Pegram Not Happy With Weight Change

Paul Carruthers | February 9, 2010

Not many people may have been paying attention enough to notice that twin-cylinder motorcycles competing in the AMA American Superbike Championship in 2010 have to weigh 390 pounds while the limit on the four-cylinder Superbikes has dropped five pounds – down to 370 pounds. But Larry Pegram noticed.Pegram, who won three American Superbike Nationals last year on his Foremost Insurance-backed Ducati, was testing his 1098R at Auto Club Speedway last week and was a bit befuddled as to why AMA Pro Racing would allow his competition to shed weight.”They took five pounds off the others guys,” Pegram said. “Why? I have no idea. We won three races last year and the four-cylinders won 17. Ducati hasn’t won a race in four or five years and we win three races and we get a five-pound disadvantage. Here [at Auto Club Speedway], on Yoshimura’s radar guy, we are one of the slowest bikes. And we’re not even up to our full 390 [pounds]; we’re probably at 385.”So right now Jake Zemke’s bike [a Michael Jordan Motorsports Suzuki GSX-R1000] was four mph faster than ours yet we have to be 20 pounds heavier. Why? I have no idea. I had thought the problem had gone away – that the Japanese were strong and they would bitch and the old AMA would do whatever they wanted, but one of the Japanese manufacturers has been calling up DMG all winter complaining that my bike is too fast. So now they have taken five pounds off of them. At the beginning of the year [2009], our bike was at full spec and everybody else had new bikes. We were faster at the beginning of the year, but by the end of the year we were all even. You look at the radar speeds here and we’re at the lower end, yet they just gave us five more pounds, basically. So everybody has caught up, if not moved ahead of us – yet they just gave us five more pounds.”