MotoAmerica Thoughts

By Pete Gorski
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Updated: June 9, 2025

A decent gap, but one short-lived, Herrin over Beaubier on lap one of Sunday’s Superbike race. [Pete Gorski photo]

by Pete Gorski

Every year I say it’s too bad more people don’t come out to the MotoAmerica event at Road America. Multiple classes, (usually) big fields, and with enhanced safety systems obscuring drivers in most other forms of motorsport (not saying they shouldn’t be safe, just saying even open-cockpit cars aren’t very open; more on that later), motorcycle racing gives you an up-close and fully visible look at what it takes to hustle a bike around a race track.

Well this year everybody listened. Helped no doubt by perfect weather (Friday excluded) on the two big “S” days, fans came out in numbers never before seen. The Main Gate was, as a fellow photographer said, like somebody kicked over an ant hill, into the late morning. As you might expect for motorcycle event, the crowd was very mobile, filling up viewing areas that don’t always attract large numbers of fans. (Looking at you top-of-Carosuel-bluff down by the Bend.)

Those fans were rewarded with some close racing and some dramatic incidents that changed outcomes. But first, they had to get through the seemingly required rain that falls on almost every MotoAmerica event at Road America. Friday was warm and cloudy, and by the afternoon it was warm and cloudy and WET. Not for very long, and not too heavy (honestly if it’s going to rain it should really rain), but enough to suppress the turnout for those sessions.

But then the “S” days were as mentioned, perfect. Sunny but not hot, windy but not blow-the-canopy-over bad…

So, how was the racing? You can get the results of every session over at www.MotoAmerica.com, but here are some observations from the wall.

° Certainly influenced by the race being Wisconsin, the King of the Baggers sessions are wildly popular. The bikes are big and loud (and they photography nicely), and watching them rumble through the long fast sweepers is like watching the dancing hippos from Fantasia — they shouldn’t be that fast or graceful, but somehow they are, a testament to the riders’ skills on these heavy bikes.

° You hear the word “processional” often used to describe Formula One racing. Maybe a few chaotic passes at the front in Turn One on Lap One and then…anyway… Unfortunately the SuperBike races flirted with that term. Less so for Race One; the battle for second was decided by nine hundredths of a second — Bobby Fong over Cam Beaubier, with Josh Herrin almost three seconds ahead in first. But off the podium, fairly large gaps. Race Two had potential, although Herrin was already building a gap to then-second-place runner Beaubier as they exited Turn Five on lap one. Herrin’s off in the Bend gave the lead back to Beaubier, and the two continued to circulate closely. But Beaubier’s low-side with four laps to go on the back end of the Carousel ended his day, giving Herrin the double for the weekend. All very exciting. But the rest? The gap to second (Fong) was eight seconds. The gap to third? Seventeen more ticks. Every race can’t end with a photo finish, we get it. But for the top class, the finishes were a little underwhelming.

° That said, Supersport kinda did produce the finishes you want. Twenty-eight bikes meant somebody was always in contact with somebody else. At the end of eleven laps in Race One, just over four seconds covered the top four positions, with 1.4sec covering the podium. Race Two was almost impossibly close at the line, with the top five riders separated by .734 seconds. And not just the front. Check out the results from Race Two — http://www.motoamericaregistration.com/Results/2025/RDAMER/25_7_RDAMER_SSP_R2_res.pdf — close finishes all through the field.

° Back to the visibility of the riders. In almost every modern form of car racing, the drivers are inside or underneath a halo or aero screen. So it’s enjoyable to see both how much the riders are doing on their bikes, but also to see a certain amount of personality on display that is absent in other forms of racing, usually in the form of logos and branding on riders’ leathers.

° The climax of the weekend was the second King of the Baggers race. You have to wonder if Tyler Herfoss is a hockey fan, because the hip check he laid on Bradley Smith in Turn 14 was, depending on your perspective, a racing incident (Smith did leave the door open) or some NHL-level clearing-the-way. Standing close to the Harley-Davidson hospitality area, the gasps were probably audible back in Milwaukee as Herfoss’ Indian survived the contact while Smith tumbled through the grass, his H-D bouncing along beside him.

Pete Gorski

I’ve been a race fan from the first time my Dad put a slot-car controller in my hand. That was back in the 1970s, and in the intervening years, I’ve spent hours watching racing, photographing racing, and for the past seven years, writing about racing. My work has appeared in Victory Lane magazine and SpeedTour Quarterly, along with the Visors Down Motorsports Photography Facebook page.

www.gorskiphotoservices.com

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