Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

MBNA 250 Grand Prix Series Round 1 : Daytona International Speedway (Left) Rich Oliver (7) won his 50th careerAMA 25Gec Grand PrIx at Daytona, although Roland Sands (10) pressured him early before crashing. (Below) Old guys Randy Renfrow (2) and .JImmy Filice (3) lead 1S-year-old .Jason DiSalVO, who ended up losing fourth to FIlIce In a photo finish by .002 of a second. STORY AND PHOTOS By HENNY RAY ABRAMS DAYTONA BEACH, fl, MAR 11 tickerSolutions.com's Rich Oliver won his 50th 250cc Grand Prix race and it was a typical Oliver victory, though he did get some help. The 39-year-old all-time class champion got into an early speed duel with the resurgent Roland Sands, of the Performance Machines· team, the pair matching each other lap for lap, though Oliver led across the stripe every time. While racing in Oliver's shadow, Sands lost the front end and crashed in the International Horseshoe on the 12th lap, giving Oliver a free pass to Victory Lane. Sands was quickly up and going and finished second, though he had no idea where he was for the remainder of the race. "I hope I can win 51 by the end of the year," the four-time class champion said after winning by 32.090 seconds. "It feels good. I really have a lot of compliments to Randy [Renfrow, the third-place finisher) and Roland. They both rode great, Roland, especially. We talked a little bit before the race, I think it was on Saturday, and we said to each other, 'LOOk it's going to be between us and we're going to have a good time, we're going to put on a show for the fans,' and that's exactly what happened. I rode my pace and I tried to stay consistent and tried to take care of my bike and I tried to break away from Roland and it didn't look like it was going to happen, then it would, then it wouldn't, then I'd get discouraged a little bit and think 'Well, maybe I can't break away,' then all of a sudden I could. I kind of just kept going at the same pace and figured, if something doesn't happen, then we'll 32 MARCH21.2001· co u co I _ work it out on the last lap, but if something does happen, then maybe I can get a little break and try to pull away a little bit. Roland rides real well through traffic and all the real tight stuff. It was real close. I'm happy that I was able to win." The pair set a record pace, Oliver considerably lowering his mark from 1997. He completed the 18-lap, 64mile race in 34 minutes, 42.757 seconds at an average speed of 116.915 mph, much faster than the 109.104 he'd averaged when he won in 1997. Oliver's 50th win is second only to American Honda's Miguel DuHamel who has 62 among his various Superbike, 600cc Supersport, and 750cc Supersport wins. Oliver might have gotten there sooner had he not broken while leading at Daytona last year. Halfway into last year's race, he broke at the front with about 18 seconds in hand, suffering another failure later in the year, his season ending in second place to Chuck Sorensen. Sorensen, now with the GP Tech team, was on the losing end this year, dropping out of the race with a broken crankshaft on the fourth lap. n _ _ os Oliver, when he finished, had the run of the class most of the 2000 season, but sees the new year as more of a struggle. "Now with Roland pushing me I want to see how much more in reserve I actually have," Oliver said. "We went down into times that were unheard of last year. We were struggling to run low 56s and high 55s last year. In fact, I only ran one 1:55 lap last year. This year we're running in the 54s." Sands agreed that the pace was hot, hotter for him in the jnfield because he was down on top-end power. In the end, that was his undoing. "I was just really riding my ass off in the infield and rode a little bit too hard there in the horseshoe and just tucked the front," he said. The pair had such a gap on third place (over 30 seconds) that he was able to remount and finish second, though he didn't know it at the time. "Tell you the truth, I picked the thing up, I didn't know where I was," Sands said. "I didn't know if I was fifth or if I was eighth. I had no idea. I just picked it up and just kept riding, ended up in second, so I'm happy with that. "I had no idea I was in second. didn't have a pit board out there. was kind of using Rich's pit board. I just kept looking at his pit board, that was my main goal, was to try to win. I figured we'd be running together pretty much the whole race and that's the way it went." Third was where the fight was youth against experience. From early on, Honda-mounted Randy Renfrow was locked in with Cruise America's Jason DiSalvo, on a Honda in his first year in AMA competition, fellow veteran Jimmy Filice, on the Corbin Yamaha, and Sweden's Tomas Polander, also Honda-mounted. Renfrow controlled the pace for the most part, letting DiSalvo and Filice fight it out, Polander holding on at the rear of the quartet where he'd eventually finish, in sixth place. There were position changes up until the end of the 16th lap when Renfrow, who was there most of the time sharing it with DiSalvo, took control of third. On the run to the flag, he too got something of a free pass, when DiSalvo and Filice bumped each other twice on the East Banking, ruining any chance they might have of running Renfrow down. "Mostly I ran them down and once I got by them I only saw them from the back a little bit. I was a little surprised," Renfrow said. (The soon-to-be 45-year-old part-time racer was limping' noticeably, the result of extensive surgery over the past several months on both knees.) "I rode okay, but I didn't think I rode all that well, and I didn't expect to ride all that well. And I was a little surprised they weren't rolling through the International Horseshoe faster and a couple of other places that would have allowed them to make it a lot harder on me. And my bike was fast - real fast. "One time I went down in there and Jimmy was in the lead and I'd just gone by DiSalvo and I was trying to get DiSalvo to go back around me, and DiSalvo wouldn't go back around me and finally I'm waving him and we're losing more and more time on Jimmy, with the kind of draft those guys are creating you can make up five or six or seven bikelengths, and the second time I went down there with a lapped rider and there were two of them, and I managed not to pass one of them and one of them I passed, and I passed him before the in<;ident, which technically is a violation, but there was no way not to. The closing speed was way too great."

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