Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 28 JULY 15, 2014 P91 Briefly... 17-inch tires was an improvement for them. As much more horsepower as I believe those things are making, I'm not too terribly surprised." The AMA Superbike men continue to enjoy the new qualifying format that sees just 12 riders on the track for the final run at pole on Saturdays. "I think it was probably a bigger problem at Barber and we ran into just people wanting to follow one another," Josh Hayes said of the new-for-2014 pro- cedure. "Today went pretty smooth. I think on the two-day format when we have to grid up and race an hour and 10 minutes from now, it's kind of tough. It's not like we're going to try and go fast in qualifying or anything and taking a chance of crashing the bike, so I think it's a bit ambitious whenever we have to race an hour later. If we had some more time and we were the last race of the day on Saturday, it would be a little bit easi- er. The overall format I think is excit- ing for the fans." With Dorna owning the TV rights to the World Superbike Series, not only was there no AMA TV or live feed of any kind, they also shutdown the team's wanting to use Go-Pro on-board cam- eras. A bit ironic considering that Go- Pro and Vance & Hines are the only title sponsors left in the series. With no certainty as to what next year's AMA Pro Road Racing Se- ries will look like or if there will be a competing series, most of the teams are wondering what the future holds. Danny Walker's Red Bull-backed RoadRace Factory team is getting proactive and will do a bit of travel- ing at the end of the season, taking its two-rider team of Jake Gagne "I've been selling motorcycles and they called me up and asked me if I wanted to go race," Holden said. "Of course, I miss racing. I miss seeing everybody here and I've missed it for quite a while so I said ' Hell, yeah, I want to go race. Let's do it. Give me a couple of bucks, I won't work and we'll go racing.' I think we're go- ing to push for full throttle next year and we'll get that Panigale running good." Holden isn't sure yet if the team will race in the final two rounds of the series at Mid-Ohio and New Jersey. sure I held the same for awhile. To be honest, my arms tight- ened up pretty bad about halfway through. I felt good physically, but my freaking arms tightened up a ton and I couldn't feel the bars. Josh was banging out the laps and being super consistent up front. I was making mistakes trying to catch up." So had he panicked a bit when he saw Hayes getting away at the front? "Definitely," Beaubier said. "I saw him getting away and I was just trying to do everything I could and I was making mistakes and I just wasn't riding as smoothly as I needed to. We were really close in time all weekend. I would have a couple of faster laps, but he had the consistency on me. It's something I have to learn racing with him." Here He Comes Beaubier did start to make inroads into Hayes' lead, whittling it down from a high of 4.3 seconds on the 16 th lap to what was 2.8 seconds on the 20 th lap – the lap the red flag was thrown. When timing and scoring reverted things back to the 19 th lap, the official margin of victory was 3.5 seconds - but in actuality it was closer than that. Still, Hayes wasn't panicking. "I knew he was making some ground, but I wasn't panicked," Hayes said. "I had some time to work with. I got boned through some traffic and didn't have a very good run through traffic a couple of laps. I knew if I could just be steady… when I come by and I see three laps to go and I see three seconds, I know I have a little bit of time and room to work with. To put together three laps as fast as I was going was hard, so he was going to have to go that much faster… I was going to force him to do 24s for three laps without making any mistakes. And that's just to catch me – passing me is a whole other story. I wasn't too panicked. The race was winding down, the bike continued on next page

• Cover