Interview With Six-Time AMA Superbike Champion Mat Mladin

Stephen Scharf

May 07, 2008

Mat, you’re a six-time AMA Superbike Champion and you set the single-season record last year with 12 Superbike wins, and you have an AMA record 66 for your career. What keeps you motivated at 36 years old to perform?

MM: You know, the last couple of years, I have to admit, to have a teammate like Ben (Spies) who’s obviously been very fast and a two-time Superbike Champion, and current Superbike champion, has certainly helped me re-motivate myself toward the sport and toward racing, which is my first passion and something I love to do so much. After many years of winning and sometimes winning quite handily, the motivation had gone away a little bit. But then Ben came along and certainly helped re-motivate me. It’s not in my nature to get beaten and decide to go away or say “I’ve got six championships or so many wins” and go away and say I had a good run, it’s not really how I work. It motivated me to get back and be strong and do the best that I can do. Ben has helped bring out the best in Mat Mladin.

Can you explain the differences between the first three races, where you won, and last two that Ben edged you in?

MM: No real difference. One thing that certainly we’re seeing a lot of these days is the difference between Ben and myself is minimal as far as racetrack lap times go and how things happen in the race. If one of us seems to hit on a little better set-up or something we’re a bit more comfortable with, it seems to transform into a win. I wouldn’t say there was a lot of difference. On Saturday in Fontana we missed on the set-up, it wasn’t great, along with a couple of other things. I don’t go into talking about problems or things that happened during race weekend because I’ve always been a believer in just saying that we didn’t get the job done, and we didn’t. So, for whatever reason it’s not something that I’ve ever gone into that much depth with. The bottom line is that the set up wasn’t quite there and the motorcycle wasn’t performing at the level I needed it to perform at for the whole race and we couldn’t get it done. In no way am I blaming the GSX-R1000 for that because we’ve seen how dominant it is and we’ve seen how dominant Ben was on the bike, so the Suzuki was capable of winning the race, it was just the way I had things sorted out it just wasn’t going to happen on that day for me. On Sunday we came back with a good set-up and a different set-up and a few things different. And we were solid and we went away from the front. On Sunday’s race, I rode as hard as I possibly could and edged away and got it out to over three seconds and made a couple mistakes and let Ben get back in and he had a bit of a sniff and with five laps to go, I just didn’t have anything left to be able to push any harder. The harder I pushed, the slower I went. I literally wore everything out just trying to get away. From the start of the race to forty minutes later, the difference between Ben and I were eleven-one thousandths of a second, and he got it right that day and I didn’t. It was a close race, and he drafted down the line. So, was there anything different? No, not really. Of course the end result was different. You’re going to see that between us, there’s not a lot in it. As evidenced last year, the championship was decided by a point. Ben got seven wins and 12 seconds, and I got 12 wins and a few seconds and a couple of crashes. In the end it was decided by one point. Sunday’s race was decided by eleven-one-thousandths of a second. There are going to be races where one of us has a bit of a problem and the other one’s going to go away and win by a large margin, but things are pretty close up in front between me and Ben.