Cycle News

CHAMPIONSHIP VOL. 55 ISSUE 32 AUGUST 14, 2018 P89 himself a second MotoAmerica Supersport Championship victory after his two race wins handed the Kentucky resident a 100-point advantage with 150 left to play for, meaning all he has to do at Pittsburg is leave with the same advantage and he's the 2018 champion. Beach was superb around the undulating Sonoma racetrack, besting pole sitter Valentin Debise (M4 Ecstar Suzuki) in both races by 2.4 and 2.1 seconds, respec- tively, with Hayden Gillim (Rick- diculous Racing Yamaha) taking two third-place finishes. "The weekend started out so good and then qualifying third again kind of had me bummed out, but I love to race and when wants to be. I wanted to at least try and scrap with him the last couple laps and then I just ran off." Rounding out the top 10 was again Gerloff, this time from Scholtz, Lewis, Hayden, Eslick, Wyman and Uribe in his final race for the Genuine Broaster Chicken Honda squad, his seat going to Bobby Fong for the rest of the year. In the championship, Beaubier has one hand on his third title with 298, 63 up on Elias. Herrin is third on 187 from Scholtz (163) and Gerloff (157). Supersport JD Beach (Monster Energy/Ya- maha Extended Service/Graves YZF-R6) has all but assured championship right now… we have to forget it. These guys are so strong. Today and yesterday all we could do was fight for the second or third position. The only thing we can do is go home, try to prepare new things and come back and just try to create a dif- ferent situation." Herrin couldn't hang with Elias in the end, settling for third and another podium for the privateer Attack team, although he ran off at the chicane with a few laps to go but kept his podium place. "It was not much of a battle," Herrin said of his tussle with Elias. "He passed me and I tried to pass him a couple times into the chicane and I couldn't do it. He's super good on the brakes when he iii My Own Race: 31 GARRETT GERLOFF 4-1 SUPERBIKE "Today [Sunday] I had more expectations than what happened," Garrett Gerloff said. "I really expected myself to have a good first couple of laps and be right there with Josh [Herrin] and Toni [Elias], at least fighting for that second or third spot, but after a pretty embarrassing first four laps I found myself battling for fourth with Jake Lewis and Mathew Scholtz and they were riding really good. Mathew kind of fell off at the end at I was able to capitalize on it, but I'm really just disappointed with the weekend in general." 95 ROGER HAYDEN 6-7 SUPERBIKE "For whatever reason I've never got along with this track and that carried over to this weekend," Roger Hayden said. "But on the positive side I was taken aback by the warmth of fans here. They were so kind in telling me how they followed my career and how they wished me well as I move on to the next stage in my life. For that alone I'll always have a good memory of my last race here." 11 MATHEW SCHOLTZ DNF-4 SUPERBIKE "Yesterday, we didn't get too much data from the race [because of the crash], so we were concentrating on having a solid finish to Sunday's race," Scholtz said. "The morn- ing warm-up was really positive for us, and I was confident going into race two. I got a good jump off the line, which hasn't been the case too much this year, so it felt good that I didn't have to try to pass a bunch of guys in the early laps of the race. We got to lap seven or eight, and I started getting arm pump really bad, which is a problem that I've had at Sonoma in the past. I just couldn't hang on to the bike very well, and I began dropping back. All in all, I'm pretty happy that we managed to finish fifth."

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