Roger Hayden crashes out of the lead of Sunday’s MotoAmerica Motul Superbike race at Road Atlanta, leaving Toni Elias (1) and Cameron Beaubier (6) to fight for the win. Photo by Brian J. Nelson
Every racing seasons starts off with a list of unknowns, questions that are answered race by race as the story unfolds. At the beginning, we not only do not know how they will be answered, but when. The first round of the 2018 MotoAmerica Motul Superbike series at Road Atlanta last weekend did very little to answer the questions surrounding this season.
Of course the big questions, such as who will emerge as a champion, whose career will get a boost, who will slip toward the end of his racing days, who will emerge hopeful for the future and who will be disappointed, all will not be answered until the end of the year, or maybe even later, with the benefit of time and distance. Here are some of the questions I was wondering about before last weekend and what little we learned at Road Atlanta (warning: it wasn’t much).
Does Toni Elias have a weakness? Partial answer: maybe not. All three years he has been in the MotoAmerica series, Elias has won the first two races, at Circuit of the Americas the last two years and at Road Atlanta this year. Last year, he went on to win the championship by an 88-point margin. One of the main reasons he did not win the 2016 title was because of a disastrous round at New Jersey Motorsports Park when it rained buckets and he left with just four points for the weekend, compared to a perfect 50 points for Cameron Beaubier. That turned out to be a pivotal moment that helped Beaubier recover from a bad start to the season and win his second championship.
Toni Elias leads the Superbike field in the early laps of Saturday’s race. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
For Elias’ competitors, it was a rare glimpse of hope. Maybe he can’t win in the rain. Or, after this past weekend, maybe he can. Elias himself didn’t seem sure, going into Sunday, with a forecast of a 100 percent chance for rain. After winning Saturday’s race in warm, dry conditions, Elias was cautious, saying “Rain is difficult. Anything can happen, but I will try to stay on the bike.” Not exactly resounding confidence, but since his last race win in the rain was in 2001, understandable.
On Sunday, he managed the race perfectly, following his teammate Roger Hayden, until Hayden crashed out of the lead, then sticking to the tail of Beaubier until the end, making a perfect pass and then putting in the fastest lap of the race on the final lap to clinch the victory. Maybe he doesn’t have a weakness. As someone pointed out, that horrible weekend in New Jersey was on the old GSX-R1000, not the new bike. Maybe it’s outdated and irrelevant information. Maybe Elias, who finished either first or second in the 18 (of 20) races last year that he finished, can win in any conditions. Road Atlanta didn’t prove that 100 percent for sure, but it provided no encouragement for Elias’ rivals.
Cameron Beaubier does an interview with the beIN Sports television crew. Photo by Lance Oliver.
Will Beaubier’s shoulder be his downfall? Answer: Still unknown. Beaubier’s title hopes ended last year at Pittsburgh International Race Complex when he saved a crash but the violent headshake of his Yamaha dislocated his shoulder. You don’t have to look back far to see another Yamaha Superbike rider whose career was ended by shoulder injuries (Ben Spies) and the same has happened to others. So far, Beaubier appears to be fully recovered, but as we’ve seen, it only takes one unlucky fall on that most complex of all human joints to cause a nagging injury that ends a career.
Can Garrett Gerloff contend for a title as a rookie? Answer: Still unknown. Normally, you expect a rookie to need a year to get up to speed, but Gerloff looks so smooth and seems to have his head on so straight that I went out on a limb in my season preview story at RevZilla and predicted he could be a title contender in his first season. Gerloff looked good on Saturday, finishing third, though he could not keep up with the frontrunners, Elias and Westby Racing’s Mathew Scholtz. But Gerloff did himself no favors with a crash in the rain on Sunday.
I still expect Gerloff to win this year, and maybe contend for the title, but that may not be enough to make him top rookie, if Scholtz continues to be as strong and confident as he was at Road Atlanta.
Jamie Astudillo made history by becoming the first female racer to finish on a MotoAmerica podium with her third-place finish Sunday in the Liqui Moly Junior Cup. The 17-year-old also proved a woman can get on a MotoAmerica podium by wearing leather, as well as spandex. Photo by Lance Oliver.
Can Honda step up? Partial answer: probably not. The Factory Yamaha team dominated the first two years of MotoAmerica. Yoshimura Suzuki dominated last year. Honda returned, in partnership with Danny Walker’s Roadracing Factory, to form the Genuine Broaster Chicken Honda team, but the CBR1000RR was never competitive last year either in World Superbike or MotoAmerica. Walker’s team seemed to lack support from the Honda mothership.
Odds never favored this year being a turnaround year. With Jake Gagne off to World Superbike to replace the late Nicky Hayden, the Genuine Broaster Chicken Honda team called up Cameron Petersen from Supersport. Then Petersen suffered a nasty crash on Saturday, meaning he left with no points and, even more important for a rookie, no gained race experience in Superbike. It’s hard to imagine the Honda being a regular fixture in the top five this year.
A tech paints Josh Herrin’s number on a race fairing on his converted street bike using a borrowed can of spray paint. Photo by Lance Oliver.
Can Josh Herrin compete as a privateer? Answer: still unknown. Another interesting question mark coming in to the season was Josh Herrin and the Attack Performance/Herrin Compound Yamaha team. With experienced race bike builder Rich Stanboli building a Yamaha YZF-R1 Superbike for the 2013 champ to ride, there was promise. What there wasn’t was time. The deal came together at the last minute, meaning Herrin didn’t get to ride the bike in preseason testing. He was going to ride it for the first time at Road Atlanta, but then even that didn’t happen.
The team’s transporter broke down in Louisiana on the way to Georgia from the West Coast. Herrin threw a loaner YZF-R1S in his truck and drove it from his home to the track. The team converted it to race trim with borrowed parts and Herrin entered the race in the hopes of salvaging points. Which he did, finishing 10th on Saturday on a bike that was three seconds a lap slower than the true Superbikes. In Sunday’s rain, with the horsepower advantage mostly nullified by conditions, Herrin was actually running in the lead group, contending for a podium finish, until mechanical problems cropped up. He still limped home in sixth, due to the attrition.
“It turned out this has been one of the funnest weekends I’ve had in a long time,” Herrin said. “My mom said, ‘It feels like you’re 15 again.’ My dad’s here, my mom’s here, my friends are here, just working on the bike together under the little tent. The whole plan this weekend was just to salvage some points and we are leaving here with 16, more than I thought we were going to get.”
Yoshimura Suzuki Racing celebrated a 40-year partnership with Suzuki at Road Atlanta with a display of the team’s history. Here are title-winning Superbikes ridden by Wes Cooley, Kevin Schwantz and Mat Mladin. Photo by Lance Oliver.
Maybe we’ll get some more answers this weekend as the Superbike class only joins the MotoGP round at Circuit of the Americas in Austin. Elias has four wins in four races at COTA. Herrin will presumably finally get to ride his Attack Performance Superbike. And maybe, a piece at a time, the story of the season will unfold a little more.
