The Rockstar Makita Suzuki rider became only the fourth rider with three consecutive AMA Superbike titles when AMA Pro Racing denied to hear the appeal of teammate Mat Mladin for being disqualified from both races at Virginia International Raceway nearly three weeks ago. That decision, which is final, gives Spies an insurmountable 620-519 points lead over his teammate in advance of the season finale at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on Sept. 28.
The 24-year-old Texan found out about his third championship while in Times Square in New York, where he’s spending time prior to riding the Rizla Suzuki in next weekend’s Red Bull Indianapolis Grand Prix.
“Obviously, this isn’t the way I want to win the championship,” Spies said after joining Reg Pridmore, Fred Merkel, and Mat Mladin-twice, in winning three in a row. “I’d like to see, barring no mechanicals, with what we did last weekend, we put ourselves in a very good position to win another one. Like I said, you would think it would happen, but you never know.”
With the two wins from VIR, Spies has ten for the season and 28 for his career, four short of Miguel Duhamel, who sits second all-time with 32. But he took no comfort in the way the season had played out.
“I thinks it’s a messed up deal how this has gone on,” he said. “I think, no matter what happened with the appeal or not with the appeal, if we went to Laguna, I think I did everything I could have done and I think we did a good job this year and we deserve it. I’m happy with my team. My team worked their asses off this year and I rode as hard as I could and we overcame some difficult times during the year. And, like I said, with this whole appeal deal, it’s just one of those things that it’s just, yeah, now that we know it happened, it happened. I think without the appeal we could have done it. Not in any way sounding cocky, but I’m pretty confident that we would’ve had what it takes at Laguna to get it done.”
With the championship decided, Spies won’t have to hold back at Laguna Seca and neither will Mladin. Had Mladin’s points been restored, Spies had to finish only 19th or better if Mladin scored maximum points.
“Now, it’s going to be good,” he said. “It’s kind of a win-win for both of us, because he wants wins and I want championships. So I get the championship and then we get to go to Laguna and it’ll be a race. It won’t be me running for 19th or better. We’ll just be able to go there and put our head down and see who wins the last race.”
Mladin, who won the AMA Superbike race in support of the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix, is assured second in the championship for the third year in a row.
Now Spies is turning his attention to Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In less than a week’s time he’ll be on track for his third and final time this year. Rizla Suzuki announced today that they’d retained Chris Vermeulen and Loris Capirossi for 2009, but Spies is only thinking about his race.
“I mean, every time I ride that bike I just want to improve,” he said. “And we had a pretty good race at Laguna, not a stellar one, and if we can improve on that I think that’ll be positive. And just looking forward to it.”
Whether that helps decide his future is up in the air. With MotoGP seats dwindling, Spies isn’t saying what’s next.
“Right now we’ve got a lot of stuff going on, and I really can’t talk about it,” he said. “But we’re pretty happy with how things are going right now.”
