Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

AMA Chevy Trucks U.S. Superbike Championship Round 617: Road Atlanta Roberts, the Erion Honda rider alone and well clear of a DuHamel, Gobert, Ben Bostrom and Pegram. Bostrom would get past Gobert and chase down his teammate DuHamel, even- Mladin's race, it also changed DuHamel's race considerably. With a vibrating rear tire and the newfound On Saturday, Gabert 11... ....... DllllanNI (171. ~ Pega_. 1721 .... knowledge, thanks to radio commu- Ben Balb_li", nication with his pits, of what had SCI'IIPIMd ~-. tually passing him on the 11 th lap. DuHamel would continue to fade, a happened to Mladin playing on his vibrating rear tire causing him some and would end up 11 tho He would even get lapped late in the race. concern. It was on the 11 th lap that all hell broke loose for Mladin, the Aussie's mind, DuHamel slowed considerably "The bike was working pretty good until that happened," DuHamel said. rear Dunlop tire destroying itself on "Ben [Bostrom] was right there with the long run toward turn 10. Mladin did a miraculous job of keeping the me, and he was coming on strong. bike under control until he got it to the gravel trap, where it finally tossed him off. It was a frightening situation, Kurtis [Roberts]. we had the same lap times; he had like three seconds, four seconds on me. So I was going, 'That's not too bad.' I was a little tired though the consequences were about already like five, six laps into the as favorable as one could imagine. race. What I'm going to try to do is be consistent, and if I can do something He walked away. With the tire incident having an later on, it'll be good. My lap times obvious and immediate impact on actually came down. It was good. I was entertaining the thought of giving Kurtis a run for his money. Then over The fact that Mat Mladin's rear Dunlop tire exploded was bad enough. The fact that it happened on the fastest part of Road Atlanta was harrowing. Somehow, Mladin didn't crash. He was, however, upset after the race. Not only had he lost his points lead, he realized how close he'd come to disaster. "I can say that Dunlop is going to have to start bringing better tires to accommodate 200 horsepower motorbikes," MJadin said from the Yoshimura tent. "You can't have tires exploding doing 180 mph - that's life threatening. The problem is, you just don't know when it's going to happen. It's the same tire we ran for the last two days, and we've done heaps of laps on 'em. Exactly the same tire. No warning - it just exploded. There was no abuse of the tire. The thing never got spun once. You can see on the 1V, I never spun the tire once. I think it's the same one Aaron was using. You just don't know when it's going to happen, and that's the biggest problem. It was a medium to hard tire - the same tire as Sears. Tomorrow I'll run a Daytona tire, and I'm being serious. I don't want to park myself into that wall over there." When the tire went, it went big. Mladin, however, did a stellar job of preventing a crash, riding out the tankslapper until he got the bike slowed in a gravel trap. Only then did he tip over. "It's instinct, you know," Mladin said. "I got lucky because if it would have happened a hundred yards up the racetrack, I probably would have been dead, or in a bad way. I got lucky that it happened just as I was getting straight. All I had to try and do was control the motorbike, and I managed to do that. I just couldn't get it stopped because it was bouncing so much. I tried to get back up and get going, but after the little crash the front of the bike was pushed back on the brake lever. That's why you try and win races to get a points lead, and we're still only minus 12, so it's not all that bad." No one - with the obvious exception of Mladin - felt the tire failure more than Dunlop's road race manager Jim Allen. And it took Allen by surprise, as the particular tire that Mladin was using - a Dunlop 758 - had never had problems before. "The tire that Mat used yesterday [Saturday] was the construction that he and (Aaron] Yates used in both legs at Sears Point," Allen said. "And everybody used it in both races at Fontana, in a different compound. And everybody used it in the same compound as Mat and Aaron. Mat and Aaron picked that tire in the first race at Sears Point, and everybody else picked something softer. In the second race at Sears Point, everybody used the tire that Mat was using yesterday. And five guys used it yesterday - Yates, [Miguelj DuHamel, [Kurtis] Roberts, Eric Bostrom and Mat. Basically, we looked at everybody else's tire - and obviously we looked at Mat's as well - and they were all okay. So without being able to do any lab testing or anything, we've pulled that tire for today's race. Obviously, that's pretty moot at this point because of the rain. All we can do at this racetrack is decide that that tire won't be used here. That tire has been used in Europe and around the world, and it seems like a good tire. It's a proven tire. We have to wait and see what we can find out." As it turns out, it wasn't a moot point. The track dried, and Dunlop did indeed have to pull the 758, not allowing anyone to use it on Sunday. Mladin's disintegrated rear tire will be taken back to Europe to undergo analysis in a laboratory setting, according to Dunlop's Mark Sears. He said that Dunlop would be able to see what happened once the tire was pieced back together. "So long as you have a lot of the pieces," Sears said. "We actually have quite a lot missing from that tire. We don't know if the spectators kept some pieces, but you piece it back together, and you can tell from the footprints. It's difficult to tell at the circuit, but we can get it back to Europe and analyze it." As for the future of the 758, both Allen and Sears have faith in the tire. "It's a conventional size with a conventional construction." Allen said. "We're not going to stop using that tire unless something tums up in that analysis. At this point all we can do is look at that one tire and see what we can learn." On Friday, Brian Livengood suffered a crash on the backstraight that was believed to be caused by some sort of tire probiem The two situations are not related, Allen says. The tires were different. "Livengood's was a totally different tire," Allen said. "It was a different size; it was made two years ago. Those two incidents are not related." the radio, AI [Luddington] told me what happened to Mat [MJadin] - he told me I was on the same tire. He asked me if I had a vibration. I said, 'Yes, I do have a vibration.' I just shut her down and just tried to ride around - because to come in and change tires and go back out wouldn't work. I just rode around. I was trying to do the best I could. The place I was losing the most time was down the back straight. I was only 9000 [rpm] in sixth gear. The thing goes up to 12,000 almost. And that's a big difference. That's where those guys were making time. They'd pass me, and I'd follow them all the way back to that turn, and I'd think, 'There's no way I'm going wide open here.' Even on the last lap they were not that far away from me. That would have made top 10, nice even number, but we finished 11th. We made points on Mat with his misfortune. I'm happy he didn't get hurt with that and the same for me. I'm just happy to be here." Mladin's demise left Yates at the front with a motivated Eric Bostrom close enough to get even more motivated. He tried his best but couldn't get the gap under two seconds. Traf- there. I ran around behind Eric for a while. It's kinda hard to pass when you've got guys going fast. 1 was noticing that I could get out of five a little bit better than him and get a run going into six, but I could never been close enough on the brakes. It just worked out that I got a pretty good run and a draft on the back straight there and kinda put me up far enough to get around him. I saw Mat up there and just tried to chase him down. I almost went a second quicker when I got rid of Eric and was just going to try as hard as I could to catch Mat, and then he had his troubles back there. At first I thought a lower or something blew off [on Mladin's bike]. I guess he did a great job of hanging on to that thing and keeping it upright. When I came back around, I saw him on the bike and saw it had a flat. From there I just tried to keep it comfortable and keep a gap." Bostrom had given it his all, but he came up short at the finish line. He was second, but frustrated all the same. "We tried real hard at the beginning because that was really our only shot," Bostrom said of his effort to make a break in the opening laps. "It was all we could do. I don't know if fic would help him at one point but we have exactly what it takes to win then hurt him moments later. When it was all said and done, Yates was near perfect. Somewhat surprising was the here this weekend, so I was just doing my best to try and leave. I was worried about people getting away, and fact that this victory was the Georgian's first in an AMA race at Road Atlanta. sure enough it happened out there. "I didn't leave off the light as good as I wanted," Yates said. "Everybody got a jump on me. 1 got by Mat going into one, but then he came around ter than it's ever been, so that part is encouraging, but it's still discouraging getting beat. As far as the race goes, everything was fair. I w~ just trying to go as fast as I could every lap. I ran into some traffic, and I had the outside of us, and I was really hoping to stay in front of him. Then It's disappointing. The guys actually improved the bike, and it seems bet- MAY 28. 2003' eye I e neVIl's a few lap times in traffic that I wasn't too happy about." by Eric [Bostrom] going into six down 10 he got by and I was like, 'All right I'm going to stick right on him.' But that didn't work out either because he got the race, Bostrom couldn't believe his Even though he saw Mladin out of

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