Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

"I think I hit the bottom of the stroke," said Alex, who was uninjured in the crash. "I'm usually just over a second off (Jamie) Hacking and them. I just wanted to push a bit harder and find a bit more. I did, but I crashed as well. (Team owner) Kevin Erion told me I could crash as long as I pushed forward and pushed through it, so it's better to do it here than at a race." The Erion team packed up after two days, with Jake Zemke and Roger Lee Hayden taking off. Alex Gobert stuck around for the final day, watching his brother from the Yamaha pits. Yoshimura Suzuki's Ben Spies had the fastest time of the test on Thursday morning, the 1:26.008 he ran on his Formula Xtreme machine the best to that point. It would later be eclipsed by the Superbike crowd, partly because Spies took Thursday afternoon off. "From my Mid-Ohio crash, my elbow is still bothering me pretty bad," he said. Spies said damage to back of his right arm sends tingles into his elbow. It doesn't hurt when he rides, but it does after he's off the bike. "It's just something that I need some time to heal. It was good we got to test, but it sucked it had to be right after that weekend. We did a race distance yesterday morning and then put on a new set of tires and went out for about five laps, and we set that pretty fast time, and we were fastest when we left. I guess when they went back out they went faster. I was confident I could run whatever anyone else did. I don't know if I'd have been faster, but we had a pretty good setup. " For his team, the test was all about setup. "Our test item was foot pegs," he said. "Besides that, all we were doing was trying to find a setup and gearing, and we found that the second day." On the AMA clocks, Graves Motorsports Yamaha's Damon Buckmaster was just under two-tenths off Spies' time after hitting a combination that helped alleviate tire wear problems. "We actually balanced the problem out with a different setup combination and we were actually getting as good front tire wear as we were with the rear," Buckmaster said. "In the end it was pretty nice. It was a little cooler yesterday. I'm not really sure if it was all setup or if weather had a bit to do with. We definitely balanced the tire out between the front and the rear." AMA timing shut down just before the end of the day, after which Buckmaster's on-bike timer showed him at a pair of low 26s. "I did two of them in a row," Buckmaster said, including a lap of 1:26.03 on his timer, "which is pretty encouraging. We found a pretty good setup to start with when we get back there, at least. Obviously the weather's going to playa big part in what tires we use when we get back there, for sure." The time Jake Zemke ran on Wednesday on his Erion Honda CBR- 954RR held up until the end. That time might have been improved had he felt better. Zemke arrived with a head cold he'd caught late Sunday. His balance was off on Tuesday, and his ears were plugged up, not ideal conditions for learning a new racetrack. "Actually, I thought the track would be harder to learn just because of all the blind corners: he said. "But it turned out pretty easy to learn. It's easy because it's all separated by straightaways, so you have plenty of time in between corners. It's not like there's a lot of corners linked together, like Virginia, where you have corner after corner. This place is like straightaway, two corners, straightaway, a corner or two. It has two or three corners at a time separated by pretty long straightaways. It seemed like it was pretty easy to learn." Health concerns aside, Zemke was in and out of the pits constantly while the team made changes. They went through at least four different rear shocks trying to improve rear grip. THE TRACK Expectations clashed with reality for the riders who hadn't been to Barber Motorsports Park, as well as for those who had. Compared to almost every other track on the AMA calendar, the circuit is vastly better in every way, including safety. And everyone agreed that it's the most beautiful physical plant they'd ever seen. But it wasn't as safe as they'd hoped or been led to believe, and, despite being 45 feet wide along its 2.3-mile length, the track seemed narrow to most riders. Yoshimura Suzuki's Mat Mladin's first impression was that "It's a beautiful facility, that's for sure," then added, "Everyone that came here for that last track went on about how it's very European. I personally don't think that. It's lot tighter than any of the European tracks I remember, as far as the ones that are laid out like this." Mladin said it was fun because there were no real straightaways. Most importantly, it was safe, though not as safe as might have been expected. "There's one issue, I feel, coming onto the back straight, you go through a left-right kink very fast, and the wall on the left side there is far too close," he said, "because it's one of those sort of corners where you could definitely have a problem, and the wall is too close there." Yamaha's Damon Buckmaster came to the same conclusion. On the third day of the test he took a good look around and found that there needed to be more run-off in the backstretch kink. "They got a heap of tires there," Buckmaster said. "But basically I think the tires would be just as hard as Armco." Erion Honda's Jake Zemke said the gravel trap is too far away. "You can see where we're running right out m ,r Own Telt "1 r:::J L J@ Giovanni Bussei 4th Fastest Superbike This was the the fourth American race track Giovanni Bussei's seen since joining the Ducati Austin team prior to the Brainerd round of the championship. The tracks have altemated between bumpy and smooth, safe and less safe. Barber joined Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca as a safe circuit with a generally smooth surface. Coming from the bumpy, wall-plagued Mid-Ohio, where lappers were a constant problem, Barber was almost a vacation, except for the heat and humidity. "We start with the bike from Mid-Ohio," the Italian said. "We saw the front tire is more stressed. Also we keep the bike a little bit more softer than Mid-Ohio. There's only one hard braking here. It's quite different. Mid-Ohio - I can tell you I didn't have reach a good setup with the bike. Very little time. Lose the first one and a half hour leaming the track, because it's very difficult, and then one half hour to set up the bike and make lap time and race. So I didn't have so good solution. So I don't know if it was maybe better with this bike." Bussei hadn't ridden a Ducati since 2000, and that model was nothing like the Austin machine, which is nothing like the factory bikes he raced against in World Superbike at Laguna Seca. "This bike was being used by factory in 2001, against the factory bikes of 2003. It's not easy, and I think we are doing a good job with the little time we had." (O)oo@ ~ Kurtis Roberts 5th Fastest Superbike "I wouldn't say I got used to this place as fast as I would have liked," Roberts said after the second day. "I seemed to rush a lot of the corners. It's slowing us down a little bit. My shoulder's pretty sore still from the (Mid-Ohio) weekend." Roberts said there were no big jumps to be made with the Erion Honda RC51, just picking up a tenth of a second at a time. "We're not trying to get the fastest time. We're trying to get it close. Everything's going according to plan." The main problem for Roberts was front-end chatter. "You don't really set it on the front here; you're just kind of leaned over for a long time. It's just real quick corners, or you're just kind of leaned over. Just mainly chatter problems we have now and grip issues. If I hairball around, I slow myself down. It's seems to be one of those places where I have to calm myself and just get the lines right and get the speeds right because I'm either going too fast or I'm coming to too much of a stop in the middle." 1] 71 Miguel DuHamel 6th Fj!stest Superbike American Honda's Miguel DuHamel had an extended detour between Sunday's race at Mid-Ohio and the Tuesday test at the Barber track (See Briefly). Having crashed twice at Mid-Ohio, once in Supersport and again in Superbike, DuHamel was still aching, and the twisty nature of the track did little to help. "It's surprisingly more sore than I thought, " he said of the collarbone he broke late in the Supersport race at Road Atlanta in early May, "especially in the chicane back there. I'm losing a lot of time through there. The last time I rode here, I was fully healthy. That's a big difference." DuHamel didn't make it to the track until Wednesday, then spent time on the Honda CBR-600RR, going out on the Superbike in the aftemoon. "At the end of the day we got back on the 600, and we went two seconds faster than we did, and we're two seconds faster than when we tested here last time. And on the Superbike I did a 28.5, which isn't bad considering the jet lag that I got from nying all over the country to see Ting. The last time I rode the bike, I hit the ground pretty hard." iO\r;;!. eve.; Roger Lee Hayden 5th Fastest Formula Xtreme "My main concem was getting the big bike handled," said Roger Lee Hayden, who spent little time on his 600. "We tried different shocks. Our biggest problems is we went to smaller brake rotors, so it doesn't grip as much. All in all I'm pretty happy with the big bike. That's my main concem, getting comfortable on that." This was the first visit to the Barber facility for the Erion team. Roger Lee said the track wasn't hard to leam but that it was easy to get into a rut. "On both bikes, I kind of got in a rut here and there. It's a little frustrating." ~ Jamie Hacking 4th Fastest Formula Xtreme Yamaha's Jamie Hacking changed the front end on his Graves Motorsports Yamaha RI so radically that it looked like a chopper. "If you told me to ride my R7 Superbike like that, I'd laugh at you," Hacking said after setting the fourth-fastest time, just a tenth off Jake Zemke. "It doesn't want to seem to nick left to right, which was really hard on me, going through hard left-rights, having to go through at fast speed. My bike didn't want to tum on me. All the other times it just felt like I was just flying off the front of it, the thing could probably stand with being a little steeper.' cue I ...

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