Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

AMA Chevy Trucks U.S. Superbike Championship Round 6/7: Road Atlanta homeboy getting around Eric Bostrom and then quickly zeroing in on Gobert to take the lead before they got to the end of the backstraight. Gobert fought right back in the chicane, but Yates sneaked back under on the exit. At the end of the first lap, Yates led Gobert, Roberts, Eric Bostrom, Mladin, Ben Bostrom, Pegram and Pridmore. The first few laps were frantic, with Roberts the man on a mission. He got by Gobert and then started a scrap with Yates, moving past the Suzuki on the third lap to lead for the first time. Mladin, meanwhile, was struggling (as were many of the top men) with vision problems, with high humidity wreaking havoc on visors. Still, Mladin went around Eric Bostrom and Yates in successive laps to hone in on Roberts. After five complete laps, Roberts led Mladin by .15 of a second with Yates, Eric Bostrom and Ben Bostrom right in the mix. Gobert was heading backward and would soon come under the attack of both Pegram and Pridmore, with Pegram also falling to Pridmore's strike. On the seventh lap, Mladin would take the lead for the first time with a pass of Roberts heading into turn one. He turned the fastest lap of the race on the fourth lap - a 1:24.620 to move into position, and once he got into the lead, he was able to string together three laps in succession in the 1:24-range to pull away. "Yeah, to be honest, I had some visor problems," Mladin said later. "At the start of the race I thought I was done. I didn't think I was going to be able to race today. Something happened on the inside of the visor, and I couldn't see anything for about the first eight laps. Then after that it got a little better, and I was able to at least see where I was going, so I put my head down and got away a little bit." By the 10th lap, Mladin's lead was Mladin took Bostrom to task over the speed of the Kawasaki. -Yesterday in qualifying. he [Eric Bostrom] was a second off the pace. and his bike was the quickest through the fastest splits. So from the guy who has been complaining so much about the speed of our bikes. ifs funny how his is the quickest." BRIEFLY••• The total Superbike purse for the Suzuki Superbike Showdown presented by Dark Dog at Road Atlanta was $75.000. with half the money being paid for each race. For his win on Saturday, Aaron Yates pocketed $4000. Mat Mladin, meanwhile, eamed the same paycheck for winning on Sunday. Believe it or not. his victory in Saturday's AMA Superbike National was the first for Aaron Yates at his home racetrack. Naturally, he was pleased. "I had no idea all the promoting they were doing here at Road Atlanta," Yates said. "They had me on the shirts and on the programs and all this and that. I guess with Suzuki promoting the race and being from Georgia, it ranks right up there. It's been a while since I won a Superbike race, and I've been wanting it pretty bad since Mat [Mladin] has been whupping up on us. I've been working hard at home gelling ready, and we've been concentrating on getting the Superbike dialed. and not riding the 600 has probably been helping a bit. I've got a lot of family and friends and a lot of fans who come out here to watch me." Not everyone was in love with the new section of track at Road Atlanta - a left-right chicane that makes up turns three and four. After Saturday's race, both Eric Bostrom and Kurtis Roberts complained about the section. Bostrom had been balked there in the Superbike race, and he blamed that section for that and for a near crash he had late in the race. "That new section is a big part of that." Bostrom said of his problems with lappers. "I know Aaron [Yates] got beat up in that section with lapped traffic as bad as I did. 1honestly don't think we should run that section, and I think we should go back to the old section - I think it's safer and more raceable. On the last three laps, someone had run through the dirt on one of the esses, and there was dirt on the track there. I almost crashed there two or three laps from the end. It just goes to show you that the track is just not really fit to race through there." After finishing second on Saturday. Bostrom was ready to try something drastic for improvement on Sunday. "For sure we have to try something different," Bostrom said. "For sure finishing on the podium is great. and we're happy enough to have a Kawasaki up here. But I'd rather go for the win, or at least gamble with a setup and go for the win, than finish on the podium tomorrow. I'm sure we'll try some different things, and it might be radical. Obviously, we have to improve some. We won the non-Suzuki race, so that's exciting. n Mat Mladin continued to take jabs at Eric Bostrom at Road Atlanta. The first of those digs came during the postqualifying press conference when Mladin said he didn't agree with Bostrom, hoping that the races would be run in the rain. "I'm a bit surprised by his comments that he hopes it rains today," Mladin said on Saturday morning. "I think at a racetrack like this with three high impact areas, we should all be praying that it's dry. There are a few areas that you don't want to be messing with - obviously, here [the final cornerl. down in tum four and on the backstraight we saw what can happen yesterday. For anyone to pray for rain when you have impact areas on a race track... that's a bit silly." But he didn't stop there. Later in the same press conference, 12 MAY 28, 2003' eye I e 2.4 seconds, and the scrap behind him had everyone's attention. Roberts led Yates and the two Bostroms (Eric first, then Ben), and those four were in a war. Mladin tried to make things a bit more interesting on the 13th lap when he ran onto the grass in the new section of the track, quickly re-entering without missing much of a beat. "I couldn't see where I was going," Mladin explained. "Honestly, in that whole race, I was lucky if I hit half of the apexes on every lap. I missed so many of them. I had a little spot on the bottom left-hand side of the screen that I could see through, and I was trying to ride with the screen about that far up so I could see through it." Yates, meanwhile, was putting on an exhibition, with impressive slides down the hill from turn 1 1 to turn 12, and Eric Bostrom was slack-jawed just watching. "It was really impressive," Bostrom said later. "I wish I would've had an Little did he know dept: After eaming pole position on Saturday moming. Mat Mladin had this to say about tires for the race: "There are quite a few choices. We'll just stick with something that won't be a problem over the distance. There are obviously some tires that are a bit quicker, lap-timewise. but at the moment it doesn't look like we have to put on the quickest tire. We can go with the safer tire. As long as it doesn't rain again, I think the race pace will be what it looked like yesterday. The track gets a little bit more rubber laid down. and you get confident with the curbing and stuff. the race pace will get back up there. We just ran a stint there on tires. We just kept the same tire in for the whole session. " One thing Eric Bostrom was hoping for was that the race conditions would remain cool. Heat. he says, isn't a good thing for the Kawasaki. "I think our bike is always good for racing." Bostrom said. "The biggest thing I'm concerned about is the heat. If it gets real hot. sometimes our bike can slip away. Hopefully, that won't be the case. It's definitely gotten a lot better in the past couple of years. but if it stays cool like this it would be terrific." Even though everyone was amazed with his dramatic save after the tire failure on Saturday, Mladin was pretty low key about it. Then he saw the replay and understood what everyone was raving abcut. "You know. when it first happened. I didn't seem to me that it was as bad as everyone made it out to be. Then, when 1 saw it on TV, I realized I did do a good job to save it. but that's just a racer's instinct. You just try and stay on board. It's better than getting off, most of the time. But we looked through the data, and just before I shut the throttle, the suspension velocity started going through the roof. The thing started to hop. and just as I was rolling off the throttle, it banged. So I was lucky it didn't happen a hundred yards earlier. or else, who knows? I probably wouldn't have been here to do this race today." Craig Connell didn't end up racing on Sunday after a crash during Formula Xtreme qualifying on Friday left him with two injured feet. ''I'm not too thrilled with that new section either," was Erion Honda's Jake Zemke's take on the new turns three·four sequence. ~ I think we saw more wrecks in that section than we've ever seen in that comer, just on the weekend. It really dis- rupts the flow of that racetrack. This racetrack's always been really good and a real fun track to ride. and it's always had a real nice flow to it. With that new section, it made the track real choppy, kind of like some of these other tracks that keep putting in chicanes, but we won't mention those." Yamaha's Jamie Hacking pointed out how quickly a lead could evaporate in the new section. "I think I got hung up in the lapped traffic. the flippy flop Mickey Mouse section," he said. "You get a two-second lead, and you'll lose easy a second and a half in that section. I've seen it all weekend long. Guys get in there, boom, there's a second and a half gone. That top section needs to be reconfigured, I think." Bruce Transportation Group's Marty Craggill didn't mind the ne""s onboard camera on my bike, because watching [Aaron] Yates come up over the hill out of nine, moving around and trying to get under Kurtis [Roberts], was truly impressive. He'd basically leave black lines from the exit all the way down into 11. And just smoke haze. It was pretty incredible to watch, so I wish everybody would've got to see that." On the 15th lap, Mladin had more than three seconds in hand, but the four behind him were separated by just.7 of a second as they continued to go at it. Then Yates got a break in traffic, and it appeared as though second would be his. Eric Bostrom didn't agree, however, and he put his head down to catch back up, passing Yates on the 18th lap. Two laps later and Roberts had also hauled Yates in, passing him to move into third. Ben Bostrom also put a move on Yates, but he couldn't make it stick. Then, a lap later, those two were both bungled in traffic, and any hopes of fin- newly re-designed tums three and four. but he did single out the final tum 12 as the "worst comer in the world. I've spent two years racing in England." Craggill said. "When I first arrived here. all the riders in America say how bad the tracks are. and they're not too bad compared to a lot of other places. But this comer here. this last comer. is the worst comer in the world. And I've raced all around the world in the European Championship, British Championship. and all the tracks in America now. and this is by far the worst corner. I don't know how fast you're going. I'm in fourth gear so you're going well over 100 mph. and you're two wheel drifting. Everyone kept on going about that corner up there (turns three and fourl getting changed. Why would you change that comer when you're in second and the wall's 50 feet away, where here you're in fourth gear and the wall's 20 feet away? If someone goes in there. they're coming out in a box, They're not going to walk away." Road Atlanta is one of the most physically demanding tracks on the AMA calendar, especially with the new tum threefour flip-flop, and it came at the wrong time for American Honda's Miguel DuHamel. Less than two weeks after breaking his left collarbone at Infineon Raceway, DuHamel was back. but not at full strength. When he wasn't on the track. he was being tended to by his physical therapist or hooked up to a muscle stimulating device. He sat out the first Supersport practice and. after finishing 11 th in Saturday's Superbike race. decided to sit out the Supersport main. ''I'm pretty tired and obViously hurting, and the conditions are just begging for something crazy to happen," DuHamel said. "We saw some guys fall. and I just couldn't risk it. And since the championship in 600 is half as long as Superbike because of doubleheaders. even if I would have rode that. it would have been a long shot to get back in the championship. And I was really tired. We elected out of it. If it was dry, a nice normal day, maybe I would have made the same decision, maybe I would have cruised around." DuHamel repeatedly thanked his team. AI Ludington. Greg Wood. Jason Lubben and YUji Kikuchi, for making his weekend as bearable as possible. "I need to thank my team for working hard knowing that I was going to come here handicapped, and they still put in lOa-percent effort." he said. He also wanted to thank Joe Rocket for putting a two-piece set of leathers together in two days and shipping it from Korea to here so he could get in them and not suffer too much. DuHamel's final thank you went to teammate Ben Bostrom for finally cleaning the one-piece nylon suit he wears under his Arlen Ness leathers. "It smelled like a corpse that had been like a couple of weeks laying in a sauna...with spices... something nice like that." he said, telling Bostrom. "You go to Afghanistan and throw it into caves, and people will come running out... Erion Honda's Alex Gobert was among the minority who wanted a wet Supersport race. Older brother Aaron started hearing about the first day of the race weekend. "I knew that two days ago when we went down for breakfast at the motel. he was grinning and smirking, and he's going to look outSide, and it's wet." Yamaha's Aaron Gobert said. "And he's real confident in the wet. He was sort of trying to rub it in a little bit. And then that moming session it was him and I at the top of the times, so I thought 'Well, he's living up to what he's saying. So I have to keep an eye on him.' Come that race there. he was right there. After the red flag, he was behind me. and he was coming."

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