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In both races, Eric Bostrom (32) was the fast starter. Here, the Kawasaki rider leads Miguel DuHamel (hidden), Nick¥ Hayden (69), Aaron Yates (20), Mat Mladin (1) and Pascal Picotte (21). Still, Bostrom ended up second on Sunday, bettering his fourth-place finish from Saturday. But it is Hayden who will be remembered most in this one. In Saturday's red-flag-interrupted race, Hayden was impeccable in both portions, eventually topping DuHamel by just over a second. On Sunday, he caught Bostrom from behind, passed him and then withstood the constant pressure applied to him from the Kawasaki man. When it was all over, Hayden had won his fifth-straight Superbike National and his 10th of the last 11 races, dating back to last season. He is, without a doubt, the dominant rider in the series and there appears to be little doubt that he will come out of all of this with the Superbike National Championship. The fat lady hasn't started singing, but she'll be riding shotgun in the Honda truck to the rest of the races ... Bostrom's solid weekend of racing moved him to second in the series standings. That's the good news. The bad news is that he's 80 points behind Hayden. You read that correctly, 80 points. Eight-O. Hayden has amassed 253 points after seven rounds. Bostrom is second with 173 points, one better than Yates. Pascal Picotte jumps to fourth in the series standings on his Austin/Bleu Bayou Ducati, the French Canadian posting sixth- and fifthplace finishes over the course of the two days. Only then comes Mladin, in fifth, with 154 points. DuHamel, meanwhile, has jumped all the way to sixth with 146 points after starting the season with two non-finishes. While the Yoshimura Suzuki team may have had a less-than-stellar time of it at Road Atlanta, at least they scored some points. Yamaha was even more miserable after its star (and only) rider couldn't even start either race, with Anthony Gobert suffering a broken leg during Friday afternoon's qualifying session (see Briefly... ) Ditto for HMC Ducati, with Doug Chandler knocking himself out of both races with a crash on Saturday morning in the same corner (turn four) that claimed Gobert. Chandler didn't break any bones but was banged up and bruised - enough to keep him from starting on either day. With only seven factory riders starting the two races, it was time to shine for the privateers. The top finishing non-factory star on Saturday was Hooter's Suzuki's Michael Barnes. On Sunday, that honor went to young Jason DiSalvo on the Cruise America-backed Suzuki, after he managed to pass White Tip Racing's Brian Parriott on the very last lap of the final. RACE ONE Sans two of its stars, Gobert and Chandler, the slightly depleted (at least in terms of factory riders) field of 42 Superbikes rocketed off the start under an intermittent sun, with a holeshot by jet setter Bostrom on the factory Kawasaki. For a while anyway, the battle up front was intense, the top four Bostrom, Hayden, DuHamel and Yates - separated by less than a second as they swapped back and forth around the 2.52-mile racetrack. Mladin, meanwhile, was a fading fifth, circulating alone on what continues to be an ill-handling GSX-R750. Although he wasn't a factor at the front, Mladin easily led a scrap between the final two factory men, Hacking and Picotte. It all changed with a flash on the 11 th lap, when Hayden drafted past Bostrom on the back straightaway. Bostrom countered with a braking move into the bus-stop chicane of tum 10, but then Hayden went back by in a brave move into the final corner. It was as if Hayden knew what lay ahead and he wanted to get there first: A gaggle of slower riders that would ultimately serve him well. The action came just a lap later, with the leaders encountering what looked like a combination of Atlanta's Spaghetti Junction and Los Angeles' Interstate 5. With bikes literally everywhere, Hayden either did the best job or had the best fortune, depending on your outlook, but the result was the same either way: He emerged from it all with a lead - 1.3 seconds at the end of 13 laps, 2.3 seconds a lap later, then over three seconds by the end of 17 laps. "We carne up on a group of guys,' Hayden explained. "There was like 10, I don't know, maybe even more than that, 10 or 12 people deep. I came out of the last corner, turn seven, I looked up going into the back straightaway, and there was just this line of these boys all the way down the back straightaway, and I was like, 'God, this is going to be good.' They were pretty good to me, because I had like a half a second that lap, and the next lap I had a second. So I think I made up a little time. The track ... it's hard around here in traffic, because it's one-line over here in a few places, and it's like, in some of these esses, you kind of like stick a wheel in there, and you're not really sure if they know you're there yet, and they'll come across you.' Hard work, but as it turns out it was hard work for naught. On the 18th lap, the red flag came out with a downed motorcycle lying in the middle of the racetrack on the exit of turn six. What would follow would be an eight-lap sprint race. It was now anybody's race. It wasn't something Hayden was looking forward to. "My bike was working really good," Hayden said later. "That's why I hated to see the red flag. The longer we went, my bike almost was working better as the tires went off. The longer the run, it seemed like it was working better, so I hated to see the red flag. You hate to see a seven-lap [actually, eight-lap] race, just because somebody can banzai, or really just hold on for seven laps and do something desperate. They don't have to think about really managing their tire or The finish of Sunday's race was this close as Bostrom (32) hounded Hayden (69) to the very ~nd. cue I e n e _ S • MAY 29, 2002 9