To say that Cameron Beaubier is on a roll would be a gross understatement. The Monster Energy Attack Performance Yamaha won his ninth HONOS Superbike race of the season, his sixth in a row and the 47th of his career today at the Komatsu MotoAmerica Superbikes At The Ridge.
In easily winning today’s 17-lap final, Beaubier eclipsed his season best of eight wins with his ninth of the season while extending his lead in the 2020 MotoAmerica Superbike Championship to 54 points.
“Yeah, man. It was really good to be able to get nine wins in a season and be able to pass my record that was a few years ago,” Beaubier said. “That just feels really good for me. Everything’s going so good right now. Like I said yesterday, sometimes I feel like I need to get pinched. But at the same time, it’s weird to say but right now that I have the most experience in the Superbike class other than maybe Toni (Elias) or something like that. I’m just dialed in on my R1. I’ve been riding this thing for five or six years. I feel really, really good. Everyone’s working really, really hard at the Monster Attack Performance Yamaha team. It feels so good to put this up on the top of the podium multiple races throughout the year, and also having a great teammate in Jake (Gagne). Being able to go one-two today feels really good to just reward them for all their hard work. It’s just been fun so far this year. They’re slowly catching me. I’m just running for my life out there. Just hope to keep it going and really looking forward to going to New Jersey and seeing how this bike works around there. Hats off to everyone here at Ridge. They made the track a little safer with that chicane. They’re willing to change the track here and there to make it a little safer for when we come back in the future. I think it was a really fun track. So, hats off to them.”
Beaubier’s teammate Jake Gagne ended up second, a day after a front tire issue knocked him off the podium and into fourth place. Gagne’s 20 points stretches his advantage in the championship, and he sits in a solid second place, 22 points ahead of Westby Racing’s Mathew Scholtz, who finished fourth on Sunday.
“Good way to come out especially after the rough race we had yesterday,” Gagne said. “I’m happy we got off to a good start. I think Cam (Beaubier) was going to want to get a start. Like he said, if he could roll out of that chicane first, he was going to go. Luckily, I was second right behind him. I charged. I tried to keep him in sight, but he was just inching and inching and inching away in those first couple laps. I just didn’t quite have the pace for sure to run with Cam. But we made a lot of progress over the weekend. We got more and more comfortable. We learned a lot about the bike. I think we all had a good time racing here at the Ridge. It was fun to get to a new track and race with something a little bit different. Hats off to Cam. Hats off to Bobby (Fong). Bobby kept me honest that whole race long. I didn’t know who, if it was Bobby or Mat (Scholtz). I figured kind of the both of them. I was keeping an eye on my pit board and I think in the first couple laps I got a little bit of a gap and then we kind of stayed right there. He inched back in. So, he kept me honest. He didn’t make it easy on me. I’m happy to bring this Monster Energy Attack Performance Yamaha back home in second and we’ll roll on to Jersey.”
Bobby Fong matched his result from yesterday with another third-place finish, the M4 ECSTAR Suzuki rider again racing with pain in his left wrist/hand from his crash at PittRace a few weeks ago. Fong closed on Gagne in the closing stages of the race, coming up .528 of a second behind the Yamaha rider.
“Honestly it feels like a win,” Fong said. “It feels good to be on the podium again, especially after missing out the last few rounds. It was good. I think we’re going in the right direction. I think we found a baseline with our bike. Every race weekend we’ve gone to it’s like we’re throwing the kitchen sink at it, changing it up and down, and this weekend we kind of started from where we left the test when we were testing here over a month ago, and we just kind of kept chipping away at it and just baby steps, baby steps. I felt good because the main thing we’re taking from this weekend is the pace I had at the end of the race today, which was really good. I felt like for myself. We’re just going to keep that momentum going and try to catch this guy (Beaubier).”
Scholtz, meanwhile, was another 3.1 seconds behind Fong in fourth place.
Fifth place on track went to M4 ECSTAR Suzuki’s Toni Elias, but he was docked a position which in turn handed the spot to Scheibe Racing BMW’s Josh Herrin. Elias had passed Herrin on the final lap after a race-long battle between the two veterans.
Stock 1000 Championship points leader Cameron Petersen had a strong ride to seventh on his Altus Motorsports Suzuki GSX-R1000, the South African chasing down Lorenzo Zanetti for the entire race with the Italian crashing out on the final lap.
Rock and Sons Racing’s Jayson Uribe had his second straight top-10 finish in his first MotoAmerica event of the year, the Californian riding to eighth some two seconds clear of FLY Racing ADR Motorsports’ Bradley Ward. Travis Wyman Racing’s Travis Wyman salvaged a difficult weekend with a 10th-place finish on his BMW.
Superbike Race 2
- Cameron Beaubier (Yamaha)
- Jake Gagne (Yamaha)
- Bobby Fong (Suzuki)
- Mathew Scholtz (Yamaha)
- Josh Herrin (BMW)
- Toni Elias (Suzuki)
- Cameron Petersen (Suzuki)
- Jayson Uribe (Honda)
- Bradley Ward (Kawasaki)
- Travis Wyman (BMW)
