Throwback Thursday: Aaron Yates Shows Off Early AMA Superbike Elbow Dragging
Larry Lawrence | November 7, 2019
Throwback Thursday: Aaron Yates Shows Off Early AMA Superbike Elbow Dragging
In this week’s Throwback we travel back not all that long ago – 15 years to be exact, to the AMA Superbike race at Mid-Ohio in 2004. We think of elbow dragging to be a fairly recent phenomenon, but as this photo of Yoshimura Suzuki’s Aaron Yates proves, elbow dragging was taking place in AMA Superbike in the mid-2000s. Granted, Yates was getting somewhat of an assist due to the raised corner curbing, but the Georgian still had his Suzuki GSX-R1000 leaning at a steep angle to get this kind of shot. Elbow dragging in road racing actually goes back to French GP racer Jean-Philippe Ruggia, who regularly dragged his elbows in the late 1980s. Marc Marquez popularized the technique with the amazing cornering capabilities of modern MotoGP machines and now elbow sliders are becoming standard issue on road racing leathers, much as knee pucks did in the mid-1980s. But in between Ruggia and Marquez there were quite a few elbow draggers in the sport, including Yates.
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