This weekend, Birmingham, Alabama hosted the Honda Superbike Classic at Barber Motorsports Park. It turned out to be a pretty hectic event, as the weather delayed three races by a couple of hours and the races themselves were shortened by five laps each. After all that, the show managed to go on --- and Mat Mladin came out on top.
Somewhat fittingly, Mladin rode the No. 7 Rockstar/Makita Yoshimura Suzuki GSX-R1000 to his seventh consecutive victory to open the season and extended his lead in the point standings as he looks for his seventh career American Superbike championship. Right now, his chances are looking pretty damn good. After seven (out of 20) rounds in the 2009 championship, Mladin leads teammate Tommy Hayden by 77 points, 220-143. The race marked Mladin's 79th career AMA Pro victory, moving him to within seven of Miguel Duhamel's record of 86 career wins.
"I've had seven in a row, and obviously nobody has had any more than seven before so we'll see if we can go to Infineon and get another one," said Mladin. "The bike worked great today, we found some stuff out this morning in the warm up. I had a completely different motorcycle this afternoon and very similar lap times to what I did this morning even with the condition of the track. It was pretty good. I'm pretty happy with the bike. We definitely made some progress this week."
Next up on AMA Pro American Superbike's race calendar is a doubleheader at the Kawasaki AMA Superbike Showdown at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif. on the weekend of May 15-17.
