At some point during the 1990s, some team manager, coach, trainer, agent or mechanic told his rider “don’t give any of your secrets to the competition.” I would love to know who that person was, because whoever started it all is now the trend-setter who has pulled the fun and the analysis out of interviews with the riders. Nowadays, no rider will tell any reporters anything with any meat in it, for fear their competitors might read it, learn from it and use it against them.
But those shackles no longer held Ricky Carmichael down. RC was racing part-time now, and he seemed more intent on showing the world he could develop a race vehicle (which would become key in his new sport, stock car racing) than holding secrets from his competition. After his loss to Stewart a week earlier in Anaheim, Calif., Carmichael commented on Stewart’s cornering skills, and how his Suzuki wasn’t turning as well as Stewart’s KX450F. For the second round in Phoenix, Carmichael said they pulled in the rake on his bike, which essentially means the forks run at a steeper angle, which pulls the front wheel close to the bike, putting more weight on the wheel for more traction and better turning.
Yes, Carmichael admitted he did this. This is the same rider who one year earlier spoke about “training to peak” for Anaheim instead of the opening series rounds in Canada, but when he was asked what “training to peak” means, he responded with “I don’t know.”
He does know, because when he changed the chassis on his bike between Anaheim and Phoenix, it made a huge difference. Carmichael went faster than Stewart in Phoenix practice, a huge change from being a second slower than Stewart in Anaheim practice. Now it was Stewart’s turn to change bike set up, as his team came in with the same settings that worked in Anaheim. He found they didn’t work so well on the high-speed Phoenix track.
All night long Phoenix looked like Carmichael’s race to win. He had come out on top here so many times before, including huge wins in 2005 and 2006, and he had Stewart covered on lap times. And everyone else was already out of the running. Chad Reed was still less than 100 percent after his injuries practicing before Anaheim. Yamaha’s Grant Langston was out with a freshly-broke collarbone, and the entire Team Honda semi was empty, with both Davi Millsaps and Andrew Short out injured.
The Lites class witnessed a bit of an upset, when French kid Christophe Pourcel took his first supercross win in just his second supercross race. Favorite Ryan Villopoto crashed in his heat race, saddling him with a bad gate pick, saddling him with a bad start, saddling him with no chance of stopping his new French rival. Pourcel rode tall in the saddle all night, cruising to an easy win. Afterward, Pourcel spoke in English for his TV interview, but required the use of celebrity French interpreter Sebastian Tortelli to get through the press conference [perhaps my English is not as clear as Erin Bates’ Canadian].
Then the gate dropped in the 450 main, and Carmichael put his redesigned chassis to work. Unfortunately for him, so did Stewart. After struggling in practice and in his heat, Stew’s crew elected not to make huge changes to the bike, since the risk of guessing wrong loomed a little too large. “Nothing really changed from the heat race to the main event,” said Stewart. “I went back and looked at the video and adjusted my lines. Some of the key lines were right before the whoops, and it worked to my advantage.”
The start worked to Stewart’s advantage, first when he grabbed the Progressive Direct Holeshot Award in the main, while Carmichael wheelied off the gate and started way back. But on lap three, MDK/Xyience Honda’s David Vuillemin crashed hard in the same rhythm section that had claimed Villopoto, and he was left in such a precarious position that the AMA was forced to red flag the race and start it all over again. On the second start, Jeff Dement grabbed the holeshot, but Carmichael and Stewart shot past him and started opening up a lead.
The dynamic duo was about to go at it again.
While the lap times from earlier in the evening would indicate that Carmichael could just check out on Stewart, he couldn’t. Stewart’s new line heading into the whoops saved the day for him, as Carmichael was clearly faster around every section of the track except that one. But it made all the difference, as Stewart shadowed RC all night, and then passed him through the whoops on lap 8.
“He just came down the inside of the whoops, where I figured he was going to get me,” said Carmichael. “He made a nice clean pass. We fought and fought. We made improvements from last week, but it just wasn’t good enough. He was really chewing me up in the second set of whoops. And when he got that, he was taking that turn real tight, and after that it would set him up for the turn past the mechanics area. It seemed like he would put a quarter of a second on me right there.”
Carmichael would make up that time for the rest of the lap, which kept him right on Stewart’s fender on the final few laps. The battle was on, and the Phoenix fans were going nuts. Then on the last lap, Carmichael found an unintended life line in Ivan Tedesco, his teammate. Tedesco, who has no love for Stewart after their run-in during practice in Toronto, was about to get lapped in the very same corner where Stewart passed Carmichael. He swerved and nearly hit Stewart, but the Kawasaki rider slid past him and headed for the checkered flag. In another thriller, Stewart had won his second straight supercross race.
After the event, he had some words with Tedesco. Tedesco said it was all a mistake, but Stewart didn’t seem entirely convinced.
No matter. The real talk in Phoenix centered around bike setup, but the battle came down to two men who find a way to win even when their bikes weren’t right.
