AMA Superbike Championship
head down early, though it took him six
laps to finally get a lead of one second on
Mladin. Once he did, he stretched that
lead incrementally until it reached 6.3
seconds with a lap to go. He cruised
across the finish line with 5.9 seconds in
hand.
"The first couple of laps went really
well," Bostrom said. "It was pretty mellow. I think everyone was unsure what
the tires would end up doing. Because no
one was able to do race distance on tires
[because of the abbreviated practice
schedule to accommodate the MotoGP],
nobody was able to do any real distance,
so the whole thing was a question mark
for all of us. Usually, when we see that
MvOwN
halfway flag, we can kind of guess how the
setup is going to be for the rest of the
race, but I didn't know if we were going
to finish the race doing 29s [I :29s] or finish the race doing 25s [I :25s]. Everything
stayed consistent, and it worked out pretty well, but that was the challenge of the
weekend."
Mladin didn't offer any excuses, saying
that Bostrom just had a better pace.
"It was a good race: congratulations to
Eric on a good race," Mladin said before
deadpanning: "To be honest, alii was worried about was trying to go quicker than
the MotoGP guys. I've been reading a lot
about it, but it didn't happen today. I didn't
get on the setup, but we'll come back next
RACE
98 Jake Zeml