Tuesday Conversation: Josh Hayes

So at this point everybody sits up, and what we were trying to do was let the car back in front of us, which may not have been the right thing but at the time it just seemed like the right thing for all of us. So we all basically sat up and stopped and moved over to let the car get up to the front. Well, the car goes to the back, and of course it took us a while but finally I’m waving at Mat saying, like, Hey, this is going to be like Daytona—we just have to go; we’re going to have to do laps and get back behind the car. So we finally get everybody back up to speed and we’re going at not full pace but a slow pace, and of course we’re going down the front straightaway and up under the bridge when the red flag comes out and we have to go in the pits, so half the field had to go around and do a whole other lap. So it was just a catastrophe.

Any ideas of how that could have been done better?
I really don’t. I’m just not convinced it’s a working system. It’s funny, because people say, “Oh, well, we’re not ready to concede that it doesn’t work,” and I’m thinking, You know, the red flag is pretty simple. You see red flags, you stop. There’s no procedure other than, Hey, it’s time to slow down, go in the pits, and start over. There’s no everybody having to learn how to do it, where with the pace car there are just too many times where we’re not sure what to do and we’re all afraid—I mean, everybody has to make a decision, but you have to go along with the group. Because with the way the series is being run, if you mess up….

Like in the SportBike race, we had the same issue: the red flag came out and we never saw a safety car flag. I was in fourth or fifth place with two series regulars in front of me; I had Jake Zemke and Chaz Davies with me, and Josh Herrin up front, and they all stayed on the racetrack. I thought, You know, I think I’m supposed to go in pit lane, but if these guys stay on track and they decide this is a pace car and I go in pit lane, my race is over and I can’t get that back. Those guys aren’t going to go about making that right so that I can be in the race still fairly, so I thought the lesser of two evils—the better way—was to go with the guys at the front, because then at least everybody’s in the same boat.

So I followed them around the track and it ended up being the wrong decision, so we did an extra lap that we weren’t supposed to do, but it was because I was unsure about how to handle the situation and so were the series regulars who typically have the pace car and the rolling starts. So there’s all this confusion, and you can write all these rules all day long but they can’t write them for every situation and they refuse to. So to me, in my mind, it’s too complicated to work. Especially when you have such a simple way to fix it: throw a red flag, come in, start over.

That echoes what I’ve heard from a lot of the guys—that they find themselves in situations where they’re either afraid to let down their team and themselves by making the wrong decision, or it’s actually dangerous to do anything other than what the rest of the field is doing.
Exactly. And the safety car issue was even tough from the start, because when we rolled out for practice, the safety car actually went really fast around most of the racetrack, but when we got to the Corkscrew, it just bottled up. The car had to go so slow through that section and people were flying in there straight into big groups of people who were hardly moving. It just was not a good situation—it was just like going into the chicane at Daytona at night, quite honestly.

So in that particular example the newly announced safety bike might have worked better, but I’m guessing you still don’t feel it’s anywhere close to an ideal situation.
Absolutely. I still don’t think it’s the way to do things. And the rolling starts—it happens in every race that at some point in the field somebody leaves a gap; it happens every time and there’s no way to police it. Because what happens is, if one guy makes a mistake—misses a gear, if something just doesn’t happen—then guess what? The rest of the field is punished, and there’s no way to get that back. The only way you avoid that situation is with a standing start.

Okay, let’s talk about your season, specifically. You’ve been close to and even on the podium but it looks like you’re still working on getting comfortable. Is that right?
Here in the last couple weeks, I really feel like I’ve started to make some headway with the motorcycle. It’s been a very slow beginning to the season for me; I feel like it took us entirely too long to get to the point where we are now. This is where we should have been by race two, I really feel like. But here recently and in some tests at Elkhart and Laguna, I was able to jump on the motorcycle the first session and actually enjoy riding the motorcycle and feel, Okay, this is a bike I can work with.

I’m still having to learn the strengths of the R1. I think the engine package is good and I definitely like the connection between the throttle and the rear wheel with the crossplane crankshaft. The chassis is getting to a point where I feel I can ride it more and more the way I want to ride the motorcycle, but I’m not 100 percent there yet. But I’m feeling more and more comfortable as far as me adapting to the engineering of the Yamaha and how the bike likes to be ridden. The electronics, we’re making some headway with, and the bike is working better and getting easier to ride so that I can actually put more effort into my riding to make it work. So things are coming along and I really hope to have a strong end to the season, and the team is working well and hard. It hasn’t happened fast enough, but things are happening.

As a team, Yamaha made me feel at home from day one; they definitely made me feel like part of the family. And the motorcycle, I know it’s good, I see it being proven the world over—in the world championship and world endurance championship, the bike is dominating, and we were kind of slow to get up to pace. Ben [Bostrom] has had some more success than me; I’ve had the one win and Ben’s been on the podium several times. I think the bike caters to his natural riding style quite a bit better than it did to me and the way I want to ride the motorcycle, so he’s been able to make some headway and ground where I haven’t quite had the confidence to push it in there quite as much and ride the bike the way I like to ride it. I’m more a guy who wrenches on the bars and fights the motorcycle and works on it really hard, where he kind of flows around really nice, and it’s a very refined motorcycle. And also I think his experience with Yamahas and how they work has really taken him a long way, but I think we’re making good ground now too.

Let’s wrap up by talking about that American Superbike win at Infineon Raceway.
Yeah, you know, as far as that goes, honestly I feel very, very much that it was almost a conditional race. A win is a win, and I’m happy to take it—somebody had to beat those Yosh guys at some point in time and I’m excited it was my name that was on there when it was time to do that—but as far as personal goals and what I expect from myself, my goal is to beat Mat on Mat’s very best day. I have no aspirations that that’s something that’s going to happen easily [laughs], but it’s still my goal and something I’m working very hard for. We’re just going to keep working toward that and see what we can make happen.

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