Reigning world champion Richard Gadson endured a wet and wild weekend aboard his RevZilla/Motul/Vance & Hines Suzuki Gen 3 Hayabusa, battling challenging weather and starting line drama to maintain a slim lead in the Pro Stock Motorcycle standings after the opening round of the NHRA Countdown to the Championship playoffs at the Dodge NHRA Great Lakes Nationals at US 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, MI, on Monday.
The promise of cool air and a sticky track surface set high expectations for the action at US 131 Motorsports Park, which made its debut on the NHRA national event circuit this weekend.
Although enthusiasm was somewhat dampened by rain showers that delayed Saturday’s qualifying rounds until late in the afternoon and later forced eliminations to be postponed until Monday, the event was also marked by questions about the track’s timing system that contributed to a race filled with upsets that roiled the standings in many of the pro classes, including Pro Stock Motorcycle.
Richard Gadson arrived in Martin as the top seed in the six-race Countdown to the Championship playoffs, hoping to build on the consistency that earned him the Pro Stock Motorcycle regular-season championship, which he clinched at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis two weeks ago.
Gadson opened his playoffs campaign by qualifying fourth with a 6.818-second/197.86 mph run on Saturday, then defeated Mark Paquette (7.228 seconds/151.67 mph) with a 6.790-second/199.03 mph run in the first round of eliminations on Monday.
However, Gadson’s ambitions encountered a setback in the second round, when despite making a quicker 6.744-second/199.65 mph pass, he came up short against Marc Ingwersen (6.816 seconds/196.51 mph) after both riders simultaneously fouled on the starting line.
Under the NHRA’s “first-or-worst” rule, when two riders both commit a starting line foul, the rider who leaves earliest loses the round, resulting in Gadson’s -0.019-second foul losing to Ingwersen’s -0.018 foul by a difference of just .001-second.
“It was a rough weekend on the starting line. I haven’t red-lighted in competition in over two seasons. There’s a different timing system here with an extremely short rollout [the distance between the staging beam and the starting line] and it decided a lot of racing today across all of the classes. I’ve made hundreds of runs being aggressive, trying to cut the best light I can, but I have made zero runs trying to slow myself down until this weekend. We also didn’t have the normal LED lights on the tree, which caused some racers problems this weekend,” Gadson said. “But that’s part of racing and instead of complaining, it adds something to the list of things I need to learn to adjust for, because we’re going to face the same thing next weekend at Rockingham.”
On the positive side, upset losses for Matt and Angie Smith, his two closest competitors in the championship standings, helped keep Gadson in the points lead after the first round of the Countdown, albeit by a slimmer margin that he might have hoped for. Eventual race winner John Hall, who also survived a double-foul in the semi-finals, jumped up four spots to second in the standings, and now sits just one point behind Gadson.
“Kind of a crazy way to start the Countdown and while it could have been an opportunity for me to really capitalize in the points because the top four all went out early, at the same time I didn’t really lose anything. I’m still the points leader after going out in the second round, which if anyone had told me that before the race, I would have said ‘no way.’ So, it’s all good,” Gadson said. “We get to try again in another few days and I’ll be looking forward to doing better than today.”
Gaige Herrera qualified fifth on Saturday with a 6.760-second/200.00 mph run, his second lowest starting position of the season.
Bad luck then struck the two-time champion in round one, when a rare engine failure caused his Hayabusa to slow at the top end of the track to a 7.152-second/147.16 mph run against Marc Ingwersen (6.997 seconds/192.55 mph).
The wave of upset losses by racers in the top half of the standings helped limit the damage to Herrera’s Countdown position. Despite dropping three spots to sixth, Herrera is only 51 points behind Gadson, with ample opportunities to close the gap over the next five races.
“I was on a good run in that round, but we had a failure just past the eighth-mile marker. That’s part of racing and something we can’t always control,” Herrera said. “It’s only the first race of the Countdown, and with a lot of people going out early today, the top half of the class is bunched up tight. I think it’s going to be that way until the end and it’s going to make the championship more interesting for sure. We’ll try to keep our heads high and head to Rockingham in a few days to redeem ourselves. It’s a fast track and I’m looking forward to it.”
Between the unpredictability of the weather and the timing system, RevZilla/Motul/Vance & Hines Suzuki crew chief Andrew Hines said this race was a far from a typical way to open the Countdown.
“It was a very strange one. The weather threw everyone for a loop. We started out thinking we’d only get the two qualifying runs on Friday and be able to race on Sunday and then ended up getting all four done by Saturday and racing on Monday,” Hines said. “It’s too bad the mechanical problem we had with Gaige’s engine didn’t happen at a more opportune time when it wouldn’t have affected his race, but we’ve had mechanicals early in the Countdown in past years and still managed to bounce back. With so many other top racers in the class also going out early, it’s almost like no harm, no foul. It could have been a more disastrous outcome than it turned out to be.”
Addressing questions about the track timing system, Hines said, “The new timing system they were using this weekend didn’t have the roll out set up properly for the pro classes. They have the same timing system at Rockingham, so we’re hoping NHRA is going to make some changes to adjust for it, because there were too many races this weekend decided arbitrarily by a timing system giving weird reaction times.”
“Gaige and Richard have both raced at Rockingham many times in other classes, so it won’t be unfamiliar for them, but it’s another new surface for the Pro Stock Motorcycle tuners to figure out,” Hines said. “It’s just a quarter mile and we have confidence we’ll figure it out.”
With five races remaining in the Countdown to the Championship, Gadson tops the standings with 2,170 points, followed by Herrera in sixth with 2,119 points.
The RevZilla/Motul/Vance & Hines team returns to action September 25-27 for round two of the Countdown to the Championship at the NHRA Nationals at The Rock at Rockingham Dragway in Rockingham, NC.
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