Danilo Petrucci was consistent. Jake Gagne was fast. In the end, Gagne was too much too fast and Petrucci’s consistency — he never finished worse than fourth all season, except when he suffered a DNF due to a mechanical failure — was not enough. The California native defended his MotoAmerica Medallia Superbike title against the MotoGP veteran from Italy, just as last year he defeated a World Superbike veteran from France and the rest of the field to earn the number one on the nose of his Fresh N Lean Progressive Yamaha Racing YZF-R1.
Gagne won the title with 376 points to Petrucci’s 356. Looking back, the final weekend of Superbike racing at Barber Motorsports Park appears uneventful, though it didn’t always feel that way in the moment. After Petrucci, who won a race in MotoGP in the rain, won in dominant fashion in a wet race at the previous round, he was hoping for rain in Alabama and there was a chance on Sunday. The need for outside intervention only grew as the Warhorse HSBK Racing Ducati NYC team struggled to get the Ducati Panigale V4 to handle well in practice and qualifying on Friday. While rain did affect the Sunday Supersport race, both Superbike races ran on a dry track. On Saturday, Gagne won decisively again while Petrucci finished third on track, though it seemed he’d be credited with a fourth-place finish due to a five-second jump-start penalty. But on appeal that penalty was reversed. Then on Sunday Gagne cruised behind his teammate Cameron Petersen while Petrucci once again lacked the pace to keep up with the Yamaha team and finished fourth.
Coming into the final weekend, the Warhorse HSBK Racing Ducati NYC team needed to take a big step forward to allow Danilo Petrucci (9) to match the pace of Jake Gagne (1) and contend for the championship. Instead, they struggled to find the right setup and posted worse lap times in qualifying than Petrucci had done in an earlier test at Barber. Gagne rode off to a solid win on Saturday, making his job of defending his title much easier on Sunday. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
In our annual predictions story at RevZilla last December, I said Gagne would successfully defend his title from his record-breaking 2021 season when he led an astounding 244 consecutive race laps. I got that prediction right, but very little else about this season went the way I expected.
When we found out that MotoGP race winner Petrucci was coming to MotoAmerica, by way of his impressive debut in the Dakar Rally, we expected to see some head-to-head competition between a world championship-level rider and Gagne, the man who put together the most dominant season in the history of U.S. professional road racing. It would be another test of the talent level in U.S. roadracing, which still doesn’t get a lot of respect on the world championship level. When I wrote about the series after the first three rounds, I noted that it was odd that we’d yet to see Gagne and Petrucci fight with each other for a race win. Now, the season’s over and in 20 races we never did see that happen.
“I just seen the back of his suit for a pair of laps and then there was not any battle between me and him,” Petrucci said, describing the races Gagne won this year.
This is about as close as Gagne (1) and Petrucci (9) ever came to racing each other on the track. Gagne won eight of 10 pole positions this year and usually pulled away to an early gap, with no one else being able to match his pace. Petrucci’s wins came when Gagne had a mechanical problem, crashed, or when weather intervened. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
Indeed, Gagne’s 12 wins this year followed the same script he wrote in 2021. He qualifies on pole, sets a pace in the early laps that others can’t match, then manages his margin to the end. It has become a cliche. Cameron Petersen called it “Jake doing Jake things.” When Petrucci led the entire race in the rain at New Jersey Motorsports Park and won by more than six seconds, he said, “I did the Jake.”
After Petrucci’s dominant win at NJMP, one of the high points of his season and a time when you would expect him to feel energized and enthusiastic, he made a statement that I never thought I’d hear from a professional racer who just won a race and saved his hopes for a championship.
“For sure it has been a tough year for me,” Petrucci said. “I am so tired. I feel like Austin was two years ago and I raced the Dakar four years ago and 10 years ago I was racing in MotoGP. I spent two months in the desert and four or five months here in the U.S.A. and I want to go back home.”
With two wins in front of his old friends from MotoGP, Petrucci had a perfect weekend in the opening round of the series at the Circuit of the Americas. While he stayed consistent throughout the year, always finishing in the top five except for one mechanical DNF, the season went downhill from there as he never again approached that level of success. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
Though the MotoAmerica season is over, both Petrucci and Gagne have at least one more big race left this year. Petrucci is going to be the next fill-in rider in MotoGP replacing the injured Joan Mir on the Team Suzuki ECSTAR GSX-RR at the OR Thailand Grand Prix the first weekend in October. And the following week, Gagne and his Attack Performance team will compete as a wild-card entry in the Pirelli Portuguese Round of World Superbike. While it will be a challenge for the team to prepare a Superbike for Gagne under the different WSBK rules and with the different Pirelli tires, it will be interesting to see if he can do better than he did on the outclassed Honda he rode the one year he was a WSBK regular.
But what about next year? Will Petrucci be back in MotoAmerica for another go?
In 2016, former Moto2 world champion and MotoGP race winner Toni Elias came to the United States as a last-minute fill-in rider and won the first three MotoAmerica Superbike races of the year, just like Petrucci did this year. Elias didn’t get his MotoAmerica championship until the next year, but he settled down, fell in love with life in California, got married, started a new family. None of the other world-caliber European riders who have come to MotoAmerica since have had such happy endings. It’s still unclear whether Petrucci will be back. He says he wants to, but I have my doubts.
Really, all we know at this point is that Gagne and Petersen will be back with Richard Stanboli’s Attack Performance team and that five-time MotoAmerica Superbike champion Cameron Beaubier will return after two fruitless years in Moto2 to race a BMW for the Tytlers Cycle team.
The other thing we can say with confidence, if not certainty, is that Petersen will only be stronger next year, Gagne is the presumptive favorite until proven otherwise, and someone will have to step up significantly to challenge the dominant Yamaha team. That’s something no one could do, not even a MotoGP winner, in 2022.
