Josh Herrin has won championships before, three of them in fact, including an AMA Superbike Championship in 2013. But this one hit different. For the first time in a professional career that dates back to 2004, Herrin ended the 2024 season truly feeling that he was “the man.” And rightfully so.
When Herrin won the Superbike crown in 2013, he didn’t feel like the best rider in the series. He was young, still learning the ropes of Superbike racing, and the title sort of fell into his lap. Despite winning four races and doing everything he needed to do to be champion, it just didn’t feel the way that it should have. At that point in time, most would say that another Josh was still the man. The one with the surname of Hayes.
“I never want to come across in the wrong way when I say those things, but it’s reality,” Herrin said of feeling as though he finally is “the man.” “There just finally came a point in my career – it’s been a lot longer than I thought it would take, but when it’s your time, it’s your time. I think, right now, all of the stars are aligning for me. I have the perfect team. I have the perfect bike. I’ve got the perfect family for me. Everything is great. I’m just riding that wave. I think that’s what it takes. Everything has just got to align. You’ve got to have the right people around you. It’s got to be the right time in your life.
“I really think now is my time. I use (Josh) Hayes as an example a lot. He didn’t win his first Superbike race until he was 35 years old, and I’m 34 right now. So, I use him in my brain a lot to tell me, ‘You have so much more experience than him. You’ve been racing a bike your entire life. That’s all you know how to do. You’re now getting to that point where he was in his prime. With all that experience, you should be able to do what he did.’ It just took me a lot longer. I’ve had a lot of great people around me in my career, but it’s taken a long time for me to have that full circle of all the correct people. I think that’s really what’s making the difference right now. I do feel like I’m finally the one in the Superbike class. I’ve felt like that in the 600 class before, but on the Superbike… I’ve always doubted myself. This year and last year, I’ve proved myself. ‘You can do this. You’re not a 600 guy. You are a Superbike guy. You have the possibility of being one of the greats in the sport.’ I want to take advantage of that.”
It also didn’t help Herrin that he was shipped off to the Moto2 World Championship after winning the Superbike title in 2013. He had a disastrous season that had him returning home with his tail between his legs. The MotoAmerica Championship, however, proved to be a lifeline for Herrin as he finished second in the 2015 Supersport Championship prior to winning the Superstock 1000 title a year later. Herrin’s second MotoAmerica title came in the 2022 Supersport Championship with a masterful, nine-win, 16-podium season for his current team – Warhorse HSBK Racing Ducati. In 2023, Herrin finished second in the Superbike title chase with two wins and a total of 12 podiums on the team’s Panigale V4 R. The man at that point was Jake Gagne, who won his third straight Superbike crown by a margin of 128 points over Herrin.
But that was then, and this is now.
Herrin is at ease with himself as 2024 comes to a close, and rightfully so after a six-win, 13-podium season earned him his second Superbike crown by 55 points over four-time Superbike Champion Cameron Beaubier in one of the most competitive seasons in AMA Superbike history. Competitive? Seven different riders won Superbike races in 2024. But none of them put the season together like Herrin did.
“If I had to just pinpoint one thing that’s turned things around for me, it would be hard,” Herrin said. “I’d say it would be two things, for sure. It’s the full circle of everybody around me just being perfect now. There is not one person on the team that, when I walk into the box, I don’t feel comfortable with. I’ve had that a lot of times in my career where there’s just that one person…. I’m a very big energy person, so when I walk into a room, if someone is bringing down the energy, it affects me. So, when I’m going to do my job and I’m going to have to push my limits as hard as I can, I need the room to be filled with good energy. So, that’s super important. This year, everyone was cool. I wanted to go hang out with everyone. We were cooking dinners together. We were going out to dinner together. There was just so much good chemistry going on with the whole team. Rachel (his wife) is a part of the team. It feels like Griffin (his young son) is a part of the team when he’s there. That was perfect, but also having a second year on the same bike with the same team in the same class, I haven’t had that since I was with Yamaha in 2013. So that was huge. I would say that besides the full circle with the crew and the family and everything, I think that was the most important part this year and will be again next year. “
The season didn’t begin with Herrin instilling fear into his rivals. Six races into the season, a third-place finish in race two at Barber was his best finish and he trailed Beaubier by 41 points.
“From Road America on, if it didn’t rain, I was on the podium,” Herrin said. “I guess now that I’m talking about it, looking back at it, I think that if somebody wasn’t taking me seriously then they were ignorant. But now that I think about it like that… with Yosh (Yoshimura Suzuki), I got the two wins but other than those two wins, I wasn’t always there. Then we had the Scheibe (Racing) year, which, obviously, we were only on the podium once. Then the Attack (Performance) year wasn’t good at all. I think I had a couple podiums. So, I think most people were doubting me going into ’23, and then we proved a lot of those people wrong. The start to ’24 didn’t probably seem like what it should have. But I think that run-off from Bobby (Fong) at Road Atlanta and the rain at Barber, it was just a bad start to the season for us. So, maybe they just were like, something’s up. I think as soon as Barber was over, everybody knew it was a different story.”
After a disappointing ninth-place finish in race one at Road America, things changed for Herrin. He won race two in Elkhart Lake before finishing second to Bobby Fong in both races at Brainerd International Raceway. Herrin was one of many who made a wrong tire choice in a wet race one at Ridge Motorsports Park and he struggled to earn five measly points, but he bounced back with a win in race two.
Then came WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca with Cameron Beaubier starting to get on a roll after returning from the heel injury he suffered at Road America. Beaubier beat Herrin in race one and was starting to get back to his dominant self, but Herrin shut that down in race two, beating Beaubier in a straight fight.
I needed to go to Laguna, and I needed to beat Beaubier, no matter what else I needed to do. I needed to win. If I could beat him at Laguna, I could beat him anywhere. That was kind of the mentality that I had going into it.”
Josh Herrin
“I knew, at least for the championship, that I needed to go to Laguna, and I needed to beat Beaubier, no matter what else I needed to do,” Herrin said. “I needed to win. If I could beat him at Laguna, I could beat him anywhere. That was kind of the mentality that I had going into it.”
Herrin had a World Champion in the form of John Kocinski in his corner at Laguna Seca and he found out that listening to the 1990 250cc World Champion and 1997 Superbike World Champion was a good idea.
“I think we got second in the Saturday race, and I was like, ‘Sh#%, man. I’ve just got to fix things.’ Kocinski talked to me Sunday morning, and he said the same thing to me and (Loris) Baz. He was like, ‘You’ve got to go out and you’ve got to put the pressure down on Sunday morning. I want to see 10 laps like you’re in a race. You have the ability to do 10 laps in the warmup. I want to see all 10 laps at race pace and within a half second of each other. I don’t want to see any off laps.’ I said, ‘Man, I can’t do that. There’s no way. I’m exhausted from yesterday. We got a race today. The conditions are sh%@ this morning. There’s mist everywhere. I got used tires. I don’t even have a new set of tires. It’s just not going to happen.’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to get hurt trying to push it in warmup. It’s not worth it.’ He’s like, ‘Man, just go do it.’ He basically just said quit being a pussy and go do it. I went out on used tires with 10 laps already on them, heat cycled, hard as a rock, whatever. And I did it. I went out there and I was going faster than I did in the race the day before and just kept getting faster and faster and faster. My shield was just full of water during the whole session because there was so much mist. I came in and I was P1 in that session and just did every lap, just one after another. I felt so confident that day. That was the day that I really started to listen to Kocinski.”
Turns out it was just what the doctor ordered.
“That day I was like; ‘this is what I needed.’ I needed a guy like this that has experienced higher levels than me that really is as hungry as me. We’d come in from a race, and at Laguna that day, he said, ‘I feel more excited for this win for you than I remember feeling in my career.’ That morning warmup changed things for me that day. I went into that race with so much confidence.
“I did my normal race. I wasn’t blocking, but I was just racing. I got a lot of heat for it at the end of the race. ‘He was blocking,’ and this and that. But the best person I heard say anything about that race was (Jason) Pridmore. He just said, ‘That was a championship race.’ Most of the time, Pridmore is right when he talks about anything that I’m thinking about. He said, ‘That was what Josh needed to do to make himself believe that he could win this championship.’ He was right.”
Suddenly, everyone was taking Herrin seriously. Very seriously.
The win at Laguna was his third of the year and race one of a three-race win streak with the 34-year-old winning both races at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. At that point, he was on his way to the title. He closed out his season with three more podiums, including a win in race one at the season finale in New Jersey. For race two, he was able to cruise to sixth place, with his friend and teammate Baz taking the first win of his MotoAmerica career. And the title was Herrin’s. There was also little argument about who was the man.
“I went out from there, and I pretty much just dominated the rest of the season,” Herrin said. “I’ve never felt like that in my career. I just needed to know that I could do those things that I thought I could do, but I just always doubted myself. I look at (Cameron) Beaubier as one of the greats in history for AMA Superbike in MotoAmerica. The guys that I think of are (Mat) Mladin, (Josh) Hayes, Beaubier, and (Jake) Gagne. Those are the guys who dominated. I’ve had a good run and won a lot of races, but I’ve never dominated like them. It takes a lot. When you know you’re going up against somebody like Beaubier or Hayes, and they’re just riding that wave of confidence. It takes a lot to try to pull them down. But you see it in fighting all the time. When somebody finally knocks that guy out, then it’s the next guy’s turn. I feel like that’s what I proved to myself after Laguna.”
Although the 2024 season has been a high, Herrin knows what the lows are like. Through it all, though, he never quit.
“The only two times in my life that I really felt like that (throwing in the towel) were in Moto2 and probably on the Attack team in ’21. Those were the only two times where I was really like, ‘Man, this might be it.’ I just was doubting myself so much and just did not understand how something that I’ve been doing my whole life, I could be that bad in. Especially in ’21 because I had done so well on that bike two years before. I was overconfident going into it. Even in those times where I’m like doubting myself, I was still going to keep racing. There’s no quitting in me ever. You’ve seen me destroy a bike. I’m still going to try to go and ride it. I don’t quit. This is what I do. I’m not picking it up and dropping it. This is my opportunity in life to make a good future for my son. This is where I want to be. I want to be at the racetrack, whether I’m helping people in 20 years or own a business or a team or something, managing riders. I always want to be here. So, I’m never going to quit. But those were the toughest years, for sure.”
This off-season, Herrin has taken up golf to the point of addiction. It’s all training and golf. Heavy emphasis on golf, a sport that requires you to control your emotions. There have been times in Herrin’s career when he’s pushed the panic button when something’s gone wrong – making things worse. Golf, he says, helps with those sort of things.
“Yeah, a hundred percent,” Herrin said. “(Cameron) Beaubier has always been really good at that, controlling his emotions on the track and just settling in. Like, ‘I’ll get him back in the next lap or the next couple laps. Just be calm.’ I think there’s a couple reasons why I’m so into the golf right now. The first is because I wasn’t good at it. I never have been. I liked playing it, but I never took it seriously until this year, until a few months ago. I wanted to prove to my wife, to my son, that I could get better at something. I would say there’s three big things. That would be one. The second thing would be that it does 100 percent keep you calm. You have to go up to the tee box, in front of strangers or guys that were backed up on the course. There are guys watching now. You just feel that pressure. So, to perform under the pressure – and when I say the pressure, I think most people would think just the pressure of racing in general like with the teams or sponsors or fans, stuff like that. But I more so mean just the pressure on yourself. You know you can hit a good start. I know I can go do a good lap time. But you make those little mistakes. The third reason would be that I’ve always had racing. I’ve been at the racetrack since I was born. I’ve been racing motorcycles since I was six. I’ve been racing motorcycles professionally now for 20 years. So, I’ve always had that. I’ve never had to really work at it. It’s always come pretty naturally. Being now at the level that I’m at… that took that extra bit of work that I never realized I needed to put in.”
