Green Day
Attack Kawasaki's Steve Rapp stunned the racing fraternity today at Daytona International Speedway by storming to victory in the Daytona 200. And he took his teammate Ben Attard with him, the ZX-6R-mounted duo dominating the race and giving the Attack team an improbable one-two finish.
Behind the two Kawasakis came the Team M4 EMGO Suzuki of Michael Barnes, the Floridian making it a Pirelli sweep of the podium. Then came the impressive Chaz Davies, the Daytona first-timer from England riding his Team Celtic Yamaha R6 to fourth place after being in the hunt at the front of the pack the entire day. Fifth place went to the first of the full factory men with Jason DiSalvo soldiering in with his Yamaha R6.
Only then came the first of the Honda CBR600RRs that many figured would dominate the race - and it was in the hands of defending Formula Xtreme Champion Josh Hayes, the Erion-backed Honda man the last rider to finish on the lead lap.
And the rest of the factory Hondas? Ouch!
In one of the strangest laps in the history of the race, the red on the bikes of the Hondas went to the faces of the Honda team personnel as both Miguel Duhamel, who was racing for the lead at the time, and Jake Zemke, who was running eighth, both came to a stop almost simultaneously with fuel starvation problems – one lap short of their schedule pit stops on the 21st of 68 laps. And then the same thing happened to Erion Honda’s Aaron Gobert.
There were different versions of the story circulated as to whether the bikes ran out of fuel or if they had fuel-pump problems, but either way the team’s hopes for victory came back to the paddock on the back of a pickup truck. Ditto for Duhamel’s aspirations of tying Scott Russell on the all-time Daytona 200 win list with six victories.
So the improbable happened, with Rapp taking victory by 21.9 seconds over his teammate Attard – though in fairness Rapp had the pace all day long, leading the morning warm-up session and matching the speed of the top men until their demise.
”It’s unbelievable,” Rapp said from Victory Lane. “The bike was so good and the Pirelli felt like a qualifying tire. The last two laps I thought I was going to run out of gas and I was thinking I was going to kill myself if that happened.”
Daytona 200
1. Steve Rapp (Kawasaki)
2. Ben Attard (Kawasaki)
3. Michael Barnes (Suzuki)
4. Chaz Davies (Yamaha)
5. Jason DiSalvo (Yamaha)
6. Josh Hayes (Honda)
7. Pascal Picotte (Suzuki)
8. Ryan Elleby (Honda)
9. Joshua Day (Yamaha)
10. Bostjan Pintar (Yamaha)
Mladin 10th
Two days after winning his first race at Daytona International Speedway in the Superstock final, Yoshimura Suzuki's Ben Spies came back to take the one he really wanted to win - the Daytona Superbike race. And it was made even sweeter as he watched a lot of the competition fall by the wayside in a wild opener to the 2007 AMA Superbike Championship.
Second place today went to American Honda's Miguel Duhamel, the French Canadian in the mix and finishing three seconds behind Spies but well ahead of his teammate Jake Zemke. Fourth place ultimately went to Kawasaki's Akira Yanagawa, the Japanese visitor riding a steady race to take advantage of the woes of so many others. Team M4 EMGO Suzuki's Geoff May rounded out the top five.
If Spies was smiling after winning, that smile probably started on the fifth lap when he watched his teammate Mat Mladin crash out of the lead. Mladin would remount and climb to as high as eighth before giving up two spots on the final lap with a badly chunked front tire to finish 10th. That gives Spies a healthy points lead of 17 points over the man many expect to challenge him the hardest as he defends the Superbike crown he won last year for the first time.
By the time Mladin went down, several others had already ran into problems - and many of those were the factory men. On the opening lap a miscue in the International Horseshoe put Kawasaki's Jamie Hacking on the ground and he took Michael Jordan Motorsports' Aaron Yates with him. Yoshimura Suzuki's Tommy Hayden was also affected as he had to take to the dirt in order to avoid the carnage. Yates would remount to finish 11th and Hayden would rejoin to end up an eventual eighth. Hacking, though, was out of his first Superbike race with the Kawasaki team after just half a lap.
Kawasaki's Roger Lee Hayden also ran afoul of things, highsiding out of the battle for third place on the fifth lap, the same lap that Mladin fell.
The next of the top men to have problems was Yamaha's Eric Bostrom. Running at the front for the first two laps and then running in the top three throughout, Bostrom had a front tire go bad on the 12th lap and he had to pit to have it changed. He would end up 21st when all was said and done.
Both of the Ferracci MV Agustas were running in the top 10 in their AMA Superbike debut, but they also ran into problems. First it was Luca Scassa crashing out and then Matt Lynn ran into a mechanical problem.
When asked what he was thinking about at the end of the race, Spies said: "A lot of points."
"We got back up front and got up on the back of Mat and he made a mistake," Spies said. "I got out to a second and a half lead and brought it on home. To do the double here is a pretty good week."
Superbike Final
1. Ben Spies (Suzuki)
2. Miguel Duhamel (Honda)
3. Jake Zemke (Honda)
4. Akira Yanagawa (Kawasaki)
5. Geoff May (Suzuki)
6. Jason DiSalvo (Yamaha)
7. Jake Holden (Suzuki)
8. Tommy Hayden (Suzuki)
9. James Ellison (Honda)
10. Mat Mladin (Suzuki)
AMA Daytona 200 & SBK -
11/03/2007, 16h56
Re : AMA Daytona 200 & SBK -
11/03/2007, 20h14
Re : AMA Daytona 200 & SBK -
12/03/2007, 18h46
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