INTERVIEW
SUPERPRESTIGIO OF THE AMERICAS ORGANIZER CHRIS CARR
P96
kind of brought me in as a con-
sultant for team SMI. Here I find
myself working a lot of hours and
trying to help organize the first
version of the Superprestigio of
America here in the States."
It was announced early on
that part of Carr's duties would
be to design the track. If you are
a bit glib, like myself, you might
ask, "what exactly does it take to
design a short track?" In all seri-
ousness, I was actually not brave
enough to ask that. The reality is
you have to make the best use
of space.
"I laid out the track essentially
on paper," Carr said. "It prob-
ably will get a few adjustments
once we get on the ground in
Las Vegas and see the measure-
ments that they've given us to
work with and how they stack up
in reality. They'll make some ad-
justments from there. It's indoor,
and space is limited. But when
it comes down to it, the track
itself will be about the same size
as the Cow Palace indoor was
in San Francisco back in 2004.
The difference is we're going to
be on dirt instead of polished
concrete."
Like its Spanish Superpresti-
gio counterpart, Superprestigio
of the Americas is going to have
a gate start. While that is com-
pletely unique to the AMA Pro
Flat Track Championship, it was
used in this year's inaugural X
Games Harley-Davidson Flat
Track event where they raced
twins.
"We are going to borrow a lot
of what we saw over in Spain,"
said Carr. "There were a lot of
things about doing a one-off
event I guess that's unique to
us here in the United States,
but not really unique around the
world. In the case of flat track
racing, say Australia and Spain,
they typically use motocross
gates."
Carr pointed out that doing
something different from the
norm of the Grand National
Championship has some ben-
efits.
"In a lot of ways this forms
the speed of a program," he
said. "Having that next race on
the gate ready to go is going to
afford us an opportunity to prob-
ably run more races, and that's
what we're going to attempt to
The U.S. version
will pit flat track
regulars against
the rest.
