MILLVILLE, NJ, SEPT 3 – The AMA Pro Road Racing Superbike championship will go down to the final race after the two principals had deeply different days on a hot Saturday afternoon at New Jersey Motorsports Park.
Monster Energy Graves Yamaha’s Josh Hayes took back the championship lead by continuing his perfect victory record with his fifth consecutive win at NJMP, while ockstar Makita Suzuki’s Blake Young ceded the lead to Hayes after a dispiriting and distant fifth. The day ended with Hayes leading Young 338 to 327 with only Sunday’s finale remaining. For Young to win the title, he has to win the race and hope Hayes finishes fourth or worse.
Following today’s race that seems unlikely. Starting from his seventh pole in eight races, Hayes had to spend a lap chasing Jordan Suzuki’s Ben Bostrom for a lap before taking the lead. Then followed 18 tense laps of Bostrom trying to find or make an opening that never happened.
“I got myself to the front and then I just tried to go hard as I could,” Hayes said. “When I got to, I would say ten, twelve laps into the race and I hadn’t gotten any kind of gap on Ben (Bostrom), I was trying to continue and keep going.
“I kinda lost focus for a minute. I did start to feel some pressure from him sitting back there; made a few mistakes on one lap. I bounced off the curbs over here, I missed an apex over there. I said, ‘Man what are you doing? He hasn’t shown you a wheel yet. So, just keep doing what you’re doing. You’ve got to have sections of the racetrack where you’re strong. Try to be strong there and not give him the opportunity and he might just have to ride around behind you and watch you the whole race.’ I’ve been in that position before. So I kind of relaxed, calmed down, got back into the swing of things.”
On the 19th of 23 laps Hayes nearly doubled the lead and kept growing it to the end. The heat brought out the worst in the track and, Hayes said, “it was a real tiptoe game playing it like that lap after lap after lap after lap. But I just tried to keep my nerve and ride smooth and keep doing the same thing and not give him any opportunity and it worked for us. I’m up here.”
The margin of victory was 2.034 secs.
“Yamaha five in a row. That’s awesome. I love it. I’m working hard for them. I’m glad I’m able to bring it home like that.”
Bostrom equaled his best finish of the year and his only other podium; he was second at Barber Motorsports Park.
“It’s been too long,” he said. “It does feel good to sit up here. I had a phenomenal bike at Laguna as well, I was just too exhausted to ride it. It was equally as much fun to ride there. Here, I can’t tell you how nice it is. I wish you could hook up some kind of electronics to the riders’ leathers so everybody could get the sensation of what it’s like to just drift the bike around for 25 laps out there. It’s the best high in the world. And it’d be nice to go into winter with that high. It’s always the worst when you end a little bit scared of the bike and right now the bike’s phenomenal. It’s so fun to ride. Anybody can jump on there and go pretty quick on it, as long as you like to surf the asphalt.”
The battle for third was waged among the Haydens, Tommy and Roger Lee, and Rockstar Makita Suzuki’s Young. Tommy took third from Roger Lee (National Guard Jordan Suzuki) on the 20th of 23 laps to fill the podium. The elder Hayden said his race was lost at the start when he got shuffled behind the lead four. “So from there, it was kind of a long race,” Tommy Hayden said. “By the time I got to third they already had, I think, like five seconds on me. Maybe I had the speed to run with them, but I for sure didn’t have the pace to track ‘em down from there. So from that point really I was just trying to hold onto third.” He added, “Hopefully tomorrow I can get a better start and put up a better fight.”
Roger Lee Hayden passed Young two laps from the end to get fourth with Young fifth. That gave Hayes his 11 point lead, but he wasn’t going to let the points lead change his thinking.
“I think doing what I did today is probably the safest place I could be,” Hayes said. “If I ease off that means off it’s going to put me in a big group of people that I’m going to be racing with and a lot can go wrong in that scenario. So I just need to go try to find some clean racetrack and do what I can and I mean, I don’t know, we’ll have to see. If this race was happening tomorrow with the situation I was in it might be easier to follow Ben and see if I could nip him to the line. If it worked out that way for me. But we’ll just have to wait and see. I feel pretty good about things right now. I just got to come here tomorrow and if I just do the same thing I’ve been doing all year I’ll be fine.”
AMA Pro New Jersey Superbike race results:
1. Josh Hayes (Yamaha)
2. Ben Bostrom (Suzuki)
3. Tommy Hayden (Suzuki)
4. Roger Lee Hayden (Suzuki)
5. Blake Young (Suzuki)
6. Steve Rapp (Kawasaki)
7. Larry Pegram (BMW)
8. Martin Cardenas (Suzuki)
9. Chris Clark (Yamaha)
10. Brett McCormick (BMW)