Cycle News

P24 WIND WILDwild card riders MEN READY FOR INDY CARD merican A Blake Young and James Rispoli tested last week at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in preparation for this weekend's Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix where Rispoli is set to make his Moto2 debut while Young is set to have another go of it in MotoGP on the Attack Performance Racing entry. Young was hampered at the test by issues that cropped up with the Attack Performance Racing machine and consequently wasn't able to get down to the lap times he'd hoped for. His best laps were in the low 1:48s. Rispoli actually did better than his GPTech team expected. Racing a Tech3 Racing Mistral 610 with a stock Honda CBR600RR engine, a standard clutch and U.S.-spec Dunlop tires, Rispoli dipped down into the low 1:49s late in the day. Young will make his third wildcard appearance of the year in the premier MotoGP category for California-based Attack Performance and was riding the bike for the first time since suffering a vicious highside at Laguna Seca last month that kept him out of the second U.S. round of MotoGP. Earlier in the season Young finished 21st at the Red Bull Grand Prix of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Attack's Richard Stanboli said James Rispoli will make his Moto2 debut this weekend at the Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix. it took a week and a half to put the bike back together and required welding a new steering head onto the frame. "We were fortunate to find an American source for the material we use for the frame," Stanboli said. "It's high-tech aerospace stuff that we got from Germany originally. If we hadn't found a new source for it here in the States we wouldn't have made this race." The end result is the Attack bike looks brand new with no indication that it suffered such a hard crash only a couple of weeks ago. And the bike has an improved steering head, something Stanboli wanted to upgrade eventually. The crash hastened the change. Young, however, was a bit disappointed with the test. "It was kind of a short test," he said. "We didn't get as much time as we really wanted. It could have gone a little bit better. We had a little mechanical issue today that took a lot of the time up for the test. We had a little bit of rain at the beginning of the day, but the sun ended up coming out and drying up the track and it ended up a pretty good day. I'm pretty happy with the bike and the way we ended up. We learned a few things. It could have been a little more productive test than it was, but we'll take what we can get at this point." Young's goals for this weekend's Grand Prix are modest. "So far the two races we've had with this bike have gone pretty bad," Young said. "I mean finishing 21st [in Austin] and crashing in the second practice PHOTOGRAPHY BY LARRY LAWRENCE IN THE

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