We’re now 11 races into the 20-race MotoAmerica HONOS Superbike season and Jake Gagne has done an excellent job of making me look like a fool. All I can say in my defense is that Supersport riders Sean Dylan Kelly and Richie Escalante are helping me redeem myself slightly.
In my MotoAmerica season preview at RevZilla, I speculated that the move by five-time champion Cameron Beaubier to Moto2, after a 2020 season in which he dominated and won a record-tying 16 races (of 20), most of them by embarrassing margins, would mean that 2021 would be “a wide open season.” Instead, Beaubier’s 2020 teammate, Fresh N’ Lean Attack Performance Yamaha rider Gagne, has won 10 straight races (probably more by the time you’re reading this). After a mechanical failure saddled him with a DNF in the first race at Road Atlanta, Gagne is undefeated. The season of parity and multiple Superbike winners that I imagined in my preview is the farthest thing from reality.
Being good and being lucky
In today’s MotoAmerica Superbikes at Minnesota race at Brainerd International Raceway, Gagne found a new way to win. It’s impossible to argue with the statement that he got lucky. And it’s also true that his most threatening rival for the race win today, Warhorse HSBK Racing Ducati’s Loris Baz, was unlucky. But the third truism in this triumvirate is that the better you are, the more likely you are to be lucky. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
Strange things happened at the start of today’s Superbike race. Gagne got sideways on the start, something he later said has never happened to him like that before. Other rides had near crashes on the opening lap. It may have been because tires cooled on the long wait between the warmup lap and the start. In any case, when it seemed the normal pattern had returned, with Gagne opening a nearly one-second lead after one lap, the Yamaha rider crashed.
As crashes go, it was both amazingly harmless and seriously terrifying. Gagne’s YZF-R1 lowsided and spun to a stop in the middle of the track, meaning the entire field of Superbikes and Stock 1000 machines was bearing down on him as he slid to a stop in the middle of the track, the bike on top of him. Here’s the video:
It was chaos at the start of HONOS Superbike race one as @jakegagne crashed out of the lead right in the middle of track, handing the lead to @lorisbaz, who lowsided in the very next turn. Gagne got out of harm’s way, but his bike led to a red flag while Baz’s bike was destroyed. pic.twitter.com/4UhcX9beOI
— MotoAmerica (@MotoAmerica1) July 31, 2021
In the next corner, Baz, now leading, ran off track and instead of a harmless lowside, his Ducati tumbled and flipped like an Olympic gymnast, smashing itself to bits. The sight of that sculpted, signature Ducati single-sided swingarm broken in two probably brought Ducatisti to tears. Or at least it ended any hopes Baz had for the day. By contrast, the Attack Yamaha team only had to change a clip-on and a lever and Gagne joined the restarted race to win his 10th in a row with little additional drama.
Gagne was lucky to emerge from a very dangerous situation, and lucky again that his motorcycle was in near perfect condition for the restart. Not for the first time this season, Baz was not lucky.
That extended Gagne’s lead to 74 points over Westby Racing’s Mathew Scholtz, who finished third today. Only a disaster will stop Gagne from winning the championship this year — a year in which I predicted multiple riders would contend for the title. Oh well. At least I still have Supersport.
This is about as far apart as Richie Escalante (1) and Sean Dylan Kelly (40) have been apart this season in the MotoAmerica Supersport class. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
Two men above the rest
In the same preview article, I also predicted that the 2020 man-on-man rivalry in Supersport between HONOS HVMC Racing’s Richie Escalante and M4 ECSTAR Suzuki’s Sean Dylan Kelly would resume: “While it’s possible that another young rider can make a step forward in 2021 and challenge those two heavy favorites for the MotoAmerica title, it will have to be a big step to catch up to Escalante and Kelly.”
Too big for anyone to make, as it turns out. Race after race, Kelly and Escalante are inches apart, but 10 seconds ahead of whoever is in third. The difference from last year is that it has been Kelly in 2021 who has won most of the races, giving him a 36-point lead. Today’s race was another great example,
It’s been that way all season. If you only watched one motorcycle road race this year, you could do a lot worse than the first Supersport race at Road America, which included 35 lead changes, a fierce battle, a shock ending (the one race neither Kelly nor Escalante won) and a popular win for an underfunded, hard-working privateer. If you missed it, here are the highlights:
Kelly has a 36-point lead at this stage, but that doesn’t represent how close the two have been. The fact that Kelly’s teammate, Sam Lochoff, is third in the standing but has half as many points as SDK, shows just how far these two are above the rest of the field.
At least I got one right.
