Tuesday Conversation: Josh Day

The last time we checked in with Josh Day (about a year ago), he was racing Superstock 600 overseas. In the time since, he’s returned to the U.S. and joined the AMA Pro SuperSport ESP team, and at the recent Mid-Ohio round, Josh broke through a string of bad luck and garnered his first win of 2009. As the young guns in the SuperSport class continue to gain notoriety, Day hopes his newfound confidence will lead to more victories and a chance to move up to Daytona SportBike in 2010.

RRX: Fill us in on what’s been going on in your life since we last talked?
JD: For this season I’ve been riding with the Evan Steel Performance guys in the AMA SuperSport class. Daytona started out pretty good as far as practice and qualifying in the speed that we had, and then we had that little mishap in Turn 1 and ended up falling down. I was hoping to get a win that weekend, but ever since then we’ve been struggling at every track. At Mid-Ohio we ended up getting the win, which was really good for us because we found a setup for the front that I felt really comfortable with, and hopefully we can carry that into other races this year.

Talk a little bit about that win.
All the practices went pretty well, and qualifying went pretty well—we were working on the front setup and getting pretty close—so I ended up qualifying second for the race. Then Scotty Van Hawk from the Four Feathers race team asked if I would ride for them in the MotoGT class on Saturday, so I got a lot more track time than I would normally get in just SuperSport. That helped me a lot because during the MotoGT race I went faster than I did during qualifying. During the Daytona Sportbike race later on in the day, I learned more about the track and started going even faster.

On Sunday we had the SuperSport race and Scotty helped us out a lot on setup, and in practice I went a lot faster than I had been all weekend on a SuperSport bike. The whole race just clicked and I got a good start. I was right behind Ricky [Parker] on the first lap, and on the second lap I made my pass for the lead going down into Turn 5 or 6 after the back straight. I never looked back from there and I thought I was misreading my pit board because I saw I was pulling away from him. I was pretty excited to finally get a win, because we’ve been chasing it all year.

Based on where you were last year, how do you think the new SuperSport class is stacking up this season?
I think it’s a really good class because everyone is trying to make a name for themselves and get their name out. You can hear your name on the loudspeaker, which is cool because before you just heard names like Josh Hayes and all the pros but you wouldn’t get noticed even if you were a strong-running privateer and trying to do it by yourself.

You had some decent results in Europe last year. What brought you back to the States for this season?
Over there everybody pretty much wants to get a lot of sponsorship money and money just to race. Its definitely a lot more money than over here. They wanted a lot of money for me to ride for them, and I didn’t know it was like that until I was over there and saw it for myself. I learned a lot about it while I was over there. Because the way the whole economy laid out at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, nobody had the budget to do this year what they were doing last season. If you look at AMA races, there aren’t as many competitors or spectators as last year.

Where do you see yourself next year?
I don’t know. It’s just so hard, because it’s a lot like last year when they announced the rules changes. The big concern now is whether or not people have enough money to go racing next year. I can run SuperSport again next year if I need to, but I would like to run Daytona SportBike next year because it’s a lot tougher and that’s what everybody else is doing. More teams are looking toward SportBike instead of SuperSport, even though it’s up and coming racers. It think to really get noticed in the SuperSport class, you really need to be winning races. Now that we’ve got that, I think that we have the confidence to go out and win races the rest of the season.