Finally… finally official: Josh Herrin joins Yoshimura Suzuki

In the longest awaited and single most important team decision in the MotoAmerica Motul Superbike series, Yoshimura Suzuki has at last confirmed that 2013 AMA Superbike champion Josh Herrin will replace the retired Roger Hayden on the most successful team in series history.

Yoshimura Suzuki and the Monster Energy Yamaha team, the two full factory efforts in MotoAmerica Superbike, were clearly the class of the field in recent years, and Hayden’s seat was a rare opportunity for talented racers in an era when great rides are scarce. It’s no surprise the competition for the seat was strong. Would it be two-time Supersport champion J.D. Beach, fresh off a dominating season in the 600 class? Would Yoshimura keep it in the Suzuki family and promote Valentin Debise, one of only two riders who managed to beat Beach in Supersport in 2018? Or would it be Mathew Scholtz, who won the Superstock 1000 title in 2017 for Team Westby and moved up to Superbike in 2018? Even MotoGP rider Bradley Smith was rumored as a potential replacement and World Superbike rider Marco Melandri later expressed interest in coming to MotoAmerica.

Originally, many in the paddock thought a decision would be made in August, not long after Hayden’s announcement. Yoshimura Racing Senior Vice President Don Sakakura told me in August that he expected to have a decision made by the final round of the year at Barber Motorsports Park in late September. Instead, the suspense dragged on into late December.

As Scholtz and Beach found out they were no longer in the running, speculation dwindled to Debise and another candidate who was both an obvious choice and a choice that could obviously be crossed off the list: Josh Herrin, the only rider on a non-factory team to win a Superbike race in 2018.

Herrin’s results made him a clear candidate for the ride, having won on the Attack Performance/Herrin Compound Yamaha YZF-R1 built by Rich Stanboli in the first year of the team’s return to Superbike racing, despite a fair bit of bad luck (the bike didn’t make it to the first round at Road Atlanta because the semi broke down in Louisiana and the bike burned to a crisp after a crash in Utah). But Herrin and former champion Toni Elias, the other Yoshimura rider, have a history. Most infamously, that history involves a crash by Herrin at Virginia International Raceway in 2017, while trying to pass Elias, that took both of them out of the race and was the biggest threat to Elias winning the title that year.

As the riders state in the video, they’ve put that behind them. That may be. Or it may be the usual pre-season happy team talk that comes easily before the competition starts. But that history is not the only reason I was a little surprised when Herrin’s name started being linked to the Yoshimura ride.

Herrin is a bit of a wild child in the MotoAmerica paddock, and that’s part of the reason why he’s also the most popular rider on social media. He makes videos doing stunts on public roads, riding down city sidewalks and otherwise playing up the irreverent image. Fans love him because he acts more like one of them, accepting a post-race beer and spending more time hanging around with them in the paddock. It was a little hard for me to imagine that personality meshing with the Yoshimura organization, which has the kind of serious, professional approach you expect from a top racing team today.

From a public relations standpoint, Yoshimura probably stands to benefit more from having Herrin in the pits than Debise, for example, which would put a Spanish and a French rider on a team in the U.S. Superbike series. And as he showed in 2018, Herrin was able to mix it up with the two title contenders, Elias and Cameron Beaubier, in a way no one else in the field could.

It will be very interesting to see how Herrin and Yoshimura get along — and how Herrin and Elias get along — as the 2019 season progresses.