Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 50 DECEMBER 16, 2014 P143 Miguel Duhamel, Aaron Yates, Kurtis Roberts, to name a few. Hayes got a late introduction to racing, so his racing heroes are the guys he's raced with. Before he raced some of them, he was watching them on TV, but Hayes would tell his friends that TV doesn't really do it justice. So imagine looking up to a guy you watched on TV and then being on track with him. "Miguel Duhamel's tapping his tail section going 'follow me' in qualifying," Hayes said. "I remember seeing him at Sears Point go over this hill. It was his first lap, fresh tire, getting the thing completely sideways, pinned—I think we were third or fourth gear in the section—and I remember going, 'well, if that's how you got to do it, I guess I'm never going to be a pro motorcycle racer. I'm never going to win motorcycle races.' "But you say that in the moment. I went home and I just kept working at it, working at it, and work- ing at it. My heroes were the guys I was racing against and I would see them do things that just blew my mind on a regular basis." And when you're in an acceler- ated learning course on racing, what better teachers than your competitors? "What I've always tried to do is take my favorite thing about those guys," Hayes said. "Whatever it is that they had that's special. Try to take that and make that my own, take all the best parts of all the best guys. A lot of times it was attitude. Sometimes it was just seeing a guy do something and trying to figure out how he did it." Things like Duhamel and Yates' tenacity, last-lap charges, and never giving up. Or Mladin's method- ical approach in practice, like: "Figuring out all the aspects and making sure I don't leave any holes in things, whether it be starts, first lap, getting up to speed on a new tire, learning all those things," Hayes said. "I watched those guys and watched how they did it." One moment that stood out to Hayes was at Brainerd. He saw Mladin coming out and thought, "Perfect. I'll catch up, slow down a bit and then hang on to the back of him." Well, that didn't go as planned. "The guy pulled away and left me for dead on the out lap," Hayes said. "He came out of the pits on a brand new shiny tire and rode away from me. That was pretty demoralizing, I need to use that. "That hurt. I know how bad that hurt, so I'm go- ing to try to make everybody hurt like that from now on. I put a lot of effort into that." And just because he's been on the top of the food chain in recent memory doesn't mean that he's stopped learning. And that doesn't mean that he can't learn from the kid that's trying to displace him. "I think Cam is the first one in a long time that I have been around who can just do something I can't do," Hayes said. "I can't even look at it and make sense of it. So I think this one's going to be a process I'm going to have to work on for a little while. He's the first guy in five years that's actually just plain ridden away from me. I was getting beat Hayes (right) not only gets along with his rookie teammate, Cameron Beaubier (left), he applauds him.

• Cover