too. It is reported that after Zhang Xue left, he took the entire three-cylinder engine R&D team with him. Excelle’s new cars began to rely entirely on outsourced engines. Sales of the main models declined. Online negative reviews that mentioned “soulless” and “not as good as three years ago” doubled.
As for Zhang Xue, he founded Chongqing Zhang Xue Motorcycle Industry Co., Ltd. in Chongqing Liangjiang New District in April 2024, naming the brand after himself. In 2026, he used his self-developed 820cc three-cylinder engine to win two consecutive championships at the WSBK Portugal station, breaking the 37-year monopoly of European, American and Japanese brands. In just 100 hours after winning the championship, orders for the 2026 500RR and 820RR exceeded 5,543 units, and by April 1, the orders had exceeded 10,000.
Two brands, one holding the past championship trophy and the other holding the current world gold medal, reunited on the same track.
Competitive mentality and ecological issues in China’s motorcycle industry
Is the controversy in Excelle’s live broadcast room really just an accidental “war of words”?
From a positive perspective, this public “competition” may reflect the increased self-confidence of domestic motorcycle brands. In the past, Chinese motorcycles could only command prices in the low-end market, but now they can compete head-on with Ducati and Yamaha in the world arena, and even win. Brands are beginning to compete for the right to speak and the influence of public opinion. This is an inevitable phenomenon when the market moves from the blue ocean to the red ocean.
Data from the China Motorcycle Chamber of Commerce shows that in 2025, sales of large-displacement recreational motorcycles (displacement 250cc and above) in China will increase by 25.87% year-on-year, reaching 952,300 units. Among them, the 500-800cc displacement segment grew the fastest, with a year-on-year increase of 42.3% to 268,000 units. This track is becoming the core engine of industry growth.
When the market pie is getting bigger and everyone wants a piece of it, competition will naturally intensify. After Zhang Xue won the championship, the order volume surged by 2,000%. After seeing this kind of market feedback, Excelle felt stressed, anxious, and even unwilling. Perhaps this is human nature.
But the crux of the matter is what kind of competition this competition is.
If it is a competition at the product level – who has a stronger engine, who has smarter electronic controls, who has better safety configurations, and who has better after-sales service – then this kind of competition is the driving force for industry progress. Just like the competition between Apple, Samsung and Huawei in the mobile phone industry, consumers will ultimately benefit.
But what happened now was a sentence in the live broadcast room, a sentence with obvious emotion and direction. This is not about comparing products, but about who is better at “connotation” and who can occupy the moral high ground in the field of public opinion.
This kind of “competition” that deviates from the core not only consumes the reputation of the two brands, but also dilutes the value of the collective brand “Chinese Motorcycle”. Zhang Xue’s victory was originally a highlight moment for the entire Chinese motorcycle industry and a common honor for all domestic brands. But in one sentence, Excelle shifted the focus from “China won” to “Who is the real winner?”
When a large number of netizens began to discuss that “Excellence is small” and “Zhang Xue is the real hero”, part of the industry premium that this victory could have brought has been eliminated invisibly.
What’s more worth pondering is that China’s motorcycle industry is in a critical transition period. From the past “assembly processing + cost-effective” model to the high-end path of “technology-driven + brand premium”. From motorcycle production and sales exceeding 21 million units in 2022 to the rapid growth of the large-displacement market in 2025, the industry is climbing and shifting gears in pain.
At this time, the interaction between leading brands will profoundly affect the cultural atmosphere and development pattern of the entire industry.
Is it “competition” to make the pie bigger together, or “infighting” in a zero-sum game? Is it a virtuous cycle of learning from each other and promoting each other, or a vicious cycle of disrupting each other and consuming energy?
Excelle said in its apology statement that it did not want the friendship that once fought side by side to be wasted. But the fact is that the moment the title of the live broadcast room is typed, the consumption has already started.
After Zhang Xue won the championship, the two parties congratulated each other and liked each other in the video, and agreed to have dinner this week. This gesture is more powerful than any public relations rhetoric. But the title of the live broadcast room made this reconciliation effort pale.
In the final analysis, what Chinese motorcycles need is more technologies and products that can win championships in the world arena, rather than more “golden sentences” that can ignite topics on social media. When our riders surpass Ducati and Yamaha on the international circuit, shouldn’t our internal brands also learn how to transcend those narrow competitive thinking?
The order has been placed for half a year, not because people are blindly patriotic, but because the car is really worth the price. In the same way, whether a brand can truly win respect depends not on how sharp the title of the live broadcast room is, but how solid the technology on the production line is and how dazzling the results on the track are.
This storm will eventually pass, but the remaining questions will not disappear: When “Made in China” finally has the strength to compete with giants on the world stage, are our internal relationships really ready?
