Honda Road Racerhead #23

Welcome to Honda Road Racerhead. I’m spending the weekend at home, which means I had to give Road America a miss, and that’s a shame considering it’s one of the best stops on the AMA Pro Road Race schedule.

Blake Young is back (at his home race; he’ll be training with Kevin Schwantz at Trek bicycles’ nearby headquarters early next week) after missing the last round while his shortened finger healed, Josh Hayes is eager to back up his Infineon Raceway American Superbike win (he was second today in preliminary qualifying), Mat Mladin is eager to extend the new streak he started during Race 2 in Sonoma (he was fastest today), and the Daytona SportBike field is eager to end Martin Cardenas’ recent streak.

It promises to be a great weekend of racing, and although rain is predicted over the weekend, Road America is one of the tracks at which relatively safe racing can be counted on in even quite extreme weather conditions. For more information, check out On Track.

In this column, however, we’re going to focus on last week’s U.S. round of the World Superbike series. Having spent nearly 100 days out of country, Ben Spies is enjoying life back in the U.S., spending time bicycling in Utah, California, and all points in between, while his crew chief Tom Houseworth is chilling out with his family in New Mexico. The two certainly deserve some time off after getting the job done at Miller Motorsports Park last weekend, where Spies did the double and set a record of seven consecutive poles (in his first seven WSBK races, no less).

Of course they’ve also given themselves a big helping of pressure, since the championship is once again a realistic goal, thanks not only to their strong performance but to Noriyuki Haga’s off weekend in the U.S. Spies definitely has momentum on his side at the moment, and one gets the sense that he’s also now in Nori’s head. I incorrectly said last week that Spies was second in the series standings, but of course he is now, with a 53-point deficit to Haga.

It was also a great weekend for Ben’s good buddy, Jamie Hacking, who subbed for Makoto Tamada and turned in the team’s best day of the year, first making it into the final Superpole session and then posting a seventh place in Race 1 (an even better result seemed possible, but the tire that was put on his bike during the red flag proved to be sub-par). Hacking was running dual energy-drink sponsorship (his own Monster Energy, and Paul Bird Motorsports’ Kick Energy), and he certainly wasn’t lacking in aggression; he had three separate incidents in the two races, and in a textbook example of Murphy’s Law being in affect, they all involved fellow Kawasaki riders, but the team was so pleased with his performance that Cycle News’ Henny Ray Abrams reports today that Jamie will be subbing again two weeks from now in Misano.

Unfortunately, Jake Zemke didn’t fare nearly as well during his substitute ride at Stiggy Honda Racing. The Californian never did find a setup that suited him, and he went 18-15 in the two races, which at least meant that he picked up his first SBK point (Zemke was fastest during this morning’s Daytona SportBike practice session in Wisconsin, and in preliminary qualifying.) John Hopkins was on hand watching the event, and he hopes to be back in the saddle in time for Misano.

Props to Jake Holden, who won the GTO class in MMP’s inaugural Larry H. Miller Superbike Challenge over WSBK weekend while posting a best lap of 1:51.243—better than four of the finishers in the first World Superbike race, despite the fact that he was on an American Superbike-spec machine (with the exception of a kit transmission) with Sunoco fuel! Cory West came out on top of the GTU class.

Anyway, it was a special weekend for American fans, including super-fan Chuck Forquer, who turned in a nice RRX blog on his experiences. There’s also a MMP slideshow.

If you didn’t attend the race (or if you did but didn’t pick up a RRX-published program), MMP has some left over. Give them a call at 435-277-8000 to find out how you can get one.

Full props to Melissa Paris for qualifying into the World Supersport program. Last week, I said here that she was trying to become the first woman to do that, which does a disservice to Katja Poensgen, the German lady best known for competing in the 250cc Grand Prix class but who also not only qualified for the 1998 German World Supersport round at the Nurburgring, but who finished a commendable 20th in the race. Technically, I could try to defend my claim by pointing out that World Supersport had a different status at the time—it was only a “world series,” after having been a European championship up until 1997 (it was given full “world championship” status in 1999, the season after Poensgen’s feat). The truth is that although I had a suspicion that Katja might have raced in World Supersport, I figured I was safe after failing to find any reference of it online—not even on her personal website! (Then again, I don’t speak German!) Honestly, it was a mistake, and I apologize.

Unfortunately, Melissa had to drop out of the race fairly early on with a mechanical failure, but hopefully we’ll see some more of her in AMA Pro Road Racing this season.

On the subject of women racing, I’ve been following the progress of the Women’s Motocross Association this season. Over the winter, the series was taken over by MX Sports (a division of the small, family-owned company that owns Road Racer X, and that also puts on the Lucas Oil Motocross Championship for AMA Pro). This year, the WMA races are being held on the same days as the men’s nationals, and they’re even getting some television coverage. I attended the opening round at Glen Helen a couple of weeks ago, and I was impressed by not only the level of racing in the class, but the important role it plays in the program. Why couldn’t a similar setup be implemented for AMA Pro Road Racing, I wondered?

Perhaps the real question is, do the women even want their own series? I know Jessica Zalusky was never really interested in that idea, and during Melissa’s recent Tuesday Conversation, she felt the same, saying, “Honestly, I could care less. If they could do it and they could get enough girls, awesome. I’m not really looking to be the fastest girl; I just want to be fast.”

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