JNCC Blog: Day 3--Practice!

Posted by Jason Hooper on Saturday, November 01, 2008

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The Sugo MX track

 

This morning after a buffet breakfast at the hotel we loaded up into a rental car and Masami Hoshino's (JNCC promoter) Subarau Outback and headed for the Sugo race facility. It was supposed to be a 20-minute drive but ended up taking the good part of an hour as we got lost on more than one occasion. The Sugo Motorsports complex has a superbike track, motocross track, trials sections and in general is just a pretty bitchin' place to go spend a beautiful October day in Japan.

When we finally arrived at the track Nate and Thad got to check out their race bikes for the weekend. Kanney would be riding Kurt Caselli's KTM 300XC from the 2008 ISDE in Greece and Thad would be riding a Yamaha YZ250F supplied to him by Yamaha of Japan. The riders would be able to practice today on the motocross track, but not that woods or endurocross sections, so we took a quick walk on the MX track and then Thad and Nate went and geared up.

Thad's bike is bone-stock, so it was pretty impressive to see him on only the 2nd lap jump every jump on the track and really start to put down some fast laps. Put it this way, the JNCC photographer said it very simply, "Thad very fast. Look like Andrew Short!" who had been here last week practicing with Sebastien Pourcel. Definitely a bit of an exaggeration, but Thad was definitely hauling and was without a doubt the fastest rider on the track all day.

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Kanney, who I would've thought would have the least bike set-up problems being provided with a factory KTM and an entire support truck was troubled with jetting problems all day. He was able to put in some hot laps but for the most part spent the day trying to work the bugs out of the bike.

As weird as it seems, I think Thad was better off getting a dead stock bike to ride. He knew coming in that it wouldn't be anything like his race bike and his frame of mind for riding it was better--just make due with what you got. Kanney on the other hand was given a race bike that was oh-so-close to what he races throughout the year and is not struggling to get it dialed-in the way he likes. Regardless, I see Thad and Nate out front tomorrow battling for the win and the 100,000 Yen pay day!

KTM, Gas Gas, and BMW are all here today giving demo rides of their 2009 off-road offerings. The Sugo MX track looked so good that I borrowed some of Thad's gear and did a couple of laps on the KTM and BMWs. I still have arm pump as I type this but it was worth it to get a little bit of riding in! Also, if there are any Yamaha execs reading this, it was NOT Thad DuVall riding a BMW and KTM. I did my best to explain that to all the journalists here but they kept asking me if the bikes were better than my Yamaha! I told them "No, Yamaha is always the best!" even though it's been a few years since I've thrown a leg over one.

Okay, I'm gonna pry myself away from the computer here in the press box and go see what the rest of the American crew is up to. Thanks for reading!

 

 

Posted by Jason Hooper on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 1:32 am

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