Between the Races: Pete Doyle

For the past decade, crew chief Pete Doyle has been an integral part of one of the most dominant teams in AMA road racing history. Paired with rider Mat Mladin, Doyle won six AMA Superbike championships for the factory Suzuki team and established them as the squad to beat—or the squad you wished you could beat—in AMA competition. In the months after Mladin announced his post-‘09 retirement, Suzuki restructured its racing department and Doyle officially became the 2010 Rockstar/Makita Suzuki team manager. Doyle will also act as crew chief for 23-year-old Blake Young this year, who’s entering his second season with Suzuki’s factory effort.

RRX: Did you have a good holiday?
Pete Doyle: I did; I actually just got back on Sunday. I went to Australia for Christmas, got back on Sunday, and I’m back at the shop now and getting back into it.

Your role within the team has changed a bit since last year. Talk about your new role as team manager for the Rockstar Makita Suzuki effort.
It’s changed a little bit, obviously; Suzuki’s whole racing operations in the U.S. has changed for this year. I actually started working in this position for the last five years, unofficially [laughs]. Obviously I focused on Mat, but in the off-season and even between the races I was in a very similar role to what I’m doing now. Not a big change, just little bits and pieces.

And you’ll act as Blake Young’s crew chief as well?
Yes, that really came about as I was crew chiefing for Mat, but a lot of the guys on the team had dual roles at that time.

You’ve gone from working with an older, very experienced rider to working with a less-experienced, younger rider. How does your mindset have to change?
For sure I knew it was going to be different, and I have to check myself every now and again because Mat had so much experience he would quite often come in and say, “Look, this doesn’t work and I think we should try this because it’s what we did last year.” When you have a rider with that much experience, it makes my job a lot easier. With Blake, who has a lot less experience, I’ll have to pull myself up a bit and remember he doesn’t have the experience of Mat. There will have to be a lot more discussions about it, whereas with Mat it was very easy. It was yes or no—there weren’t any maybes.

It must be an adjustment to start working with a kid who still makes young-guy mistakes, when Mat was so calculating and precise.
You can never try to make the rider change his riding style, but as far as mistakes go, you can only hope that he learns from them … and you might have to explain it to them that to finish first, first you must finish [laughs]. But when you think about it, the exuberance that Blake shows, you don’t want to quell that. He’s got a fire in his belly and that’s what you want to see. He’s got a year under his belt within the team and with everybody that works here, [and] he had a year under Mat when Mat won the championship, so he knows what’s required. He hasn’t won a race yet, so we’re hoping to get him up to the top of the podium.

How do you see the AMA series post-Ben Spies and post-Mat Mladin. Do you see any superstars emerging?
Not in the mold of those two. One of the things that will stop us from having another Mladin or another Spies is our technical regulations—riders aren’t going to learn as much as Ben and Mat did over the years because the bikes are less adjustable. I think it will slow down the development of the motorcycles and the riders; people are not going to look to this country for the future. When Ben was asking Mat and everyone on this team what he should do, we said he should get out of this country as quick as he could or else he’d be stuck here. Guys like Mladin and Spies don’t come along every day, and we were fortunate to have both of them.

It’s quite funny that this past year we were watching Ben’s progress in the World Superbike series and thinking about what’s been going on here in America in the past five or six years with us. We knew Ben’s level, and we knew he was good. He went over there and made the World Superbike guys look second-rate. In my opinion, he wasn’t on the best motorbike—maybe the third or fourth bike in the series—and he still made them look stupid [laughs]. A lot of people have woken up and are changing their tune.

How do you see the 2010 season playing out for your team’s riders?
I think it’s going to be a tough year for us. You can’t take two of the best riders in the world—Spies and Mladin—and lose those guys in two years and go into the following year with two guys who have never won a Superbike race. We’ve got two guys who both want to win races and who are both hungry. The team would really like to show everyone that not only can Ben and Mat win races, but [that we can] get these guys up there as well. We’re looking forward to the challenge. For sure I think Josh Hayes should start 2010 as a championship favorite, but in saying that, Tommy Hayden raced Josh down to the final race—down to the final lap of the last race. We’ve got to be optimistic that we can still win the championship, and we’re still going to be competitive.