Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

Yamaha's Jamie Hacking made his return to riding at the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca test last week, four months after the final race of the year and seven months since breaking his collarbone in two places during a test at Mid-Ohio. Hacking spent the day getting up to speed on the Yamaha R-6, leaving the testing of the R- I to his three teammates. cn: How are the collarbone and shoulder? jamiehacking: I'm pretty happy with the way the day went. I didn't feel too out of the groove. I felt right in the groove. Just felt like the shoulder was holding me back a good bit. My goal wasn't to go out here and be really fast just to get in a lot of laps and sort out our new bike. cn: Which bike did you concentrate on? jamiehacking: I rode the 600 the whole day. That was tough enough for me. I've still got a lot of recovering to do. I'm probably, maybe -40 percent right now. cn: Why come back here and not Fontana last week? jamiehacking: Ialways do good here. It's someplace I relax. I go good at Fontana, but you ask anybody, Fontana is a physical racetrack. I don't know what it is about that place, but it's got really fast chicanes and you've got a lot of gyroscopic stuff going on, and you've got to really be able to muscle a bike around. I'm no way near ready for that. A lot of these right-hand comers and coming down the hill from the Corkscrew, I was having to hold on a couple of times with my knees because I didn't have quite enough strength to push with my handlebars. bone again. I had to have the plate taken out because it was just so uncomfortable in there. I rested the thing as long as I did. The thing started pulling away, and it didn't have a really strong bone calcification in there. I was sending X-rays week to week; you could see the dark gap was getting bigger and bigger. [Dr. Ting) said we're going to have go to back in there and put that plate back in. That was December, right before everybody went to Daytona. The day after I got the plate put back in, I could already tell a significant difference. The collarbone felt good. cn: Why has it taken so long to heal? jamiehacking: Just from the trauma from the first accident, with the thing being broken in two places, and then me riding on it a week later [at Laguna Seca) and falling over here on it again, and then falling a week later, and having the big accident that I had there at Ohio, and it bent the plate and rebroke the collar- en: How strong will you be for Daytona? jamiehacking: I'm behind, I'm really behind. And I think the rest of the guys are still behind. I think definitely we're not going to catch up. Really didn't progress like I thought we should have, but for a new front end on the motorcycle, a lot of new parts on it, it's just going to take some time. It's got a lot of different stuff that the other bike already had sorted out. Just looking from everybody's standpoint here, nobody's had any real good testing time. Hemry Ray Abrams Mike Preston: Kawi's Main Man Preston what it would take for them to get back into Superbike. en: Why aren't you racing Superbike this year? mikepreston: They [AMA Pro Racing) need some structure, they need some direction, they need some priorities, they need some accountability. When they have races that are tentative and dropping off, they need to get after it. I think they need to, and this is difficult, I think it's even corporate, but we all want to race together. So, they need to condense the classes. Kawasaki is one of two teams - the other being Yamaha - not contesting the AMA Superbike Championship. At the Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca test last week, we asked Kawasaki team manager Mike en: The Superbike rules have been stable for a period of three years. mikepreston: They have been the last three years. To be honest, I say they've been stable for two years. The first year was, in my eyes, a joke. You can run a 1000, then you can't. We can't bore up. It's kind of crazy. The last two years have been stable. Now they're talking next year or the year after we'll go to 600. Now I hear there's maybe some re-thinking of that. It's still unstable. For my mind, they're worried a little too much about what we're going to do, what kind of bikes we're going to have. They need to say, "Here's our classes, this is the way it's going to be. It's going to be two classes, and if you want to race, come along." So it'd be a 1000 and 600 class. That's acceptable. en: Is that what you prefer, 1000ee and 600ee classes? mikepreston: Kawasaki, we don't have any preference really. We make both models, we make a lot of models, but we just want to race with Yamaha, Honda, Suzuki. We want everybody to race together. We think we have a good product to race, and we have good riders and a good team. We want to race with everybody. But it's too diluted. It's too disorganized. I come back and I look at Daytona, the premier event is Formula Xtreme, but then it's not good enough to race here [Laguna Seca) at the Gp. And I hear all this weird stuff and I wonder what's going on. I hear concerns from safety - which I want everybocly to be safe, I don't want any rider hurt - but I don't see any data or priority or base or what they're thinking is safe. Is it speed? Is it lap times? What is it that's safe? If they had that listed out and we could see it and watch it, then we'd go okay. en: The rumor was that the premier class would be Formula Xtreme in 2007. mikepreston: They were talking 600s, and if they're going to go 600, that would be fine. But maybe we'd better do it now, because in two years, a 600 is going to damn near as fast as the 1000s are going now. There's's too much ambigUity going around. We want to race together. We want some stability, some organization, some direction, some planning, accountability. I think that's the possibility to get us to come back. The Superbike rules have been good for two years, but now we're hearing it's going to change. Henny Ray Abrams

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