World/AMA Superbike Weekend @ Laguna Seca - July 12-14, 2002

by Jimil

I was fortunate to go 2 out of the 3 days. The first day was on Saturday. I took my YZF 600R and met up with Cisco. Together we rode down to Laguna to watch the AMA Superbike Race as well as World Superbike practice. We got there early enough and parked in one of the specialized motorcycle parking areas. I guess it was too early for them to have anyone posted at the parking entrances. What was cool was they had a helmet/gear check in so we didn't have to carry our stuff.

There aren't as many people on Saturday as compared to Sunday so we were able to take a few pictures of some of the riders. Since we both had cameras I'm splitting the pics into 2 sections. We hooked up with Glen and Megan who rode down a little bit later than us and we wandered around the track. This was Megan's first time to watch professional motorcycle racing and she was having a blast! We checked out the paddock as well as the vendor areas and watched the races from various point on the track.

Sunday there were more of us. I decided to cage it and Joel and Cous came along with me. We hooked up with Stuart and his wife as well as Cary, Glen, Megan, and Minty and her boyfriend, Brett.

The World Superbike Races were the ones to watch this year. Mainly because of the amount of wild card riders who got to join the WSB race. If you ever wondered how our AMA boys would do against the WSB guys then this was it. Among the wild cards were Nicky Hayden, Aaron Yates, Eric Bostrom, and Matt Mladin. Duhamel and Gobert sat these out because of injuries in practice. The racing was awesome and Nicky and Eric showed that they could hang with their WSB counterparts.

We also wandered around some more to check out the vendor areas as well as the paddock to see if any of the star riders were around. But since there were so many people on Sunday there was no chance you could go get a picture or an autograph. Good thing Cisco and I did that the day before.

It was a great weekend. The weather was perfect and the racing was awesome as usual. For those of you who missed it you have to make it next year cause the Superbike displacements will be bumped to 1000cc for inline fours!