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AMA SuperBikes VIR

AMA SuperBikes: Mladin scores win number 60

(AMA Pro Racing Release) Yoshimura Suzuki’s Mat Mladin continued his late season AMA Superbike Championship push today at Virginia International Raceway, scoring a convincing win over rival Ben Spies.

Saturday’s victory wasn’t the most dramatic of his career. The 35-year-old Aussie got a reasonably good start and picked off holeshot winner Jamie Hacking and early leader Aaron Yates on lap 2. Spies then clung onto Mladin’s rear wheel in second for a time before slowly losing ground and ultimately making a mistake that blew the race wide open. That was pretty much it.

However, Mladin’s error free ride is perhaps better summed up in the numbers associated with it: Three wins in a row, nine on the season, his sixth at VIR, a tightened 11-point championship deficit to Spies, and a landmark 60th win of his illustrious AMA Superbike career.

After struggling throughout practice and qualifying, Spies made a pretty big gamble on his race set-up and it appeared to be paying off to some degree in the early going. Rather than losing half a second as he was earlier, the Texan was able to pressure the six-time series champ over the first handful of laps before losing a tenth or two per circulation. Mladin opened the margin to nearly two seconds after 15 laps of work and finally forced Spies into a major mistake. The reigning class king ran off the track in Turn 1, allowing Mladin to extend his lead to almost 13 seconds (with more than 20 seconds back to third) before easing up to the checkered flag.

After claiming the win with 10.359 seconds worth of padding, Mladin said, “Obviously it wouldn’t have been that much if Ben didn’t make a mistake. But we put the pressure up front and just tried to eke it out a couple tenths a lap. As I always say, qualifying is one thing and racing is another and we knew that it wasn’t going to be as easy as what it looked in qualifying, and as it turned out it wasn’t. We just tried to pull a couple tenths per lap, and we got it out to just right on 2.0 and Ben made a mistake. It was definitely some slippery going out there today. And you know the lap times weren’t too bad when they needed to be. We just look forward to tomorrow and perhaps get another win.”

Commenting on reaching career win #60, Mladin said, “It is amazing. It was only maybe three years ago that I was at 30-something wins and we’ve had a number of wins over the past three or four years and really boosted that number up. As I said yesterday, in no way, shape, or form do I think 60 is going to be the last. I’m certainly working as hard as I can to extend my career and be a force in AMA Superbike for as long as possible. So who know how many we might have when we finish?”

Spies has yet to finish any lower than second in the Superbike class all season long, but he understands that he’s probably going to have to pick up another win or two to prevent Mladin from re-claiming the #1 plate.

He explained, “Yeah, we have been consistent but we know what’s got to be done for the rest of the year. Today’s race went better than I thought it was going to go until I made the big mistake. We changed the whole set-up of the bike and we hadn’t even ridden that set-up all weekend and went for it and just tried to get something. I don’t know really how hard he was riding but the first few laps when we weren’t making mistakes we could at least kind of stay there and not get pulled too much.

“I just made a mistake and ran off the track. I might have been able to stay on the track but it was going to put a lot of pressure on the front tire so we just stood up and got back on. The last ten laps we tried to still go pretty decent just to hopefully give the guys some data for tonight. Just worked on a few different things and hopefully we can turn it around tomorrow.”

The fight for third was one of the more entertaining scraps of the season. Hacking and Yates settled into a spirited battle for the final step on the podium, trading the spot multiple times over the final three laps.

The Monster Energy Kawasaki pilot got the best of the Jordan Suzuki runner on the final lap as Hacking ducked under Yates in Turn 7 and narrowly held the position to the checkered flag.

The third-place finish is Hacking’s third rostrum result of the season and his second in succession.

Hacking said, “He was making a little bit more mistakes than I was. I made a couple mistakes in front of him when I got by him, but he was consistently messing up here and there -- nothing against him, we’re all trying hard slipping around. The battle with Aaron -- once he’d get in front I was a little stronger in a couple places and he was a little stronger from 14 down to the bottom last corner. That kind of worried me a little bit. I didn’t know if I would be able to reel him in but definitely our bike’s got a little bit more steam than his does right now.

"I didn’t think he was going to make the mistake that he did going up through the esses on the last lap. He’d been running wide and getting over on the curb and getting the bike into some tankslappers so I squared it up and got a really good run and barely squeaked by him on the inside. I almost got on the grass and just braked in there pretty deep. I managed to make the corner and I knew from there on I could hold him off and bring it home.”

Hacking’s teammate, Roger Hayden, made a steady climb from eighth early to claim fifth, putting two works ZX-10Rs in the top five.

Yamaha USA’s Eric Bostrom led teammate Jason DiSalvo to the line, as the blue bikes ended up sixth and seventh, respectively.

The late race fight at the bottom of the top ten was almost as tense as the one for third, as a fading Jake Zemke on the American Honda CBR1000RR just fended off the advances of Yoshimura Suzuki’s Tommy Hayden (0.084 seconds adrift) and Corona Extra Honda’s James Ellison (a further 0.092 seconds back).

Mladin will look to claim his third straight VIR double and lower the points differential into the single digits in Sunday’s AMA Superbike final, scheduled to get underway at 3:00 pm local time.