Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/128323
Race two of the AMA Chevrolet Superbike Championship ro und at Infineon Raceway gets under way with Miguel Duhamel (1 7), Ben Bostrom (155) a nd Jake Zemke (9B) leading a Honda charge through tum one. ishes over the two days despite being a bit battered after a practice crash on Friday. LocalAFM rider David Stanton was the most impressive of the pure privateers o n Saturday, the Lafayette, California, rider putting his Arclight-backed Suzuki GSXRI000 into seventh place. On Sunday, Stanton was runningeven higher whe n his race ended with a crash . Larry Pegram rode his privateer Yamaha RI to seventh- and eighth-place finishes, the Ohioan experimenting with a different fork setup that willlikelypay dividends when he gets it sorted. Team Prieto 's Geoff May had another solid outing, the privateer turning in a pair of ninths over the course of the weekend in what was his first visit to Infineon Raceway. After five rounds of an IB-race series , Mladin holds a 24-point lead over Duhamel, 177-IS3, after his perfect win record was broken by Duhamel on Sunday. Zemke is third with 150 points 42 points ahead ofthe next man. And that man is privateer May with 108 points, three better than Lee Acree ( 13th and II th at Infineon). RACE ONE For 12 laps, Zemke kept Mladin honest , the Erion Racing rider even leading after getting around fast-starter Yates on the seco nd lap. The Zemke/Mladin duo quickly pulled away from the rest straight away, putting over three seco nds on the Ben Bostrom/Duhamel tussle by the fourth lap. By this point , Yates had run straight at the chicane , the Georgian pitting a few laps later to have his tire changed, initially thinking that it was covered in oil. Yates would carry on and eventu ally finish 10th. getting the worst of the Infineon traffic jam. At the finish, the margin of victory was 6.7 seconds . "This race every year, it's impossible to go 100 percent from start to finish because if you do, your tire is not going to be very nice at the end - if you pick one that is maybe a little too soft for what you needed," Mladin said after winning the 28th AMA Superbike National of his career. "So there is a lot of race strategy that comes into racing here at Infineon, that's for sure . At the start I just sat behind Jake to see what he had, and he was good in a couple of spots , but overall I think he was holding me up a little bit. I went past and tried to gap a little bit. It was only two-tenths of a seco nd a lap for a little while, then a little more, then we got some traffic and stuff, and I stretched it some more. Ove rall, it was a solid race, and everything went pretty well. To be honest, I wasn't sure what we were going to have with tires and stuff. I wasn't sure what was goingto go on, so we really did what we had to do to bring it home without doing anything silly. When we got off at the end , the tire looked brand new, so we know what we've got for tomorrow. " After getting past Ben Bostrom on the 15th lap in the chicane, Duhamel started to creep forward , the French Canad ian getting the most out of a motorcycle that had been completely rebuilt the night befo re to cure ailments that had thwarted his qualifying attempts. "To be honest, me and Ben we re having a pretty good little scrap, and he was riding some really good times and keeping the pace good," ~:;;;;_~~= Duhamel said later. "Mat • [Mladin] and Jake [Zemke] were two or three seconds :iiii- - - ahead, but the gap was pretty steady. I thought I could go a little faster, but after a while _ _ __ they seemed to be pulling Mladin's first pass on Zemke didn't stick, the Suzuki rider making the pass in the Carousel only to see Zemke blast back by on the dragstrip run to turn seven. When the pair arrived at the chicane on that same lap - lap six - Mladin did the deed on the entry to the right-left chicane. And this time there was no reta liation from Zemke. From there the two up front continued to gap those behind them, with Mladin not really gett ing away from Zemke as the class rookie was putting in his best effort to date . The duo continued to circulate together until the 13th lap when Mladin started to pull incrementally away. After 13 laps, he led by 1.4 seconds . That gap would grow to 2.6 a lap later, then 3.2. The margin narrowed on the 16th lap to 2.5, but it quickly went back out to over four seconds, the leading dwindling and increasing depending on who was Jake Zemke (98 ), Miguel Duhamel (17), Mladin (hidden), Aaron Yates (20 ) and Ben Bostrom (155) negotiate the chicane during race two on race. Bostrom 's younger brother Eric continued his rough 2004 season , the Ducati Austin rider finishing a distant fifth on Saturday and then crashing out of Sunday's race while trying to chase down brother Ben. Eric Bostrom is still search ing for the answers to the Ducati/Michelin puzzle, and he and the team obviously have some work ahead of them if they hope to run at the front. Yoshimura Suzuki's Aaron Yates, the sixth factory rider, made his return to the racetrack after serving a one-race suspension, and he put the GSX-R1000 on the pod ium with a third-place finish in race two on Sunday. A day earlier, Yates was forced to pit for a new rear tire and ended up 10th. Attack Kawasaki's Josh Hayes had his best Superbike weekend of the season , the Mississippian riding the only ZX-I OR in the field to sixth- and seventh-place fin- www.cycienEWs.com CYCLE N EW S • MAY 12, 2004 35