Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

ILeftl Owen Weichel chases Francis Martin in the Superi)lke race. Weichel was able to make the pass to finish third. (RIght) Szoke does a bumout In celebration of his victory. end, and if he did I'd have the tires to do it." Taylor thought differently. When he was up on Szoke, he noticed that Szoke was wearing the side of his tire. "The Dunlops were amazing and I could tell his was going off worse on the left. I was watching him going out of the hairpin," Taylor said. If he could make it to the end, he'd have something in reserve. Four laps from the end, his hopes ended. "I wore through my engine case and I started slipping off the peg," said Taylor, showing off the oil on his left boot. "I didn't know what lap it was. I thought maybe we're on nearly the last lap, so I kept going. Every time I came by, 1kept looking for that last-lap flag, but it was panic. I went into corner two a couple of times and, basically, like driving on ice when you've got it leaned over a certain distance. And I was pretty sure we had a bike and tires for him at the end of the race. But I guess about three or four laps from the end I got some pretty big scares. Its terrifying at this track because you get a highside here, you're going to go home in an ambulance. Sometimes it's worth taking that risk. It's been so long since I've been on the box for the Superbike. " Taylor thought it was the seal from the crank. Normally, there's a rubber block that serves as a warning device, but he'd ground down the block and hadn't replaced it. Until he pulled off the track, he didn't know what it was. "I thought it was the engine pumping too much pressure, crankcase pressure - I used to build these things. I was worried that maybe it was going to go boom and then I'd be really in trouble. I shifted a little bit sooner. I though maybe the high revs were killing it. Immediately Jordan jumped a big gap on me and then I thought 'What the hell, I'm just going to ride. If I fall down, I'll slide good.' I didn't hurt myself yesterday; I figured I wouldn't hurt myself today." Taylor kept going, but Szoke was going better, and he denied that he was having trouble with his tire. "My left side of the tire was shagged a little, but that's normal when you're running 175 horsepower to be shredding tires," he said. "But they were still good. My end of the race was so shagged it's not funny. Even though the races in the AMA are longer, they run different tires. We run a tire up here just to make a race, so it's the best optimum grip so I would have a couple fast laps left in that tire." "That tire" wasn't exactly what he wanted for the race. In qualifying, he'd been running the soft Dunlop 555, but he was chunking the center of the tire on the back straightaway and the team didn't have any mediums left. The team didn't know what they were going to do for the race. Dunlop doesn't support the Canadian series like it does the AMA series, and more than one rider complained of a lack of supply. "Dunlop tires are amazing, but getting them is impossible," Szoke said. "You'd think even with me, leading the championship, it'd be easy to get tires. But no, we never got anything we wanted, anything we needed. And it's kind of always a Canadian thing. I think they need to do a better job there. " The team went into the trailer and found a medium Dunlop 587 that teammate Francis Martin had run for eight laps at the previous round at St. Eustache. "It was a used tire and we gambled whether we knew the compound was right, but we didn't know if the tire was good," Szoke said. It was so good that he was never headed and was able to stretch the margin once his pit crew told him that Taylor had dropped behind. "They gave me the sign that he dropped back and I looked back and he wasn't there," Szoke said. "I didn't see any yellow flags so I wasn't sure what happened. I just kind of cruised around and took it easy with the traffic and just tried to bring it home." Taylor was being quickly caught by the trio contesting third, but he didn't care. "I thought, 'I'll get it home best I can,'" he said. Until forced to slow, Taylor thought he had something for Szoke. "We were stronger down through two. I wanted to get ahead of him in two and maintain it in four and five. I did it on one lap, where he only got me at the end of the back straight. I thought if I could stay ahead of him for one lap on the straightaway I could take off, but we never got that chance." As Szoke and Taylor pulled away, the battle for the final podium spot formed up among Weichel, Martin and Lacombe. Martin held the spot until the 10th lap, when his soft rear tire made it impossible to consistently hold off Weichel. Martin would take back third on the 12th lap before losing it for good on the 15th of 16. "It's not the best race I had, for sure," the French-Canadian Martin (pronounced mar-TAN) said. Martin said the team had ordered the Dunlop medium-compound rears, but they'd never arrived. He was forced to use the soft rear. "The tires slide big time on the exit of corner one. Well, every right corner sliding everywhere." While in third, Martin was also getting misted by the oil from Taylor's Yamaha R1. "I slow down for a few laps, and I see it's not from my bike and I sped up a little bit more." Weichel said that once Martin started to fade, it was the "old cat and mouse, he passes you on the straightaway, kind of blocks the turns a little bit." Weichel made two passes cue I e in one, only to lose out when he was overly anxious with the throttle. "I got into some slide and I just settled back down and said I'm just going to wait until the last lap and make my move there," he said. Weichel was fifth on the 13th lap, taking Lacombe in turn nine, then Martin in tum 10, the final comer, on the penultimate lap. "The tires were fine, just my management," Weichel said. "You look at Michael's [Taylor] tire, his wear strip is a little higher than mine. I used more side of the tire. What happened is, as the race went on, I started spinning a little. I made sure the tire picked up at the end. You don't think you're giving it enough and then, all of a sudden, you've got movement and you're spinning it." With two rounds remaining, Szoke now leads the series with 262 points to the Weichel's 177. When Lacombe was dropped from fifth for jumping the start, the spot was awarded to Atlantan Geoff May, fifth in his first trip to Mosport and likening the circuit to his home track of Road Atlanta. eN Mosport Intemationoillocewoy Conn. ........nvlll., Omrlo, Results: July 21, 2002 [Ra...~ 41 PARTS CANADA NATIONAL PRO SUPERBIKE: I. Jorcl

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