MotoAmerica midseason update: A tale of two racers

At the mid-point of this year’s season, with five rounds down and five to go, it has been a tale of two racers, a tale of two seasons. After three rounds, it appeared Elias was a safe bet to defend his championship. He had five wins in six races, the one exception being a wet race at the Circuit of the Americas. Potential competitors, most notably his Yoshimura Suzuki teammate, Roger Hayden, had taken themselves out of title contention and it seemed no one could beat Elias in a dry race.

Then came Road America. Two-time MotoAmerica champ and Monster Energy/Yamalube/Yamaha Factory Racing rider Cameron Beaubier clashed with Elias on the last lap of race one, each putting a hard pass on the other. In the second incident, Elias crashed and Beaubier went on to win. He followed up with three more wins, one the next day at Road America and two at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. In two rounds, Beaubier went from 35 points behind to 29 ahead. Elias went from a sure bet to a man facing an uphill battle.

Is it the tire?

Whether coincidence or explanation, the dramatic shift in fortunes happened just as Dunlop introduced a new rear slick tire for the Superbike class. Last year, a new rear tire introduced in the Supersport class had a decisive effect on the championship, breaking a virtual tie between Garrett Gerloff and J.D. Beach and helping Gerloff to the title (and the second spot on the Yamaha Factory Racing Superbike team for this year). Is the same thing happening this year in the Motul Superbike class?

Elias definitely thinks the tire was part of his problems.

“Everything was perfect and when the new tire arrived everything was different,” Elias said in an interview posted by MotoAmerica. “The bike changed a lot, setup changed a lot, electronics changed a lot. I don’t feel the same feeling so my goal and my focus and my team’s goal is to go back to where we were before Road America.”

(It’s worth noting that Yamalube Westby Racing’s Mathew Scholtz, the only rider other than Elias and Beaubier to win a race so far this year, also suffered a dramatic change of fortune when the new Dunlop rear tire came out, crashing twice and dropping from a tie for second to fourth place in one weekend.)

Yoshimura Racing Senior Vice President Don Sakakura, who has played a key role in much of the team’s 40 years of success in domestic Superbike racing, admitted that the problems with the new tire took the team by surprise.

“Honestly, we looked at that tire a couple of times throughout the year before it was actually mass produced for the paddock and we didn’t really see some of the problems that we saw from Road America on,” Sakakura said earlier this week in a phone interview. “Don’t know why exactly it happened. We were surprised with what we saw at Road America.”

If not for the controversial crash in the Saturday race at Road America, Elias would have likely finished no worse than third, winning 16 points, and his gap to Beaubier would now be less than half of what it currently is. But the crash wasn’t his only problem.

“Sunday, we had some issues with setup on the motorcycle, quite honestly, and that caused some problems for Toni and the result was he ran wide in the corner and fell way back in the finishing order,” Sakakura said. “It’s been a little bit of a struggle from that point trying to get a combination of things to find the right balance with the motorcycle.”

“Really, it’s just trying to find that balance that Toni needs. He seems to be maybe more sensitive than some of the other riders we’ve had to work with here about balance of the motorcycle. Corner entry, getting into the corner, things like that.

“The larger tire, obviously you get a larger contact patch, but also it’s taller, so basically you have to get into the whole balance of the chassis, suspension damper, more spring, things like that. We believe the side of the tire, the construction, has an impact on the movement of the motorcycle and how much the tire is deflecting under load. Obviously, that changes the position of the motorcycle. We have the ability to change quite a few things to maintain a geometry target that we’re looking for, and we’re able to achieve that with changes to the chassis settings. It’s not quite as easy as changing the ride height.”

“Once the motorcycle is set up for that tire, there’s a lot of benefit over last year’s tire,” Sakakura said. The Yoshimura team did a test at California Speedway the Friday after the round at Laguna Seca and they now believe they’ve found the right setup.

“Toni’s in a much better mindset now,” Sakakura said. “I think he’s very positive, very confident, and obviously very hungry to get back on top of the podium again. You know Toni. He’s a very intense individual and is very competitive. We’re looking forward to the second half of the season to regain that point lead.”

Meanwhile, Beaubier’s four-race win streak may have vaulted him into the lead, but the three consecutive second-place finishes prior to that were what put him within striking distance. After his early crashes and slow start at Road Atlanta, the former champ has been steadily improving. Not surprisingly, he has no complaints about the new Dunlop KR451 rear tire.

The second half of the season

The second half of the MotoAmerica season starts this weekend at the Championship of Utah at the Utah Motorsports Campus near Salt Lake City.

At this point, it certainly looks like a two-man race for the title. Scholtz won a single race in the rain, at COTA, but Road America was a disaster. Hayden has finally come back from a dismal start to the season and has three consecutive podium finishes, but he’s still eighth in points. Gerloff, now Beaubier’s teammate, has yet to finish better than third in his rookie year.

MotoAmerica Motul Superbike standings
1	Cameron Beaubier	203
2	Toni Elias	174
3	Josh Herrin	135
4	Mathew Scholtz	129
5	Garrett Gerloff	98
6	Jake Lewis	95
7	Kyle Wyman	82
8	Roger Hayden	79
9	Danny Eslick	75
10	David Anthony	63

The only other rider to threaten to win a race has been Josh Herrin, riding for the Attack Performance/Herrin Compound team on a Richard Stanboli-prepped Yamaha YZF-R1. Herrin is in third in the points and has shown flashes of race-winning pace, but he is 68 points behind Beaubier. He can wonder about a lot of “what ifs.” What if the team transporter hadn’t broken down on the way to Road Atlanta, leaving him to compete on a modified street bike to salvage points? What if he hadn’t taken on the exhausting task of riding both World Superbike and MotoAmerica races at Laguna Seca? Maybe he wouldn’t have crashed late in race two while running near the front. What if the deal with Attack had come together earlier and Stanboli had been given more time to build a Superbike and get it dialed in, including some preseason testing?

Herrin will also start the first race at Utah with a three-position grid penalty because he argued with corner workers and didn’t follow instructions after his last-lap crash at Laguna Seca.

So yes, it looks like one of the two racers who have won the last three Motul Superbike titles will also be champion in 2018. Then again, in late May it looked like we could just cancel the rest of the races and hand the trophy to Elias right then. As the late Nicky Hayden loved to say, that’s why they line up on Sunday. You just don’t know what can happen.