Cameron Beaubier pulled away from the field in the second MotoAmerica Motul Superbike race this weekend at Utah Motorsports Campus and also pulled away in the championship standings. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
The two top classes in MotoAmerica are threatening to become runaways, and crashes are the reason why.
In the Motul Superbike class, two-time champion Cameron Beaubier leaves Utah Motorsports Campus with a 49-point lead and he’s heading into his “home” race at Sonoma in northern California, where he dominated last year. When I wrote my mid-season MotoAmerica update at RevZilla earlier this week, I noted that the Superbike title fight was down to a two-man battle, between Beaubier on the Monster Energy/Yamalube/Yamaha Factory Racing team and Toni Elias of Yoshimura Suzuki Factory Racing. After this weekend in Utah, that’s true more than ever, but Elias’ job got a lot tougher.
The weekend did not go as planned for the Yoshimura team. The highlight was Elias stalking Beaubier and putting a late-race pass on him on Saturday to give Yoshimura its 200th win in AMA Superbike and MotoAmerica Superbike racing. That narrowed Beaubier’s lead to 24 points (one less than the maximum points for a race win) and signaled that Elias and the team had sorted out the problems they experienced after a new tire was introduced at Road America by Dunlop.
The Saturday win was the end of the good news, however, as Elias crashed in today’s race while once again chasing Beaubier in second place. Meanwhile, Roger Hayden, the other Yoshimura rider, continued to suffer a dismal season, crashing on Saturday and suffering with obvious handling problems in the second race that left him fifth.
Elias is a notoriously tough competitor at the end of a race if he’s anywhere within sniffing distance of a win, as Saturday’s race demonstrated. Beaubier said he wanted to avoid that situation today.
“I just wanted to put my head down and try to go from the beginning because it’s pretty tough to race that guy the last couple laps,” he said. “And we were able to do it.”
The strategy worked, as Elias lost the front and low-sided on lap six of the 17-lap race, trying to keep up.
“I came around the last section and saw yellow flags and I thought it was a backmarker,” Beaubier said. “Then I saw my pit board and it said I had a decent gap. I backed it down and just tried to hit my marks and be consistent and take as little risk as possible. That was more stressful than anything, just trying to get it to the finish.”
| MotoAmerica Motul Superbike standings | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cameron Beaubier | 248 |
| 2 | Toni Elias | 199 |
| 3 | Mathew Scholtz | 152 |
| 4 | Josh Herrin | 151 |
| 5 | Garrett Gerloff | 131 |
The other crash that played a key role in the Superbike standings happened in the morning practice session today when Josh Herrin, third in the standings going into this weekend, high-sided and sent his Attack Performance/Herrin Compound Yamaha YZF-R1 cartwheeling. With the one-bike rule in MotoAmerica, there was nothing even a crack team like Attack Performance could do. There was really no motorcycle left to repair — just a collection of mangled parts. The front wheel and suspension were not even connected to the frame after the vicious crash. So Herrin missed today’s race, putting him nearly 100 points behind Beaubier.
J.D. Beach is on pace to clinch the MotoAmerica Supersport title perhaps two rounds before the end of the season. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
In Supersport, an even larger advantage
If Beaubier’s 49-point gap is looking like a comfortable protective moat, then Monster Energy/Y.E.S./Graves Yamaha rider J.D. Beach’s 82-point lead in Supersport looks like a Grand Canyon-sized obstacle to anyone who hopes to catch him. Again, crashes are to blame.
| MotoAmerica Supersport standings | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | J.D. Beach | 215 |
| 2 | Hayden Gillim | 133 |
| 3 | Cory West | 95 |
| 4 | Nick McFadden | 94 |
| 5 | Braeden Ortt | 87 |
Ironically, it was a nasty pre-season crash in the Daytona 200 (not part of the MotoAmerica series) by M4 ECSTAR Suzuki rider Valentin Debise that put him out of contention before the season even started by causing him to miss the early rounds. At Utah, it was a crash in today’s race by Rickdiculous Racing’s Hayden Gillim that put him a seemingly insurmountable sum of points behind Beach. Nobody other than Debise and Gillim has been able to challenge Beach’s speed at the front this year. And Cory West, who is in third place in the standings, also crashed today.
Indirectly, a crash also hurt Debise on Saturday. He crashed in a practice session and when he gridded up for the start of race one, he noticed his Suzuki GSX-R600 was leaking oil, a result of damage that hadn’t been fully fixed in time for the race. To his credit, he voluntarily pulled off to avoid causing a risk to other riders.
With the Yamaha Factory Racing one-two finish in Superbike and Beach’s win in Supersport on his YZF-R6, if you squint and don’t look too closely, it almost looks like the first year of MotoAmerica racing, when Yamaha won all four classes. That’s misleading. Since Yoshimura Racing got a new GSX-R1000 to work with last year, Yamaha has not had it easy in Superbike, and Debise and his M4 ECSTAR Suzuki team have done amazing things with a GSX-R600 that’s a considerably older design than the R6 (the only 600-class sport bike to be updated recently).
Realistically, however, the only thing that will stop Beaubier and Beach is if they suffer crashes of their own. Consider this: If Elias wins all eight remaining races and Beaubier finishes second, Beaubier will still win the title by nine points. Beaubier’s third Superbike title and Beach’s second Supersport championship, at this point, may be as simple a matter as staying on two wheels — except for celebratory post-race wheelies, of course.
