High Drama In Supersport As Top Two Riders Come Together.
Real Steel Motorsports’ Hayden Gillim made his second mistake of the season in Sunday’s Stock 1000 at Ridge Motorsports Park and it was again a double whammy as it not only cost him victory and championship points, but it also handed a second victory to his thus-far series rival Jayson Uribe.
OrangeCat Racing’s Uribe was hot on Gillim’s tail when the defending MotoAmerica Stock 1000 Champion crashed in turn 14 on the fourth lap with the pursuing pack of Uribe, Benjamin Smith and Ashton Yates zooming past. By the time Hayden remounted he was 14th and had some work to do.
With Uribe pulling away to an eventual 9.7-second win over FLO4LAW Racing’s Smith and Jones’ Honda’s Yates, Gillim set about gaining as many points back as possible. At the completion of the 13-lap race, the Kentuckian was up to fourth place.
However, Gillim went straight after the finish line and didn’t make the turn-one chicane and was thus handed a two-second penalty, which gifted fourth to Visit Indiana/Tom Wood Powersports’ Nolan Lampkin and fifth to AMD Motorsport RK Racing’s Richard Kerr, the last two riders Gillim had passed prior to the finish line.
That put Gillim sixth and cut his championship points lead over Uribe to six points after six races.
BPR Racing’s Bryce Prince, OrangeCat Racing’s Travis Wyman, Team Brazil’s Danilo Lewis and Prince’s BPR Racing teammate Deion Campbell rounded out the top 10.
“It’s always a bummer when you see someone else crash, but the biggest thing for me was getting a better start and being able to be there in the beginning,” Uribe said. “Yesterday I gave myself a little bit too much to work towards. I think that it could have been possible, but I was taking a lot of risks just to keep up. Today we kind of came out with a new plan to just be there, be aggressive, be rough. I feel like we were pretty good at doing that at the start. Like you said, when Hayden went down, it was a bummer but for me it was a realization of, ‘Now I need to conserve. Now I need to stop pushing so hard and save the tire, save the bike, save my body.’ That’s really what I tried to do. I caught a false neutral going into 14 one of those laps and it made me pretty nervous. I thought for sure someone was going to come up the inside. Luckily, we were able to get it back into gear. That OrangeCat BMW was running really good. Kind of like what everybody else was saying. All these bikes have strong points and weak points. I feel like the BMW is really good on the brakes. I can really push that thing going into corners. The biggest thing for us is just being able to get power to the ground on the exit. We’re working on it. We’re working every time we get on that bike to try something new and improve. It’s going good.”
Supersport – Scholtz Wins With High Drama
Strack Racing’s Mathew Scholtz won his sixth Supersport race of the season at Ridge Motorsports Park, but this was the first one that came with a big dose of drama.
Scholtz had finally caught up to the fast-starting PJ Jacobsen on the Rahal Ducati Moto Panigale V2 with two laps to go. The South African then made an inside move on the New Yorker and it didn’t end well. The two came together and Jacobsen went down, ending his run of finishing on the podium in all the nine previous races.
Jacobsen obviously wasn’t happy with the outcome as the championship was turned on its head. Scholtz went from having a three-point lead to what is now a 28-point lead.
Jacobsen got a flier of a start and instantly put his head down. Scholtz, meanwhile, had a slower start and had work to do to get to second. Once he did, he started to run the New Yorker down. With five to go, the two were together. With two to go, the accident happened, and it was called a racing incident by race control.
It takes a lot to overshadow Kayla Yaakov, but her teammate’s crash did just that. Yaakov raced to her best-career Supersport finish of second, just a day after she finished third. Quite a weekend for the 17-year-old Pennsylvanian.
Yaakov had come out best in a battle with Vision Wheel M4 ECSTAR Suzuki’s Tyler Scott that went to the finish line with Yaakov .214 of a second ahead at the finish line. Meanwhile, her teammate Corey Alexander was just as close in fourth place.
Wrench Motorcycles’ David Anthony had his best finish of the year in fifth.
When asked about the racing incident with Jacobsen, Scholtz said “I thought that I made the move pretty clean past him and ran slightly wider than you would usually do. But I feel that he just tipped in and knew that I was there and carried on turning and hit the side of my foot peg. I felt him there, but I carried on turning and I looked back and I saw that he had crashed. Obviously, that’s not something I want, but I feel that I got to the point of making the pass fair and he should have given me room. But I think that if you’re on their side, they’re going to say that I was wrong. I feel that maybe PJ was slightly wrong. So, we’ll just take it as a 50/50. But overall, I feel that I definitely had the pace and just really happy to pull the championship lead a little bit further. Looking forward to the next couple rounds. Laguna Seca is one of my favorite tracks. Myself and PJ had a massive battle there last year on the Superbikes, so I’m sure we’ll do the same thing there.”
Mission Super Hooligan National Championship – Lewis!
Saddlemen/Harley-Davidson’s Jake Lewis did what everyone has been waiting for him to do on Sunday at Ridge Motorsports Park – he won a round of the Super Hooligan National Championship on his Harley-Davidson Pan America.
Always thought of as the fastest guy in the class to have not yet won, Lewis made good on the promise he’s shown by storming into the lead and pulling away to win by a tick over two seconds. And that’s with a final-lap blunder that put him off track momentarily.
Lewis’s victory helped make up for his first-lap crash in wet conditions in Saturday’s race.
Lewis beat S&S Cycle/Indian Motorcycle’s Tyler O’Hara with the defending series champion earning his second podium of the weekend and this one put him atop the championship standings after two rounds and four races.
Third place went to Lewis’s teammate Cory West, who also made up for his crash from the lead in yesterday’s wet race.
O’Hara’s teammate Troy Herfoss ended up fourth after a race-long battle with KWR’s Hayden Schultz.
“I’m two for four on Hooligan finishes,” Lewis said. “Last night I was just so pissed off and bummed. Both Cory and I. It just feels really bad. It feels like you let your team down doing that. Especially me on the first lap. I felt good during the little warmup before the rain race and then, first lap, just threw it on my head and didn’t get any points. Now it’s kind of do or die for me. It’s like my only chance is to try to go out there and win every single Hooligan race. I put in some good, consistent laps this morning and we changed a little bit of setup stuff from yesterday qualifying, and it was a better direction, and it made it even a little bit better for the race. I saw Cory struggling in a couple little spots and felt TO come up my inside there at a couple spots. I thought he was going to stuff me, but I think he played it a little bit nice. I knew once I got by Cory just to put it in first, especially that first lap, two or three good, hard sprint laps, which I did. My lap time was quite a bit faster than I qualified. Then I looked over and saw I had a little gap on TO and just kind of maintained that. But then on that last lap, that lapper, it was just my fault. He broke a lot deeper than I thought he would, and I kind of missed my brake marker and ran off the track. Luckily I had a big lead.”
Royal Enfield Build. Train. Race. – Another Record For Moore
Mikayla Moore said after her victory on Saturday that she uses lap times for part of her motivation. Her best lap time was a 2:02.801. On Sunday she went even faster, setting a new lap record with her 2:02.683 on the sixth lap to set the bar is even higher for the next wave of Royal Enfield Build. Train. Race. racers. Oh, and she also won. By 44 seconds.
The win was Moore’s fifth of the year.
Second place today went to Lauren Prince, the Nashville, Tennessee, resident earning her first MotoAmerica podium a day after crashing on the sighting lap with a cold front tire. Even today wasn’t easy on Prince as her rear tire warmer got stuck and she was forced to start from the back of the pack.
Aubrey Credaroli rounded out the top three with her first podium finish of the season.
“Yesterday I did a 2:02.8 and if I rounded up the numbers, that’s technically still a 2:03,” Moore commented. “So, I was like, I wanted more. I talked with the K Tech guys and they suggested a lot of things that I was nervous about, because I had already done my warmup lap. So, it was really about trusting myself and the bike that I’ll be able to accomplish my goal. I was super happy I was able to do it on the seventh lap. I just kept watching myself drop time. To be able to do the 2:02.3, super happy. I wanted to go for that 2:01, but hey, I’m happy with the 2:02. I exceeded my expectations, like I always do. Super happy to be here.”
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