Bike racers fire it up to open new season

Larry Tate

The 2007 motorcycle racing season started off in February with the World Superbike opener in Qatar, but for North Americans, the real opener was last week, as Daytona's annual Speed Week saw eight days of racing, capped off with the famous Daytona 200.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world back in Qatar, the Moto GP teams also had their first outing, so it was a busy weekend indeed on the track.

DAYTONA

The Daytona race week started the North American season off with a huge bang for the Kawasaki factory, as the Attack Kawasaki satellite team took first and second in the 200, veterans Steve Rapp and Ben Attard doing the honours, and the U.S. factory Monster-sponsored team took first and second with Jamie Hacking and Roger Lee Hayden in the all-important (for sales) Supersport 600 event.

To cap it off, James Stewart won the Supercross for Kawasaki ahead of Suzuki's Ricky Carmichael and Yamaha's Chad Reed.

Kawasaki's bang was weakly echoed by the soft "pop" of a wet firecracker for Honda, when all four official entries – two for the factory team, two for the satellite Erion team – all either ran out of gas or had fuel pump failures on the same lap! Three of the four bikes, including that of Canadian star Miguel Duhamel, coasted to a stop the lap before they were due in for their first of two planned fuel stops.

Defending series champion Josh Hayes was fortunate enough to be the first into the pits for his stop, and his bike quit on pit lane. He managed to coast into his spot and to continue, albeit with an extra stop later in the race for safety. His eventual sixth-place finish at least gathered some points for him to take with him in his defence of the Formula Extreme title he won last year for the Erion squad.

Top-placed Canadian was multiple Canadian Superbike and Sportbike champion Pascal Picotte in his first race after switching to Suzuki from Yamaha for this season. Picotte qualified his Blackfoot/Picotte Racing GSX-R600 16th and finished an excellent seventh.

With Kawasaki up and Honda down, Suzuki also managed a good week overall, with young Texan Ben Spies winning both the premier Superbike and Superstock classes. His first national title was in 2006, and he looked very much in control of the first race of the season in both classes.

MOTO ST

Moto ST is a brand-new series, featuring several-hour endurance races for bikes restricted to two cylinders. The second race of the new series ran the Sunday before the 200, and featured a large grid.

The San Jose team of Brian Parriott and Nate Kern (who won the first race in the series last October) led 50 of the 65 laps before a sudden engine failure ended their string. The win then went to Aprilia, with Italian riders Federico Aliverti and Giancarlo De Matteis taking an unexpected win.

Canadians did well once again. Top Canuck finishers were regular SV Cup competitors Ross Millson and Paul Glenn on their SV650, finishing third in class and 13th overall.

Also worthy of note was the Canadian Free Flow racing entry of Ken McAdam and George Osmond on a Suzuki SV1000, 27th overall and third in the big-bore class. The bike was built in McAdam's home garage from a wreck picked up on eBay, it had never run before the weekend, and neither rider had ever been to Daytona before – an impressive first-time result for the team, with more sure to come.

In the many sprint races the weekend of the Moto ST race, we've got to mention one Canadian: Nadine Lajoie, a regular competitor in the Women's Cup and RACE Amateur 600 series at Shannonville.

She took an excellent third of 37 in the "Middleweight Superbike" (600) race, ninth in the GTU race, and 12th (and top 600) in the Unlimited Superbike. More on Nadine at http://www.nadineracing.com.

MOTO GP

The 2007 Moto GP opened its season in a spectacular way at the Losail circuit in Qatar, with 21-year-old Australian Casey Stoner taking his first premier class win. It was also his first race on a Ducati and his first on Bridgestone tires.

It gets even better, as for the entire 22 laps he was hounded by seven-time world champion Valentino Rossi on his Yamaha (complete with new Fiat car sponsorship), but never missed a beat.

Speeds clocked in practice had the Ducatis at 321 km/h, the Yamahas at 299 – that's a hard one to make up. Rossi squeaked past a couple of times but only for a corner or two, and Stoner led at the line every single lap.

Third went to the factory Repsol Honda Spanish rider Dani Pedrosa, who managed to hold off Suzuki's Anglo-American star John Hopkins for the last podium. Hopkins' ride was probably the most impressive of the day, as he's still got a badly damaged right wrist from a pre-season practice crash (coincidentally, at the same track) less than a month ago.

So the top four were Ducati, Yamaha, Honda and Suzuki. No Kawasakis? They were confident going in, but in the event, Randy de Puniet crashed and Olivier Jacque only managed a 12th. At that, he was one spot ahead of the Team Roberts KR212V, a bitter disappointment for a team that was podium-fast at the end of 2006.

Also disappointed was 2006 champion Nicky Hayden on the second Repsol Honda. Hayden was only able to card an eighth, and will have to dig deeper to come to grips with the new 800 cc machines if he hopes to defend his title.

WORLD SUPERBIKE

There have been two WSB events, with three winners of the four races. The first round – at Qatar, same track as the Moto GP crowd used for their first event – went to James Toseland on his Hannspree Ten Kate Honda, while the other race went to bad boy and multiple world champion Max Biaggi, who's so hard to get along with nobody in Moto GP wants him any more in spite of his amazing talent.

The second round a week later in Australia had defending champion Troy Bayliss trade wins with Toseland. Close behind was Biaggi, and the Yamaha team of Nitro Noriyuki Haga and Troy Corser (who lost his Alstare Suzuki ride to Biaggi) are right there as well.

As usual, it seems likely that the WSB series is going to provide the best racing of the year.

wheels@thestar.ca;

larryt@primus.ca

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