Mat Mladin's Yoshimura Suzuki Crew - A Well-Oiled Machine

Of the five, O'Rourke has been the longest-serving. The chief mechanic, who worked with Mladin in Australia, came with him to the U.S. in '96 for his first year on the Yoshimura Suzuki. He's been here ever since. Crew chief Doyle, who served on the Muzzy Kawasaki World Superbike title team of Scott Russell, also worked with Mladin when he rode for Kawasaki Australia. Doyle took over as crew chief in '00. Auxier is the self-taught computer and electronics whiz, while Asher started working with Yoshimura in '02; Ackland has been with the team four years.

The discussion was meant to be a retrospective of Mladin's career, but it continued to veer back to the present, which won't go down as the team's favorite year. The Superstock-oriented '09 technical rules were a source of frustration to the team, making the superbike feel less so. Mladin's frustration reached a peak in August when he announced his decision to retire upon returning to his home in Chino, California, after withdrawing from a race for the first time in his career. It came after he rode just a few laps at Heartland Park Topeka, a track whose safety margins in his opinion were well below par.

The transcript that follows isn't complete or entirely faithful to the conversation. Many of the answers were drowned out by laughter or good-natured ribbing. The crew works so well together that their communication is often non-verbal. They know what has to get done and they do it, without fanfare and out of the limelight. The results speak for themselves.

Q: Mat, what did you expect?

Mat Mladin: I expected to win, really, as soon as I got over here, until I got here and realized how out of whack the whole (Suzuki) setup was. Then just made a change for '97 and won pretty quickly, then realized that I didn't want to stay there. So I went back and started putting a few things together.

Q: When you came back to Yosh, were things a lot better?

RO: Anything we tried to change in '96 sort of went back to the way it was after we left. Then we started leaning on them pretty heavily and turned it around again.

Peter Doyle: Everything always has to change, but it was fairly good when I got here. There were still some big problems. There were some people who were trying to make decisions and do things that weren't in the best interest of anybody of maybe just themselves or just their rider. Yeah, there were some problems, but most of that got sorted out over the next three or four years.re.

Johnny Asher: It's been progressive. We've seen the peak of the factory support and now, as Mat says, it's gone the other way. We're back to nothing. There was a climb, an increase in it, and now, yeah, it's back to zero.