What a great event! The seventh round of the HANNspree FIM Superbike World Championship was in Tooele, Utah this weekend at Miller Motorsports Park. The event had everything you could have hoped for in a major motorcycle race. I can only speak from my own experience but one of the things that left the biggest impression on me was the quality and professionalism of the track itself. Miller really went out of their way to accommodate us (the press), the Promoters/Sanctioning Body, and the Riders and Teams in order to allow the spectacle to unfold and turn into the amazing weekend that it was. I’m obviously not the only one who’s noticed as the Miller round in 2008 was voted ‘best managed round’ by the FIM and this year on Saturday the Track President, Dan Davis and the Infront Motor Sports announced that the contract to host the World Superbike event at Miller would be extended until 2013. Congratulations to Miller and thanks for the job well done.
I don’t think there’s any question that the ‘big story’ is Ben Spies. We’ve already covered that in our ‘Ben Spies – Miller‘ story but I can hardly do the weekend review without bringing it up. Ben’s performance was – well, perfect. A source very close to Ben who we’ll call ‘Nameless’ because of the nature of the comment actually told me that Ben might be sandbagging a bit. Not to say that he’s got a whole other level but that he may note be putting it all out there when it’s not necessary. As we’ve seen this year that last gear might have been used at Assen with mixed results. The thing I thought funniest about that comment is that there was some frustration expressed because there was a feeling that they couldn’t work on the setup for the ‘top gear’ unless he used it. WOW.
I had a nice chat with Tom Houseworth (House), Ben’s long time crew chief. Although I’ve known Tom for some time it still felt like a bit of a privilege to get some time with him as the whole world seemed to want to talk to that crew. They have definitely reached ‘rock star status.’ It was crazy. I said to him, “I guess this is about as good as it gets, right?” They just won Superpole and both races at their (Tom’s and Ben’s) home race. It occurred to me that it was rhetorical, that’s why I didn’t really phrase it as a question. His response surprised me but made perfect sense. He said “Qatar was better.” He went on to explain “Coming here there was all kinds of pressures and expectations, Qatar was a surprise, it was all new and everything was ‘all good.’”
I had noticed that Ben was accelerating right through the rev limiter going into the hair pin (aka ‘Black Rock’ or 5) I would have assumed that his answer would have been something like ‘well it’s a compromise we had to make to get the gearing right somewhere else on the track.’ I asked him “Tom, why is Ben running into the rev limiter so early down the back shoot into 5?” Tom said “It’s really fast there and it’s hard to see the corner because of the desert conditions so we’re using the rev limiter as a breaking marker.” Cool huh…creative use of GPS and programmable ECU’s.
I talked to my new/old friends at Pirelli; Kevin, Chris and Mark, and Kevin had a piece of insight that I thought was interesting. It’s still a bit of a curiosity to me what the motivation or maybe where does the motivation come from to build or improve tires when you’re in a spec tire situation. So I asked how do you judge your tire without competition? Chris and Kevin both broke out in laughter and said, “the competition between teams is about all the competition we can handle.” I hadn’t really thought about it that way but I guess that’s true. Obviously all the teams want to win, the situation or problem for Pirelli is to solve with only (at least this is what was available at this round) three fronts and three rears (for dry) to work with getting everyone up to speed. When you’re dealing with twins, v-fours and inline fours from all different manufacturers and all different riders with different riding styles, that can’t be easy. Not as easy as it sounds, eh (gratuitous Canadian expression)?. Another thing that Kevin said was that they where struggling with grip a bit because of the salt on the track. There are other tracks they go to that have sand but that the salt is a whole different aggregate in the equation and that is giving them some issues. I don’t know about all that but all of a sudden I sure was thirsty.
I’ll be putting up a pretty huge gallery of images from Miller hopefully later today but due to time constraints I’ll not be able to integrate them into this article. The only reason I mention that now is because there are some great images to support the following observations and comments. One of the funnier (not ha-ha) things I noticed this weekend is that it’s really true what they say about Max Biaggi. This guy apparently doesn’t smile much. I never saw him smile all weekend. That includes when he came into the garages after the last Qualifying Practice on Friday and was told he had set the fastest time of the session. I have a great shot of him on the grid too, hence my comments about the images.
To quite the opposite extreme is Michel Fabrizio. He’s competitive and confident. You could defiantly tell when he came in and wasn’t happy with the bike but he was very light hearted and funny as well. The FIM pit girls had a kind of old school nurse get-up on (hot). It was a one piece dress deal and pretty short. At one point Michel was chasing one of them around the garage with an extension mirror; it was a good laugh and kept the atmosphere in that pit light and friendly. For those of you that don’t know what an extension mirror is; it’s a small round mirror on the end of a telescopic arm usually used for looking into a small space to find out what happened to the stupid bolt you just dropped.
Quite a different feeling loomed over the other half of that garage. It didn’t start out that way, in fact quite to the contrary. After Haga’s huge get-off in the final qualifying session before lunch on Saturday all the joy ran right out of that garage and down the drain. In my thirty plus years of following motorcycle racing I don’t remember a time I’ve ever felt so conflicted about who wins as I do this year in World Superbike. I don’t think it’s exactly typical but I don’t really have any favorites, I just like good close racing. Having said that, barring the injection of Spies into the SBK scene I would like nothing more than for Noriyuki Haga to win the championship this year. He has been the x-factor in SBK for years. In my opinion he is one of the most exciting racers on the scene for the last decade. He’s ridden some of the least competitive machines to the best results imaginable. In the year when he’s finally on the (arguably) best machine in the paddock with the best team, coming off a good year, good health etc. he runs head long into the new ‘rookie sensation’ Ben Spies. Six rounds in it looks like Nori’s got things pretty much under control and should likely be able to fulfill what almost seems like his destiny or maybe even his entitlement, maybe not. Haga-san is brave and tough but there was no mistaking that after his wreck on Saturday he was not the same. He was limping in the pits and the competitive fire seemed to have been sucked out of his riding. I don’t believe in the ‘I deserve’ mindset and as I already mentioned I really just like close racing but I’m definitely conflicted about Haga and Spies. Somehow the expression ‘may the best man win’ doesn’t seem to apply. We (TRS) wish Nori Haga a speedy recovery; we think you’re awesome even if you may be the ‘Spies crazy good rookie season killer.’
With Spies sucking all the air out of the room one might almost overlook the fact that we (the US) had two wild cards in the race. Jamie Hacking and Jake Zemke both rode in the premier class and both escaped the weekend unscathed and with mixed results. I think one would have to say that Hacking was the more visible of the two. I heard some people refer to his weekend as the hero to zero ride. I think that’s way to harsh. Jamie rode great in my opinion and put the Kawasaki places it hasn’t been since, I don’t know… Russell? It’s tough to jump on a strange bike and work with a strange (unfamiliar I don’t really know if they’re strange or not) team and get things sorted out in two days. This is a fickle sport, I get that. But just because he had a poor result in the second race doesn’t negate his qualifying and race one results, at least in my opinion. I must say however watching him run off for the second time in race two was a bit of déjà view.
As for Jake Zemke I think he did okay as well. Not sensational but he rode well. No get-off’s. In race one he beat five regular series riders and in race two he beat four (not including retired riders). Not everyone is going to come up like Spies. No offense to Jake but he never was. In my opinion Jake did exactly what one would expect from him. He was smooth consistent and brought the machine home. It’s not like he didn’t race for it. In the second race Zempke, Xaus and Corser was one of the most entertaining battles on the track and Zemke got them both. In my books, any day you beat Corser is a good day!
As is so often the case the real racing came from the support class. Kenan Sofuoglu’s win over Eugene Laverty was a ‘bad beat.’ Not to say there was anything wrong with it; it was an awesome last lap drive under the co-Honda rider to claim the win. The racing in both classes was good but Ben Spies running away in both races did leave a little something to be desired. The Supersport race made up for that.
This weekend also saw the début of the Larry H. Miller Superbike Challenge. This one-off series was divided into two races, a GTU or 600cc race and a GTO or 1000cc race. Basically 12 laps of a mixed group of privateers from around the country banging bars for cash. It’s a bit hard for me to get my mind around it because it’s new, one-off, and basically looked like a WERA national on steroids. The GTU race was won by former AMA rider now with Vesrah racing Cory West followed 4.613 seconds back by local rider (to us not Miller) Taylor Knapp and 8 one hundredths of a second behind him was Robertino Pietri. Jimmy Wood and Russell Wikle round out the top five. The GTO race saw AMA Pro regular Jake Holden take home the first prize money followed by David Anthony (Aussi Dave) Robert Jensen (WERA Head Hunter) Taylor Knapp (throw down dude lately) and kid star Russell Wikle top five. The only woman in the race was Elena Myers who finished 16th in the GTO and 14th in the GTU.
All told I think the Weekend was a great success and tons of fun. Definitely looking forward to the 2010 event already and would like to thank everyone at Miller, Infront and at the FIM for the great hospitality and for putting on a truly entertaining event. Ciao!
