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MARTIN: Same Old Ben, A New Michel, And What About Jamie?
Written by: Chris Martin   
06/04/2009
Iowa City, IA
 
Yamaha Motor Italia's Ben Spies (Photo: Brian J Nelson) ยป More Photos

The American round of the Superbike World Championship at Miller Motorsports Park turned out to be a weekend of familiarity, both for the fans and the star of the show.

Of the announced crowd of 47,300, a vast majority descended on the mountainside circuit to root for the championship's newest superstar, American hero Ben Spies. Even though diehard AMA Superbike fans had watched the Texan develop up close for years now, he returned home with a new aura of star power, the kind that comes along with setting the world alight.

So what were these fans treated to in the unveiling of the all-new, world championship-model Ben Spies? Well, pretty much the same old Ben they already knew so well. Unlike the snakebitten and occasionally erratic (yet undeniably rapid) rookie the rest of the world was just getting accustomed to, the familiar inch-perfect (sorry -- world championship here -- millimetre-perfect)
lines of the unflappable AMA-spec Spies turned up at MMP to please the partisan crowd with a most convincing Superpole/doubleheader sweep of the weekend.

That Spies did so in the face of expectations of such perfection made it all the more remarkable. Despite being pit up against arguably the deepest field in the competitive series' history, if the 24-year-old had done any less than the clean sweep, it would have been branded a disappointment. I even wrote an earlier Voices of SPEED column on this very topic and we followed up with a poll here at SPEEDtv.com asking for your input (by the way, more than two-thirds of you correctly predicted that Spies would pull it off).

Yep, same old Ben, that guy the locals already witnessed accomplish pole/double win weekend sweeps at Miller Motorsports Park in 2007 and 2008 before he left the AMA tour behind in his quest for global domination.


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