Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

off brought out the red flags again. The third time was the charm, and as he'd done in the previous two starts, Mladin forged to the front, passing faststarter Yates at the end of the backstraight on the fourth lap. From there, Mladin pulled away - a 10th here, a 10th there, half a second here, half a second there. With nine laps to go, Mladin had a 7.I-second lead, and it appeared to be business as usual for the five-time class champion. Then it all went wrong. As he crossed the start/finish line, Mladin's bike slowed and the threesome chasing him roared past, led by Hodgson. Mladin wouldn't finish the lap, his GSX-RIOOO giving up on him midway around the track. His crew had changed clutches during the last red-flag stoppage, but it went bad on him. "It was the clutch," Mladin said later. "How many more red flags are we going to have? You just don't know, so you have to pick a point where, okay it's time to do it [change the clutch]. Just in case. If we had another little one [red flag] and they send you out in two minutes... you just don't know. It started slipping when I got the halfway flag. About L14 it started slipping down the front straight. When it starts slipping, you've got issues. As soon as it started, I went from being able to do 4s to mid-5s being a struggle because I was losing all my speed. Lap after lap, it got worse and worse, and I just totally lost my drive. The thing just stopped. It wouldn't go at all. That's the way it goes, mate. That's life. That's why we try to get a big points lead. Maybe we're seven or eight points out of the lead, so we start the championship again." As much as the troubles were a woe to Mladin and his crew, it made a race of it. A heck of a race. With just six laps to go, Hodgson led Yates and Spies, the latter bouncing back from a bike that had been causing him problems since early in the race, the trio covered by just .6 of a second. ':About seven [laps] into it, the fuel pump, I think, started going out and it wouldn't run in second and fourth gear," Spies said. "I was having to go first, third to fifth. I let Aaron [Yates] and Neil [Hodgson] by because I didn't want them to be by me on the straightaway and hit me." With Mladin out of the race, Spies opted to give it a real go and he pushed past Yates to close in on Hodgson, setting up what would have been one hell of a final lap. But heading into turn three, Hodgson went straight, slowing to nearly a stop before he could get the bike turned. By then, Spies and Yates were by. "I was going to pass him - I don't know if it was going to stick," Spies said later, "but I was going to give it a go. The lap Neil Hodgson (100) was a sick man on the weekend, but that didn't stop him from riding to third- and fifth-place finishes. The Brit battled to the very end with Spies (11) for the race win on Saturday but ended up running wide on the final lap to hand victory to the Suzuki rider. before, I came out and got a really good drive off the last corner, and I knew I was going to have to have a little bit of a gap on him [Hodgson] because the bike was hiccupping. I got up alongside of him [Hodgson] and it started breaking up. I was going to actually try and pass him [Hodgson] where he ran off and he went hauling off in there and I knew that wasn't going to work. Then he went off and I knew Aaron was there, but I didn't know how close he was. I just tried to put the last lap together." Hodgson was disappointed by his miscue but refused to use the fact that he was suffering from the flu as an excuse. "To be totally honest, I made a mistake going into the chicane - I went through a gear too high," Hodgson explained after crossing the line in third place. "I couldn't do anything about it. I knew I was a gear too high and it just catapulted me into the second turn a little bit too fast. I sort of braked where I'd been braking every lap, but probably 5 mph faster. I just couldn't get the thing stopped, and the tires were gone by that stage. There's not a lot of side grip, so you just sort of drift into the corner and pretty much you're a passenger on the bike. That's exactly what happened, I was just a passenger sliding into the corner. That was it. Race over. Simple as that. At that point, you just can't believe what happened. I was totally devastated, but that's racing. I've done it before, and I'll probably do it again. We've all done it. We all push hard and it's not easy." Hodgson was a sick man, the Brit sleeping away most of the day in the Ducati truck to find the strength to race. To make matters worse, Hodgson actually threw up in his helmet during the race. "I was sick in my helmet about half race distance," Hodgson said. "I came across the start finish line and burped and unfortunately it was sick, which was quite strange. I felt so much better after that, like that had been sitting in my stomach the whole time. Yesterday, I felt like death. You know where you've got a fever and you can't do anything. Today I feel a 100 times better, and I don't feel good, so I hope that a good night's sleep will be the next step tomorrow and I'll be even sharper." Yates gave it maximum effort on the final lap to get close enough to Spies to make a pass, but he couldn't get near enough - even when Spies nearly highsided out of the final corner. Still, Yates finished a close second, improving his points haul to I 14 points - just one behind Mladin. "The last lap was good," Yates said. "We were pushing hard, and we had a good race going, and I'm sure everybody enjoyed it. I knew Ben [Spies] had some troubles there about midway, and I was hoping they were a little more major then they were. But he came back. Mat [Mladin] went out, and I was just hounding Neil [Hodgson] and trying to figure out where I was going to make a move on him, and then here comes Ben, and we had a race on. The lappers were kind of tough there. They helped sometimes and hurt sometimes. They brought us back and forth from each other. I was just pushing hard and there wasn't much grip out there. It should have been a good show, and it was great for Suzuki to be up here one-two." Behind the recovering Hodgson came Duhamel, the French Canadian some I I seconds behind the factory Ducati, easily the best of the Hondas. "The third clutch was my best start with the new clutch," Duhamel said. "For me it worked out good. I just need to be a bit more aggressive in turn one. There was a guy there, I don't know where he came from. Hat's off to him; he was in there really deep. And then I was hooked up with Neil [Hodgson] and had a little battle there and was going faster than I qualified, and I'm really pleased with what we accomplished. Once they got the gap on me it was really frustrating, because they were two-, three-tenths faster a lap. And that was about it. I had a little bad luck in traffic, but I made a mistake before that, and Neil got away. After that, it was pretty much just try to keep going a good pace." Bostrom was next on his Ducati, some IS seconds ahead of American Honda's Zemke. Hayes benefited more than anybody from the first red flag, his crew making repairs on the Attack Kawasaki that allowed him to make the restart and finish an eventual seventh, hot on Zemke's heels. Rapp and Craggill had a race-long battle, though the Australian was never in front of Rapp. They crossed the line separated by just a 10th of a second for Briefly... Mat Mladin earned the 40th pole position of his AMA Superbike career on Saturday morning at California Speedway, the Australian lapping at I:23.612 to easily beset the competition. Since the track had been reworked to make the kink safer (and faster), Mladin's lap was a record. "It was a good session for us," Mladin said. "For the first 15 minutes, we just concentrated on race setup stuff. We figured out which tires we can use, and there are a couple there to pick from, so I'm pretty happy about that. Again, Dunlop, with the tires, is doing an amazing job. We've got a couple of the new-style tires that can really cop some abuse, so I'm really looking forward to going 2B laps this afternoon. We tried a couple of softer tires that most of the guys tried yesterday, and we picked up the pace and did some decent laps." Ben Spies ended up third fastest, the Texan unable to displace teammate Aaron Yates, even though the Georgian failed to improve on his time from Friday's session. "Today's session we pretty much concentrated on race setup," Yates said. "We had a couple of tires we hadn't had a chance to try yesterday. We stuck 'em in today and did some laps. We messed around and tried a different shock, just trying to get a good comfortable pace for the race. That's what counts out there. I knew Mat [Mladin] was going to be trying hard for the pole to get that point, but we just focused on getting a good setting and making the bike comfortable for the race." Spies said the track conditions were a bit warmer on Saturday than they were on Friday, but he still went faster, ending up behind Mladin with his best of I:24.3B6. "The track temperature seemed a bit... it's a bit greasier than yesterday," Spies said. lOlt's a bit warmer. We went out on our race tires and got a pretty good setup. Iwent out on a softer tire and did an okay lap. I messed it up a bit. We went back out at the end on a softer tire and messed up again. We had a couple of tenths left, but not a 3.6 [a 1:23.6 - that Mladin did] for sure. We did the best we could to get a good race setup, and hopefully we can put the Suzuki back on the podium again." Erion Honda's Alex Gobert did a few laps on Friday morning but elected to sit out after that. The young Australian crashed heavily on Thursday and was knocked out. '" don't remember from the corner until the ambulance ride to the hospital," Gobert said on Friday afternoon. "I didn't even know where I crashed. My brother found out from talking to [Vincent] Haskovec. I tried to ride this morning, but over the bumps it rattles my head a little bit." Gobert ending up racing despite the concussion, and he finished seventh in Formula Xtreme. Superbike rookie Ben Spies was asked after his first AMA Superbike National win if the thought victory would come this quickly in his first full season of Superbike racing. "Probably not," Spies said. "This is one of my stronger tracks. I know I'm going to be better as the season goes on. I knew if I had a shot, my first shot would be here. I'm pretty horrible at Barber, and Iwas Continued on page 29 CYCLE NEWS • MAY 11, 2005 27

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