Sunday, June 01, 2008

World Superbike at Miller Motorsports Park

It was an awesome weekend; World Superbike joined the AMA for a racing event at Miller Motorsports Park this weekend. Derrick and I went yesterday and had a pretty good time.

When we got there we first spent some time in the vendor area and the paddock. We saw a bunch of really awesome custom choppers there; this was one of the coolest ones:


As we wandered through the paddock we saw some very clear reminders that we were really at a World Superbike event. Notice the names of Troy Bayliss and Michel Fabrizioso, the factory Ducati riders:


We stopped at the Scorpion USA booth and saw Bubba the Scorpion there:


In the Yamaha tent they were displaying Valentino Rossi's MotoGP bike. Okay, I realize it probably was not really Valentino's real MotoGP bike. Still, it was cool to see:


We watched most of World Superbike qualifying on the front straightaway, about 500 yards from the turn. This is literally the fastest part of the track, as they would get of the throttle and start braking for the turn right in front of us. Sorry for the pictures; apparently my camera phone distorts the pictures at 190 mph. Actually, with the delay between when I press the capture button and when the picture actually gets captured, it requires quite a bit of timing to even get a shot with a rider in it; it is amazing I even got any at all.



We also saw the World Superbike practice and Superpole event. I captured this shot of eight different riders making their way through Tooele Turn:


We also got to watch the AMA Supersport race and the first AMA Superbike race of the weekend. The superbike race featured some great racing between Aaron Yates, Neil Hodgson, and Jamie Hacking:


Mat Mladin was challenging for the lead until lap 3, when he went off the track right near us in an awesome high-speed lowside:


That left Ben Spies to take the win, which he did convincingly, thus making us a pretty happy bunch (we are all big Ben Spies fans):