With only hours between Wednesday’s practice sessions, Mladin was treated by the Jordan team trainer. He walked haltingly to his bike and struggled to get in and out of the saddle. Tucking in was especially painful, as were the extended runs and g-forces of the banking. Still, he set the fast time.
Mladin leads at the start...
Mladin leads at the start of the race, but the lack of preparation time and his injury meant that he wasn’t able to pull away from the pack.
“Pretty hard to test anything at the moment,” he said. “Back just hurting a bit. You know, the big difference in the last few years in this championship over here between the top two guys and the rest has been the way the guys use their body and the way they muscle the motorbike around. Until I can do that, it’s pretty hard to test at the level I want to test at.”
Thursday morning the injury worsened. “He couldn’t get out of bed, so he was going to call us to come get him out of bed,” Doyle said. “He couldn’t get up. Once he sort of got moving and got some circulation going, it sort of got a little better. He’s been pretty tough over the years. He’s got quite a high pain threshold.” But he couldn’t bend over to put on his socks or boots.
Mladin didn’t qualify fastest—that went to teammate Tommy Hayden—but he was solidly in Superpole. His Superpole lap was a stunning 1:37.499, faster than Hayden by nearly a second.
The delay in delivery of the...
The delay in delivery of the ’09 GSX-R1000 created major headaches for Yoshimura team manager Don Sakakura, forcing him to scramble for a plan B with only three weeks to Daytona.
Thirty minutes before the start of the race, with the teams having assembled on the grid, Sakakura and a number of other team managers heard the AMA announce an 18-lap race. “What’s going on?” he asked. “It was posted 15 laps all week, even before the weekend. We were using production fuel tanks. It would’ve been very close for fuel. We might’ve made it—maybe. We wouldn’t have made the cool off lap for sure.” Sakakura, Yamaha’s Tom Halverson and Jordan Suzuki’s Rich Alexander approached the AMA’s Al Ludington. Ludington queried AMA director of competition Colin Fraser, who confirmed it was 18 laps. The team managers, who were listening to race control on their headsets, were stunned. “Go to a different channel,” Ludington said to Fraser as he walked away. He returned moments later. “It’s 15,” he said.
“Just a disorganized, quite disappointing weekend on behalf of the AMA how prepared they were,” Sakakura said.