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/1478892
VOLUME 59 ISSUE 37 SEPTEMBER 13, 2022 P113 "My plan was to get up front and then get away," Caylor said. "I kept seeing 'plus zero' on my board and I was thinking, 'You've got to be kidding? Who's going along?' On the fifth or sixth lap, I got a plus one and then the next lap it was plus two. I didn't back off on the last lap." After the race Caylor revealed that one of the secrets to his GSX-R600 Cup victory was a last-minute gearing change. Strong winds over the course of the weekend caused him to de- cide on going up a tooth on the rear sprocket to help acceleration out of the turns. "It caused two more upshifts and downshift but was worth it. It seemed to work really well." In the SV-650 Cup Final, again Caylor got a lackluster start, this time it took him four laps just to get up to third. When he got there, he witnessed a relentless battle in front of him between Bradley Champion and David Yaakov. "They were really battling," Caylor remembered. "I saw how intense their battle was and knew I didn't want a part of that." After he reeled the leading duo in, Caylor saw that Champion and Yaakov's battle was actually slowing them down, and he saw an op- portunity. Caylor outbraked the pair going into turn 10 and then made a perfect sweep up and over turn 11 and was able to briefly grab the lead. It proved to be the right decision to get by them while he could. On the next lap Cham- pion and Yaakov, who passed Caylor going into turn one, took each other out. The race was red flagged and declared com- plete. With scoring backed up a lap Caylor was declared winner, scor- ing his second Suzuki Cup victory of the weekend. Caylor may very well have scored a triple Suzuki Cup win that weekend had it not been for a slight mistake. It came in the red-flagged Suzuki GSX-R750 Cup final. Several of the top competitors changed tires during the red-flag break. Caylor didn't. "The tire went off and it killed my drives," Caylor admitted after the race. Still Caylor nearly won the race anyway. On the last lap he made the bid coming up under the bridge on the final lap and actually moved ahead of Robert Jensen for a fraction of a second, but Caylor's front tire pushed put- ting him wide and Jensen stayed on the gas a little hard coming out of the turn and surged under- neath into the lead and swept past the finish line just a fraction of a second ahead of Caylor. Even though he hadn't man- aged a clean sweep of the Suzuki Cup races he ran, a pair of wins and a runner-up finish was enough to make him the head- liner of the event and earned him a handsome payday of $10,000 that helped he and his wife buy their first house. Those Suzuki Cup wins served as a great launching pad into AMA Pro Racing. He'd already raced a few AMA Supersport and Superstock races before his big Suzuki Cup wins, but the confi- dence those victories gave him proved invaluable. The 2002 season was Caylor's first big stab at pro racing. He raced AMA Superstock as well as a few AMA Superbike rounds on an EMGO/Fastlap-sponsored Suzuki GSX-R750. During most of his rookie campaign Caylor scored decent but not spec- tacular results. He did manage to score just inside the top-10 a couple of rounds, but at the end of the season, he heated up and Road Atlanta Chris Caylor's performance in the Suzuki Cup Road Race Finals in 2001 earned him a spot on the Cycle News cover.