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Daytona Bike Week L..&.-I~IQ) again the springboard for a Superbike title, his third in a row. The key to both races was experience, knowing how to use the draft, knowing where to be exiting the famous Daytona chicane, and improvising. Mladin knew that he couldn't match speed with Hayden. He also knew that drafting him would be tricky. So he decided to win from the front, running his engine below its redline, holding power in reserve, just in case. "If your bike revs to 14,000 and you're at 13,800 when a guy comes by you, unfortunately you're not going to pick up any more speed because the thing's going to bounce off the rev limiter; it's just going to bounce off the rev limiter and stop," Mladin explains. "So you've got nowhere to go. I kept my bike down low. I held fifth gear around the banking. I put it in the top (sixth gear). sort of halfway between the finish line and coming off the banking, so I had a lot of rpm left. So as soon as Nicky came by, I squeezed tight to him. My bike just went through the roof! The thing picked up 2000 rpm so quickly, and it just shot me back by again." Simply put, the Daytona International Speedway chicane is the single most crucial corner in American road racing. More races have been decided between the chicane and the finish line than by any other sequence in racing. Being the last bend of the 3.56-mile circuit, the run from the chicane to the stripe is the longest, and fastest, of any track in the U.S.A. and, probably, the world. It is the only brief respite from about two miles of full-throttle racing on the Daytona banking. Get it right, as Mladin and DuHamel did, and you're a hero. Get it wrong, and there are dire consequences. Crashes aren't uncommon in every part of the chicane. Riders get in too hot; they highside in the first flick right; they tangle in packs on the exit. In 2001, Pro Thunder rider Dirk Piz died avoiding a crashed rider in the chicane. Nicky Hayden had a violent crash in practice last year, somersaulting over the bars and landing on During the Dunlop tire test . . . MIadIn (66) Iwd the opporbmlty to 11'7 the modItIecI c:Ililcane for the first time. His biggest concem _ tINIt as he _nt onto the "-king, ... _ higher (fifth Instead of ~). mailing the . . . . . . around the already fast track _ _ faster. his back, but he still came back to win the race. Kevin Schwantz damaged his hand with a crash in 1988, won the race, then went on to win his first GP two weeks later at Suzuka, Japan. DuHamel crashed chasing Scott Russell into the chicane in 1997, early enough to incur the wrath of Honda management. Russell won that year and four other years, though he lost to Eddie Lawson in 1993 after avoiding another rider in the chicane. Thomas Stevens, then with Yoshimura Suzuki, highsided in 1993, then was chased by an attack goose as he walked away. Larry Pegram torched his Competition Accessories Ducati with a crash in the chicane in 2001, then went on to finish a controversial sixth on a backup. The 2003 AMA/Chevy Trucks U.S. Superbike Championship begins at Daytona with a new chicane, one that has polarized the field. The split is along class lines: Superbike riders, for the most part, hate it. Supersport riders are less' critical. It was no different when the left-right-Ieft chicane was first designed into the then-3.81mile road course in 1973. Don Emde had won the Daytona 200 in 1972 on a Yamaha TZ-350, but it was the Kawasaki 750 H2R two-stroke triples that caused the change. Former Grand National Champion and 1967 Daytona 200 winner Gary Nixon is one of the few riders to have raced on the beach and on the road course in all its various incarnations. "One of the reasons they got the chicane put in back in '72 is the Kawasakis wobbled pretty bad," Nixon explained. Nixon said that Bob Hansen, then the manager of Team Hansen Kawasaki, met with AMA offi- Anthony Gobert is the only Superblke rider who went on record with a positive view of the newly modified chicane. 20 FEBRUARY 26,2003' c u e • • - n-.- _ s - cials after the race, and the change was implemented. The next big change came in 1985 when the chicane was lengthened - a short chute was added between the entry and exit - and the track length was shortened to 3.56 miles with the run-up and exit from the International Horseshoe cut down. Now, 18 years later, the chicane has again been modified. The change was a direct result of catastrophic multirider accidents in the Pro Honda Oils Supersport races in 2001 and 2002. Now the chicane is shorter, less technical, more like the first chicane with the riders straight up and on the gas before rejoining the backstretch and hitting the banking. "The mission was to make a safer chicane - from a rider's standpoint, to make it safer," said Dunlop road race manager Jim Allen, the former racer responsible for helping build safe tires for the ra.ce, Wand they did." That said, the verdict is far from unanimous. "I have kind of mixed feelings about the chicane," Kawasaki's Tommy Hayden said. Tommy was one of the riders caught up in last year's crash, one of the few to emerge unscathed. "I think that it will make it a little safer. It's not as likely for something like last year to happen, that I was involved in, so I feel good about that. But it makes the track a little less technical, I think. The chicane was pretty tough. The guys that had it figured had a little advantage over some other people. It