Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Nicky Havden STORY AND PHOTOS BY HENNY RAY ABRAMS It"i\ n the third lap of the very first race of the year, ~ Nicky Hayden's season began to unravel. The crankshaft problems that had plagued the Castrol Honda World Superbike team's RC-51s appeared in America at the worst possible time, early in the most important race of the year - the Daytona 200. All Hayden could do was motor back to the pits and sit. Luckily, not for long. The first of three red flags soon brought the race to a stop and Hayden was able to rejoin the race on a spare RC-51, an allowance that at least one other team questioned. Riding as if it was for the victory, though there was little hope of that, Hayden escaped with 10th-place points and moved on to Sears Point. In Sonoma, Hayden was bested by an on-form Anthony Gobert. "I just got beat," the refreshingly candid Hayden admits. "Went right down to the last lap. It was probably one of the best races I had all year, as far as excitement." Then came Road Atlanta. The first race ended with Hayden in fourth. The second race ended without Hayden. He lost the front end, and with it the season. And there was still a long way to go. There were ups and downs, more of the latter than the former, until the second race at Mid-Ohio. "I just kind of changed my attitude a little bit for that weekend," Hayden says. "I wanted to go have fun and go ride, just do what I'd been doing. Not try to do anything fancy, just try to do that." And he did. Hayden, who'd gotten third to Yoshimura Suzuki's Mat Mladin in Saturday's Superbike final, beat Mladin on Sunday. Then he ran the table, winning a thriller - by .005 of a second over Kurtis Roberts, then Miguel DuHamel in a Honda sweep - at Brainerd International Raceway. On his way to winning at Pike's Peak International Raceway, he showed that he'd learned something about tire conservation from the previous year, when he wore the rubber off his rear tire. In tlie season finale at the inaugural AMA/Chevy Trucks U.S. Superbike race at Virginia International Raceway, he used lapped riders to hold off Gobert and take his fourth win in a row, tying Mladin for most wins in the season. "It was so good to end with a win, just made it nice, four in a row," the rider with tbe thousand-watt smile says. "Just how things started off and the middle of the year, just to come back like that, that shows you no matter how bad you're doing, you've just got to keep going, keep fighting." The 2001 season was a test of Hayden's character. The precocious Kentuckian suffered early bike 24 FEBRUARY 27, 2002' cue I • n e problems, had corrective surgery on his wrist, crashed more than he'd ever done in a season, had a crisis of confidence, and then lost one of his best friends to a racing accident the night before the penultimate superbike race of the year at Pike's Peak International Raceway. "On race day, I wake up in the morning before the alarm goes off," he said. "I'm so excited I can't even wait to get to the track and race. And this day, when I woke up, I didn't even want to get out of bed, I didn't really want to go to the track, and I never felt that before." _ s What he decided was that he had to get out of bed and he had to win. But even a win in Colorado wouldn't salvage his season, one that had arrived with such high expectations. Having come so close in 2000, it was widely assumed that Hayden would pick up in 2001 where he left off. The Daytona problems were less damaging than they could have been and he wasn't that far behind. Right after Daytona, he had surgery on the scaphoid bone in his wrist and the recovery was slower than expected. "My thing took a long time," he says. "You've just got to leave it in a cast and just let it heal."

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