Tuesday Conversation: Josh Hayes

Yamaha American Superbike rider Josh Hayes made history at Infineon Raceway with a victory that ended Rockstar Makita Suzuki’s 55-race win streak in the class, but the season hasn’t been easy for the three-time AMA champ. Fortunately, Hayes—who changed teams, bike brands, and classes for 2009, and has since struggled to adapt to his new ride—feels the pieces may finally be settling into place. At last weekend’s Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca round, Hayes very nearly made a second trip to the Superbike podium (he was edged out on the final approach to the line)—and had a first-class view of the pace car debacle, to boot.

Hey, Josh. What are you up to?
I’m watching this show called Holy Bleep on Versus, and they’re showing a car race at Mid-Ohio, and this BMW gets put off the middle of the back straight, right in the kink? It goes off the inside, hits a barrier, and flips forward, end over end, like eight times. Crazy. And apparently I’m going to be on one of these dumb shows now for my Laguna crash—the one on the Honda FX bike when I flipped over the bars and broke both my feet.

I still don’t like remembering that crash—2007, right?
Yeah, I have to do an interview with them soon and it’s going on “Most Daring” or some show like that. I guess they saw the footage somewhere.

Let’s talk about this past weekend’s Laguna, where you added a Daytona SportBike ride to your regular American Superbike duties.
Well, heading into it I knew it was going to be an extremely busy weekend because we were doing double duty. I knew it was going to be a bit crazy, and that proved to be the case [laughs]. I had back-to-back sessions quite a few times, but I felt really, really good on the motorcycle and got up to speed pretty quickly on the 600 I thought—I was never super-high on the time sheets, but I hadn’t been at Daytona either and had pretty good speed in that race. So come race time, I thought I had speed, and was going along doing exactly what the guys had told me they wanted me to do in terms of how to approach the race, and things were going well. But there was a lot of bumping and crazy stuff going on and I kind of got caught out, put myself in a bad position, and ended up crashing out.

In Superbike, again I never really topped the timesheets but I knew I had a pretty good race bike, and with the exception of the whole bit about the red flag at the beginning and all the mess with the pace car, it had been such a crazy day that I had a real hard time finding a good rhythm in the race. But I got rolling, and I don’t know if I’m satisfied with fourth, but it isn’t my worst Laguna outing by any stretch [laughs]. I was just kind of glad to get through it. I was very close to the podium—I passed Yatesie [Aaron Yates] in the last turn on the last lap for third, but he was able to beat me to the line.

What were you told about how to approach the SportBike race?
Just stuff the team’s been watching about how the races have been going, like the guys who are typically super-fast in the beginning aren’t always the ones who are there at the end of the race, so the idea was kind of, Hey, take your time, be easy on the tires, and let the second half of the race come to you. So I kind of sat back pretty far for the first half of the race, first ten laps or so, then I started to make my move and move forward and things were going well. I was putting in lap times faster than the leaders and starting to make some ground, and that’s when the red flag came out and it all got kind of thrown out the window. On the restart I was back in fifth place and had Danny [Eslick] right behind me, and it was just hard to fight through those guys. It was like bumper-bikes out there.

Were you happy to be back on a 600 or was it something of a distraction?
I really had a lot of fun riding the 600, and I didn’t feel that it hurt my Superbike performance in any way, honestly. Other than, you know, it’s never good to crash out the race before you go out to do your real job [laughs]. As far as the riding went, I just really enjoy riding that motorcycle.

What did the Superbike pace car incident look like from your perspective?
You know, I feel kind of lucky, because I saw the waving yellow when we were coming down into Turn 10. But everybody was in a pretty big group—it was early in the race and we were all stuck together there, so we all paying pretty close attention to each other and what we were doing—and the flag was in an area where we’re not typically looking; it was basically if you look straight out off the track. And the first one, I just saw a waving yellow; I never saw a safety car sign. So at that point I’m kind of second-guessing myself, because I’m watching the guys up front still racing, and I think as racers we always confirm it before we sit up by seeing the next flag or two to make sure we’re doing the right thing.

So then when we were coming into Turn 11, the last turn, I saw the waving yellows and I saw the safety car sign just coming up. I had backed off of the guys slightly driving onto the front straight—just didn’t quite go for it—and I put my right foot out. But we were still accelerating pretty fast and I wasn’t going to stop the race; I was still kind of going with the flow but had definitely backed off of the guys. And all of a sudden Taylor Knapp comes up the inside of me still shifting gears, and I’m like, Oh no. So I’m looking at him, and I never ever saw the safety car because I’m looking at this kid about to go—I mean, I can kind of see the guys ahead of me slowing down, and I see him come ripping by me grabbing gears, and as we’re going up the hill under the bridge, he’s in a full panic stop, like braking uphill turning left with the rear end hung out and about to completely plow Mat Mladin. And I’m watching this; I’m about to watch this catastrophe and I didn’t even know where the car was; at this point I had not seen it—until we rolled past it.

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