Here’s a shocker … Yoshimura Suzuki dominated AMA Superbike racing at Infineon Raceway/Sears Point/Sonoma, choose your favourite track name. Ben Spies took wins in both ends of the AMA Superbike double-header at Infineon Raceway near San Francisco, both times followed home by team-mate and six-time U.S. champ Mat Mladin, whose main contribution to the weekend was a bad-tempered outburst against the people at Daytona Motorsports Group who have bought the rights to run the AMA series in the future.
At an interview that weekend, DMG head Roger Edmondson was very diplomatic in saying, when asked about Mladin’s outburst, “all of us from time to time make statements that include an extraordinary amount of arrogance, ignorance and intemperance. But that doesn’t mean that they are arrogant, ignorant or intemperate people. It just means that at times emotion gets ahead of where we are.”
That was polite. Very.
For Canadian fans the Red Bull AMA U.S. Rookies Cup (copied from the existing European series) had to be the most interesting race of the weekend. Using identical spec KTM 125 cc GP machines, the series is a potential jumping board to the big leagues, and an entry is extremely hard to get. More than 600 applicants got winnowed down to 23, who get a bike and support for the year … including one Canadian.
That would be 13-year-old Emerson Connor of Burlington. Connor not only has qualified to get into the series, but is riding in the top group, finishing a superb 10th at Infineon against many older and even more experienced rivals.
Connor, who’s been winning motocross, flat track, and supermoto titles for four years already, is clearly pumped and ready for the big leagues, another of the incredibly talented young riders Canada has been tossing into the mix in the last few years.
