VOL. 50 ISSUE 32 AUGUST 13, 2013
fork change and a shock change
and what it did was it helped my
initial leave out of the gate. After
Millville, I was talking to the guys
and I didn't feel like it was necessarily all me. My starts were not
good and while you're not going
to get the holeshot every time –
there's too many good guys out
there – I just felt like we should
have been better."
Once in the lead, Villopoto
seemed to be in a league of his
own, changing lines and passing
lappers with ease on a course
that some argued was one-lined.
However, Villopoto said otherwise. Mark him down as a Unadilla fan.
"I really enjoyed this track,"
said Villopoto. "They've done a
lot in the past few years trying to
get the dirt better and get rid of
some of the rocks and it definitely shows. Unadilla is very wide,
and has a lot of options and line
choices. You can go from right
to left, or inside to outside, or
vice versa. It's a great track and
it's becoming one of my favorites
just because you can take completely different lines from other
people."
Perhaps it was Villopoto's extreme confidence (perhaps from
the new suspension settings) that
allowed him to find lines where
others didn't. In any case, it was
certainly one of the best performances of the year.
P45
Briefly...
focus on the 450 class. I think it's
all about staying strong all season."
Ryan Villopoto credited his performance with new suspension settings that the team came up with
during the week off. He also talked
about how far the team has come
since switching to Showa suspension just before last year's Monster
Energy Cup, which in effect put the
team at square one when it came to
settings. "When we switched over
to Showa we tried to learn as much
as we could as quick as we could,"
said Villopoto. "With the Showa
stuff, it seems like no matter what
you change you tend to notice it as
opposed to what we were running
before. With what I was running before for so many years, you could
change something and it might not
fix the problem or you might not
notice it. But the Shawna stuff, it's
easy to fix things, but sometimes
you can get confused because
small adjustments changes the
bike a lot."
The start of moto two produced a
huge pileup on the outside of the
turn that took out Trey Canard,
Mike Alessi, Malcolm Stewart,
Zack Freeburg and Justin Brayton. "There were people going
down everywhere," said Brayton.
"I didn't have anywhere to go and
I ended up going down, which left
me in last place once I got going."
Canard's bike was mangled after
flipping end over end and he had
to go to the mechanic's area to get
parts replaced before he could
rejoin the race. Alessi didn't make
a full lap before pulling out of the
race.
continued on next page
