Spies convinced over title potential after just one ride
Added on Monday, December 7th, 2009 by Carole Nash Editor
Spies convinced over title potential after just one ride
World Superbike champion Ben Spies has claimed that he knew that he could be world champion after just one ride of the Yamaha YZF-R1.
The American secured the World Superbike championship and Yamaha’s first ever rider’s championship in his rookie season in 2009, after switching to WSB from the American AMA superbike championship.
And the Texan, who is now preparing for a career in MotoGP with Tech 3, claimed to American journalists that he needed just one testing session onboard the Yamaha to convince himself that he could win the championship in his first year, even though he had yet to see the majority of circuits.
“I thought that once I tested the bike … it was hard, because the bike was so standard at that point, to know how it was going to be,” he claimed. “But I told (Team Manager) Maio after the first day of the test, we were sitting on the pit wall, and I said ‘If we can get this bike good… and we don’t have any bad luck,’ which we had a lot of … I said, ‘I can win this title’.
“I knew at that point we had the speed, but then learning the tracks, learning the team, just everything. But I was like, ‘I think I can do it’. And that’s how it started.
“I’m pretty sure, right after the first day of the test, that’s when we kind of got the attention of everybody else, and it kind of stayed like that for the rest of the year. But I knew after the first day that we could be there, or we could challenge.”
