Sammy Halbert Wins R1 Daytona Short Track, Aaron Yates on Daytona Superbike Pole, AMA Live RR Timing Back Online and FT Live Timing Still Out

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Sammy Halbert's #43 Memphis Shades YZ450 Springfield ST Sept. '07

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Team Honda's Miguel Duhamel #17 leads Jordan Suzuki's Aaron Yates #20 at Road America Superbike Race 1 in 2008--Yates took the pole at Daytona today for today's and tomorrow's Superbike Doubleheader finals.

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In what was a major show of authority, Woody Kyle Racing's Sammy Halbert, National #7 by his virtue of being the overall champ in the GNC series in '09, ran away with round one of the AMA Flat Track Doubleheader last night. Riding a Yamaha YZ450 that was obviously dialed-in, Halbert-former National #43 as shown in the first shot above-ran away and hid from the field to win by two seconds over Henry 'Hammerin' Hank' Wiles on a Kawasaki and 'Jersey' Jake Johnson on a Suzuki. Halbert will go down in history as the inaugaral winner at the new short track facility outside turns one and two at the world famous raceplex.
Thanks to the great folks at http://www.cyclenews.com/ and http://www.roadracingworld.com/ for the official news links as shown here:
http://cyclenews.com/articles/flat-track/2010/03/03/halbert-dominates-daytona-short-track-1
http://roadracingworld.com/news/article/?article=39629
Congrats to Sammy for this opening round win and we'll be looking forward to this evening's races to see how things go for him and the rest of the field as they do it all again!
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On the road racing side of things, Jordan Suzuki's Double A-ron Yates won the Superbike pole position today beating out early fast man Larry Pegram by a little over .25 seconds. Yates, a long time competitor in the series, also took the honors of garnering the very first superbike pole for the Jordan Brand-sponsored team in it's seventh year of competition in the class. Congrats to Aaron and to the Michael Jordan team for this great result.
Here is the rest of the lineup thanks to Dean Adams and his troupe at http://www.superbikeplanet.com/:
http://superbikeplanet.com/2010/Mar/100304b19.htm
Congrats to Aaron and Team Jordan Suzuki for this great achievement!
The first superbike race is scheduled to roll off the line this afternoon at 3:30 P.M. EST, and as of late this morning, the AMA Live Timing on the road racing side was back up and running. You should be able to follow the race here:
http://laptraxtg.racersites-cluster.com/LapTraxTG/AMA/livescoring.html?LAPTRAXID=2010011005
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Yesterday's software problems for the AMA Flat Track Live Timing are still up in the air, and we are hoping they do get this issue resolved for this evening's second round at the new Daytona Short Track. As of this writing no live timing is available for the flat track and I have been getting updates from the forum at http://www.flattrack.com/ in order to keep up with what is going on on the track.
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Here is the link to last night's post about the problems that they were having with the live timing all day yesterday:
http://stusshots.blogspot.com/2010/03/pegram-fastest-in-both-superbike.html
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Thanks for coming by, now let's check out that first Superbike race!

Pegram Fastest in Both Superbike Practice Sessions at Daytona as AMA Live Scoring and Timing Suffers from Major Problems on Both RR and FT Sites

In an opening salvo to the AMA American Superbike season, Larry Pegram lead all comers today in both practice sessions at Daytona to set his stamp of authority on the beginning of the season.
However, the AMA Live Timing and Scoring has been suffering through some major glitches today that all but has kept the timing site down. Once it finally did come back up, the new-look link stayed on results of the first Daytona SportBike session-led by Martin Cardenas-and never updated beyond.
And from a post over at http://www.flattrack.com/, other people were having the same problem as I have all day over on the AMA Flat Track side and couldn't get anything more then the last results of the Supercross race from Atlanta last Saturday. One person did post that said to the effect that Mike Kidd (AMA Flat Track) did say the timing and scoring would be up for the races themselves this evening at the short track. We'll see and are waiting patiently.

As of this writing, at 6 P.M. EST, the 'live timing' link had been completely removed from the road race side and the link on the flat track side took you to Saturday's Supercross results in Atlanta.

Are you listening AMA? We hope so......

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Here is the 'new' link as taken off of the AMA Road Racing site earlier today:

http://laptraxtg.racersites-cluster.com/LapTraxTG/AMA/livescoring.html?LAPTRAXID=2010011005#

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Without trying to be critical of Mike or the AMA, which I'm not as I understand his and their position is to oversee and run the show, I do want to point out that for both the AMA Road Racing site and AMA Flat Track site to come out of the box with these types of problems at an event that is not only their 'Super Bowl' so to speak, let alone the inuagaral races of the year, and to not have the glitches ironed out at this point is a gross oversight. And one that after all the problems from last year and the steps taken by both series over the off season to improve themselves leaves a pretty big gap in trying to please the fan base and keep and/or to grow on that fan base. Let alone in this wired world we live in now.


For the results of the first two Superbike practice sessions you can go here thanks to the great people at http://www.superbikeplanet.com/ who are on scene for the 'festivities' at the big raceplex in Daytona:
http://superbikeplanet.com/2010/Mar/100303c.htm
http://superbikeplanet.com/2010/Mar/100303e.htm
And you can check out the first Daytona SportBike session from this morning here. The second session is scheduled for tonight and should be running now. Of course if the AMA's timing and scoring was running we could tell:
http://superbikeplanet.com/2010/Mar/100303b82w.htm

We sincerely hope that the glitches experienced throughout the day today on both the AMA Road Racing site http://amaproracing.com/rr/
and the AMA Flat Track site http://amaproracing.com/ft/
are not something that we will have to put up with throughout the course of the rest of the event. We would like to think that they can get these details worked out at least by this evening to where by tomorrow we can follow the great live timing and scoring that we have come to expect out of the people at the AMA. And that their oversight in having these problems on the first day of the first races of the season are just that. An oversight. We are patient, but........

The shot I picked above for this irate sounding post is of Larry Pegram's Foremost Insurance/Pegram Racing Ducati 1098R as was on display last August at the Indy MotoGP round. This was a diplay of the bike Larry used to contest the '09 season last year in AMA American Superbike and won three races with, including a surprise victory over 7-Time Champ Mat Mladin in the second race at Elkhart Lake's Road America in June.

Here's a link to a great article penned by Paul Carruthers over at http://www.cyclenews.com/ that talks about Larry's first session today:
http://cyclenews.com/articles/road-racing/2010/03/03/pegram-gets-it-started

We wish Larry the best of luck and a tip of the helmet for his first day's work effort at the opening round today, and we wish all the competitors the best of luck and safety. At least we are back racing. Now, if the AMA can get the technical problems straightened out with the live timing and scoring, this could be a great race event to see and watch over the next few days.

Thanks again for hanging with us here at Stu's Shots and listening to me rant again! Maybe they'll be able to get these problems worked out for us fans and I won't have to rant again. At least not this week....
Maybe I just have too much passion for this sport, and it might just be me. But I doubt it. And as I have proven in the past, if I am wrong I will retract my statements and offer a complete and total apology to those parties involved. Until then, it appears as amateurish at best coming from the professional series that they are.
But we are still waiting patiently.....

....and apparently so are others.
As of 8:35 P.M. EST over at www.roadracingworld.com, this was just found on the problems having to do with the timing and scoring:
http://roadracingworld.com/news/article/?article=39626

It's going to be a long week.........

Update 9:00 P.M. EST--

According to a post over at www.flattrack.com, Mike Kidd with the AMA has said that they are having problems with the software for the timing and scoring on both the RR and the FT side. They ARE working on the problem as this was posted.

Here is the Twitter link that seems to be updating current race info at the short track:

https://twitter.com/GNC_Flattrack