KurveyGirl.com brings you the results of this weekend’s events.
Hayden Gillim made the most of his debut on the Indian factory King of The Baggers team, winning the two-lap, $5,000 dash for cash Challenge race on Friday morning and then running away from the field by more than a second a lap in the first King of The Baggers race of the weekend. “I didn’t look back. I was just going,” Gillim said. It was the first win with the Indian Challenger for Vance & Hines, which took over the Indian program during the Winter, and with former class Champion Troy Herfoss in second, it was a 1-2 for the Vance & Hines squad. It was also Gillim’s first win at Daytona, and after 16 years of racing at the Speedway, Gillim was having trouble processing his emotions. “It doesn’t feel like my normal race day. It feels like an odd day. Right now, I’m just pumped,” Gillim said in the post-race news conference. “Now we have to go back and find out why (the bike) felt so good.” Third-place finisher and defending class Champion Kyle Wyman said the factory Harley-Davidson team had been chasing a new setup to adapt to a new Dunlop front slick that was far different than what he had used in the past. “It even feels different in the pits,” Wyman said.
Defending Mission Super Hooligan National Champion James Rispoli timed a last-lap draft move perfectly and started his title defense with a win on Friday. It was a dream result for the Saddlemen Race Development team. The team’s three Harley-Davidson Pan America riders took the top three spots, and Travis Wyman on the team’s FXR finished fourth.
3DO M4 ECSTAR Suzuki’s Tyler Scott was quick all day, just 0.002 seconds behind PJ Jacobsen in the first Supersport practice session on Friday and then fastest each time out after that.
Former Moto3, Moto2 and MotoGP racer Darryn Binder put his Celtic/Economy Lube + Tire/Warhorse Ducati Panigale V2 on the second row of the grid in his first outing on a production-based racebike in years. Binder last raced a production-based motorcycle, a GSX-R600, in 2013 in South Africa, although he had used one for training during his Grand Prix career.
Twins Cup races at Daytona last year were drafting battles that went down to the last lap, but on Friday, Robem Engineering’s Hank Vossberg pulled away from the field and won by 4.446 seconds.
BMW brought out the trio of machines it fielded in 1976 at Daytona in the first-ever AMA Superbike race and put them onto the racetrack for demo laps. Here Nate Kern rides out of the pits on the bike that Reg Pridmore took to second place in the race behind Steve McLaughlin. Photo by Michael Gougis.
