Does this mean that I'm not getting passes to the Daytona 200?

dmg has ruined our sport! i miss the good ole days!

 

as I understand it (and I could be wrong, it's happened once before ), AMA is still the sanctioning body and DMG is just the promoter?

 

IIRC when David Atlas took over from Edmundson you had posted that you thought it was a good thing for the series.

It seems that despite good intentions on his part, being spread too thin and surrounded by idiots have took their toll on him personally. That is very unfortunate.

How does the DMG continue to screw this up? The France family either has to be embarrassed as hell at how American roadracing has basically been ruined by their meddling, or they are just so arrogant that they don't care.

 

I have no dog in this fight, but I haven't watched AMA racing in years. Even WSBK has fallen a little, but nothing like this. Once MotoGP moved to 4-strokes, my interest in SBK went off a cliff.

Sad to see it's still in a sorry state, and mismanagement isn't going to help.

 

and the 200 has not been the same in many years as well. sad really.

pcb

 

IMO the real 200 died when they went to 600cc bikes and it was just a support class race for the Superbikes. Their reasoning at the time was that the 1000cc bikes were too fast for the 200 mile race and eventually someone would have a catastrophic tire failure at speed on the banks and serious injuries would likely result.

I have a difficult time understanding this reasoning, as they still raced Superbikes on the same track on the same weekend, and their race was at least as long as any single stint between rear tire changes would be in the 200. Perhaps in the interest of safety and keeping the literbikes they could have mandated at least one front tire change in the race. That would be easy enough to police.

In reality the 200 has been on the downhill slide for a couple of decades. While there have been many exciting races since then, the spectacle as one of the world's great motorcycle races has certainly faded. Probably the last "great" race was 1995. At that point all of the Japanese plus Ducati and Harley had factory bikes. Plus several World Superbike riders also competed (Russell, Fogarty, Merkel, Polen, Hodgson, and Corser among them). Huge field of 750cc superbikes, and a great race. Even in earlier periods of recession (1991, for example) there were large grids and well-equipped teams.
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLfWnQV5WTw[/ame]

The way things are going I will be surprised if there even is a 2020 edition of the race.

Considering the OP is one of the few to have actually competed at the track, I will be interested in his further comments.

 

I agree with everything stated here. I wish they had kept the 750cc 4-cyl / 1000cc 2-cyl rules and tweak them if any one manufacturer became too dominant. I don't know, maybe I'm nostalgic, but the 750's were Superbikes to me, 600's Supersports, and 1000's not even on my radar.

Around 1995 was when my interest peaked, and then likely downhill from there.

Totally understand Art's point about the 1000's and tire failure with the 200, then just go back to 750's...they worked.

 

i agree with you. 1000cc bikes were formula usa only...not ama!

my last year racing at daytona was 1997...i was on a 750 superbike. it was grant lopez's ex team hammer bike i got from keith perry. those were good days!!

it is not that same...

pcb

 

So who is this old racing buddy who happens to be a lawyer, referenced in Part 2?

(You are so not getting any passes.. maybe RR could sponsor you for a couple?)

 

I keep waiting for part 5. I'm obviously not on the inside here, but it seemed to me the articles were building up to some sort of climax/ultimatum being thrown down.

The sad thing about all of this is that despite of all of the problems, there is still some very exciting racing going on. DSB was a ton of fun to watch last year, and should be highly entertaining this year with all the fresh talent. Same thing with SBK.

That said, some of the administrative things that are coming up now are simply mind blowing to me as a fan. I can't believe this kind of stuff is going on at a "professional" racing organization. I hope that we have simply hit the low point, and things start going uphill from here. Motorcycle racing is already being hindered enough by the economy, we don't need people on the inside making it worse.

 

Ironic, Graves and Yosh are the only two using the system, yet Josh Hayes doesn't even use it. Is DMG fighting this change or are Yosh and Graves complaining? Based on the articles, it appears that manufactures have some sway. I like how it was plainly obvious he was talking about Kawi's team last year.

 

Yes, that is what I meant. He has told me on a few occasions at the Yamaha Champions school that he did not use traction control at all, other than one race the season before last.

Edit: Guess I should restate that slightly, they are tuning the bike with Marvel 4 and using a ton of other functions in it, but specifically not using the TC on his bike according to him. Seems like the Marelli system would be hugely overkill though and they could cut that down a ton just by using Motec units, but I'm nowhere near an AMA crewchief and didn't sleep at a holiday in last night. Even going to the spec ECU rule that BSB is using this year would be a significant cost increase for teams that are using piggyback systems or kit ECU's currently. Is John advocating factory harness or something to make this rule workable?

 

Funniest thing ever after the race yesterday when Pascarella was saying in an interview that his homebuilt R6 had more motor than the Graves guys.