Ick's Corner

Well I have to say, I’m still on the fence about last nights race. When they were racing it was good but the way the cautions were handled and the rolling start was borderline  BLECH. I’m also trying to figure out the disparity in the rules. Why was Buell/Harley allowed to campaign a bike whose displacement almost doubled that of the competition? I guess it’s really not that hard to figure out but if the engine configurations are the same, the same rules should apply for all manufacturers.  Instead of dumbing down the series to fit Buell, maybe Buell should hire some real engineers and produce a bike that can compete.

The start of the race, for a lack of a better word, SUCKED. This is the first rolling start of a motorcycle race in history, I think. They do use rolling RESTARTS but not at the intitial green flag. Bikes have traditionally started from a dead stop. This was a total NASCARification of this series. I will note that the Superbike and Supersport series still use the traditional method of starting.

Back to the race…… In the beginning, it was a 3 man show. Ben Bostrom and Josh Hayes on the Yamahas and Danny Eslick aboard the Buell. Now in my previous post, I gave the Buell until lap 14 before the imminent explosion. I was wrong…. It was something like 10 laps but surprisingly it wasn’t the engine, it was the bike itself. The fairings on Eslicks bike literally fell of the thing almost taking the radiator with it. Many of you may be scratching your head saying “Radiator???? On a Harley?????? C’mon!!!” I shat you not. The Buells have entered the 20th Century with a liquid cooled engine. This little fairing problem sent Elsick backwards but he ended up with a respectable 13th place finish considering the extended pit stop. The top finish for the Wisconsin based maunfacterer was Shawn Higbees 5th place.

During the coarse of the race we saw 2 or 3 full coarse cautions which seemingly sent the race officials into a panic. At one point they sent the race leader, Ben Bostrom, past the pace car throwing everybody into a dither. The error caused another 2 laps of paced action to allow for the entire field to pass the car and catch up to Bostrom. This was necessary because the bikes don’t use radios and sending the whole field was a better option than red flagging the race to reset.

The race ended up in a 5 lap sprint to the end after all of the cautions with Ben Bostrom taking the top of the podium and the usually consistent Josh Hayes crashing out of the 2nd spot with 2 laps to go handing the last 2 rostrum spots to Josh Herrin and Jason DeSlavo respectively.

Here’s the top 15:

A bright spot of the race. This was the first time a husband and wife competed in the same Daytona 200. Josh Hayes’ wife, Melissa Paris, finished 21st in her first professional race of her career. Well ahead of her husband who crashed out on the penultimate lap. Sorry guys….. No sexy pictures of Melissa…… Yet.