Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/990347
VOL. 55 ISSUE 22 JUNE 5, 2018 P123 in 1986 en route to earning his third-consecutive AMA Superbike Championship. Merkel went on an absolute tear in the mid-1980s. In 1984 alone Merkel won an amazing 10 races on his way to the AMA Superbike title. That record stood as one of the most impressive in the history of the series and many considered it nearly unbreakable, that is, until the doubleheader era. In 2005, Mat Mladin finally eclipsed that single-season mark by scoring 11 wins. Merkel was so dominant that he compiled an amazing win percentage and he collected his 20th- career victory at Mid-Ohio in '86, he's reaching that milestone after only 47 races. Merkel's 20 wins became a benchmark that other riders strived to reach for years to come. His feat was quite remarkable, especially when com- pared to the riders after him to reach 20 wins. The second rider to get to 20 wins was Miguel Duhamel at Sonoma in 1998. It took Duhamel 71 Superbike races to get to 20 wins. Then at Road America in 2003 Mat Mladin (who would go on to become the all-time wins and championship leader in the series) got to 20 wins, but even the great Australian road racer took 95 races to get to 20 wins. As dominant as Mladin was, a lot of fans forget that he went two seasons in AMA Superbike winning no victories at all (1996 and 2002) and two seasons (1998 and 1999) where he won just a single race. It makes it all that more impressive, then, that Mladin compiled an all-time series record 82 wins. At Fontana in 2008, Ben Spies was the fourth rider to reach 20 wins. Spies had to deal with his talented Yoshimura Suzuki teammate Mladin, and a host of other factory riders, yet still man- aged to reach 20 wins after just 61 races, at the time the second-fastest ever. Josh Hayes became the fifth rider to get to 20 wins at Sonoma in 2012. In the highly-com- petitive racing environment he raced in the first decade of the 2000s, it took Hayes the longest of the elite 20-win group to get there, running 104 Superbike races before scoring his 20th. Then came the uber-talented Yamaha ace Cameron Beaubier. The young Californian very nearly set a new record when he got to 20 wins at Road Atlanta last year. Beaubier got to 20 wins in only 48 races, just one more than Merkel, making Beaubier the second fastest at the time to reach the milestone. But then Elias, who came in initially as a fill-in rider for the injured Jake Lewis at Yoshimura, got off the mark in ultra-speed, winning the first three MotoAmerica Superbike races he partici- pated in. The winning just kept on coming for the Spaniard. He won six races in 2016, then 10 last year, setting him up to reach the 20-win milestone just five races into this season. That means Elias reached 20 wins in a remarkable 43 races—four races faster than Merkel did it in 1986, establishing a new record that lasted 32 years! So there you have it. Everyone knew Elias was one of the speediest riders in the 42-year history of the series, but now there's clear evidence that of all seven riders in championship history to reach that mythical 20th-win mark, Elias did it faster than anyone else. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives No one has reached 20 American superbike wins quicker than Elias (1).