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Jimidan
Posted on Saturday, August 25, 2007 - 10:16 am:   Edit Post Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Move Post (Custodian/Admin Only) Ban Poster IP (Custodian/Admin only)

An article on Nicky Hayden from, of all places, the New York Times. Interesting
story about him and the current state-of-the-union for Moto GP (which hits Indy
for the first time in September of 2008).

August 15, 2007
Win. Wipe Out. Repeat.
By JOSH DEAN

So this was how the day would end for Nicky Hayden, rag-dolling through the rain
at 140 miles per hour, his season shattered like his motorcycle, a
multimillion-dollar machine depreciating rapidly as it shed chunks of titanium
and carbon fiber in the gravel shoulder area where Hayden would eventually skid
to a stop. “That's a huge crash!” the Eurosport TV announcer howled, a fairly
obvious observation to anyone who had just watched the white, orange and black
Honda dip into a corner of the wet track and chuck Hayden, the reigning Moto
Grand Prix road-racing world champion, into the air just two laps from a
fourth-place finish that he desperately needed.

For nearly 45 minutes, at speeds up to 180 miles per hour, Hayden had fought his
way back from 12th place at the Alice Grand Prix de France, in Le Mans, despite
a balky bike and torrential rain that caused half a dozen riders to crash. But
feeling the pressure of Italy's Valentino Rossi — probably the greatest road
racer of all time and an iconic, curly-haired presence who looms over MotoGP —
Hayden came into a corner a little too fast, causing him to brake harder than is
prudent on a wet track. Before he could react it was, as he would later say,
“sky, gravel, sky, gravel, sky, gravel.”

In MotoGP, the most elite level of motorcycle racing, crashing is inevitable;
it's not a matter of if but when. Learning how to crash, then, is a skill every
racer develops: relax (relax!), bring your arms in to your body and let the
protective suit do its job. “There's an art to it,” Hayden says. If you're
moving at 100 miles per hour, even a pool of water would feel like concrete. “So
imagine what concrete feels like.” Provided he is not unconscious or immobile,
the racer takes inventory of his parts, starting with his feet and working his
way up until he's pretty sure everything is still functional.

There, just off the hallowed asphalt of Le Mans, the 26-year-old Hayden rose to
his knees and slammed his fists into the ground. The TV camera cut to his pit,
where the crew chief, Pete Benson, ripped the yellow placards from the board
that displayed Hayden's standing and tossed them to the pavement. In a split
second, the world champion lost any chance of retaining his title. Instead of
earning 13 points toward his season total and finishing in front of all but one
of the riders who led him in the rankings, Hayden earned no points and dropped
out of the top 10.

Back at the hospitality tent for Alpinestars, an Italian company that makes the
suit, gloves and boots that had kept Hayden's parts in working order, a
smattering of journalists, friends and company men noshed shrimp cocktail in
near silence.

Some minutes later, Hayden's manager, Phil Baker, appeared in the rain, carrying
his client's battered racing suit over his shoulder like a sick child. “He's
O.K.,” Baker said. “Just tore some cartilage in his rib cage.” A technician
bagged the suit — covered with scuffs and scratches, but otherwise in decent
shape — to be shipped home for autopsy. “It will make a comeback,” the tech
said.

Outside, trucks were idling and tents had begun to collapse. If you were so
inclined, you could see it as a metaphor for Hayden's season to date, but it was
just a typical mass dismantling at a Grand Prix track. Almost from the second a
race concludes, the whole operation — hundreds of brightly painted trucks,
air-conditioned hospitality tents, countless cooks and roadies and hawkers of
merchandise — packs up and rolls out for the next stop, in this case Mugello,
Italy.

Last to leave was the fleet of R.V.'s in which the riders lived for the weekend.
And as the day ended at Le Mans, the mood in Hayden's trailer seemed funereal.
The television was silent, frozen on the back of racer Marco Melandri, the words
“2 Laps to Go” in the top right corner of the screen. Hayden had paused the tape
at the moment immediately before his crash.

He was sitting in a recliner next to a stationary bike he uses to warm up before
races, his stocking feet sunk in the tan pile carpet. He's a handsome kid with
peaked eyebrows that give him a bit of a Cheshire Cat look, particularly when
he's smiling. As the biggest American star in a sport largely comprising
Europeans, Hayden knows how to make a personal statement. He likes to experiment
with hair style and color — a low point being a buzz cut dyed with leopard spots
— and has made a few feints in the direction of facial hair. The European news
media have taken to calling him “Trick Daddy” or “the Kentucky Kid,” and in
2005, he received the high honor of being named one of People magazine's “50
Hottest Bachelors.” Both Michael Jordan and Brad Pitt have declared themselves
fans, and Hayden is about to be the star of his own MTV reality show.

In his trailer, though, Hayden was merely the guy who choked. His expression was
flat, his hair hidden under a Michelin beanie. He fidgeted absently with the
remote. “I don't like watching other people crash, but I don't mind watching
myself,” he said and then replayed the tape.

Hayden is enormously dedicated; losing destroys him. When he's not racing, he's
thinking about racing, or working out to get himself in racing shape, or else
sitting in the garage with his race team, talking about racing. He has not been
shy about expressing his frustration with the bike Honda Racing delivered for
the 2007 season — a rule change forced all manufacturers to build slightly less
powerful bikes and Honda's had so far been a disappointment — but on this day he
accepted the blame. It is often said that Hayden, unique among his colleagues in
that he grew up riding on dirt tracks, loves to go sideways and is comfortable
when the back end is “loose,” meaning unstable and sliding. So, yes, the rain
fogged his visor and numbed his hands, but it also probably gave him a slight
advantage. This one hurt.

“I know fourth isn't great, but it would have been by far my best result of the
year,” he said, his Kentucky twang absent of intonation. “And I let it get away.”

I asked him if he ever thinks about last year, if it's at all helpful in moments
like this to remember that he's still the world champion, the man who ended the
reign of the great Rossi.

“Oh, from time to time fans bring up the poster” — he was referring to an image
of himself at the final race of last season, on his knees next to his bike,
weeping into his hands — “and it still puts a smile on my face. But it seems
like a long time ago now.”

Le Mans is like another world compared with Owensboro, Ky. (pop. 54,067) — known
as “the OWB” to Hayden, its latest favorite son. For a small Ohio River town
full of churches and car lots, Owensboro has proven to be a rather fecund sports
breeding ground. Seven Nascar drivers hail from there, including the brothers
Waltrip and Green, as do the former N.B.A. shooting guard Rex Chapman, the Texas
Rangers' outfielder Brad Wilkerson and the three Hayden boys: Tommy, Nicky and
Roger Lee. (Not to mention Johnny Depp, who surely played one sport or another.)

To get to the Hayden family compound, you head around the back of a Kmart,
through the parking lot, past the loading docks and over a railroad track where
you'll find the sign for Earl's Lane, named for the Hayden family patriarch as a
last resort because he couldn't come up with a variation on Hayden or Rose
(that's Mrs. Hayden) that wasn't already registered somewhere in the county. In
the founding days of the Hayden estate, the road had no name and the Haydens
picked up their mail at a barbecue joint on the main drag, but when Rose opened
a plant nursery, it seemed like a good idea to have an address. Also, Earl says
a friend told him, “You can't just tell the fire trucks to come up the old dirt
road.”

Earl Hayden has always had a thing for motorcycles. He was a dirt track racer,
and when it came time to settle on a girlfriend, it only made sense that she too
would be compatible with the sport. As Earl tells it, Rose rode even faster than
he did, and besides, he was a bit wild and prone to spills. Nicky chose the
number 69 for his bike because that was his dad's number; Earl chose it because
it read the same way whether he was upside down or right side up.

From almost the day they could walk without wobbling, Earl's three sons were
planted on motor bikes and prepped to become racers. Four hours a day, seven
days a week, he drilled the boys and also Jenny, the older of his two daughters,
who would win an amateur national championship at 12 before giving up
motorcycles for tennis. (The younger sister, Kathleen, rode too, if only to
maintain the esprit de corps.) To pay the bills, Earl performed a variety of odd
jobs. He raised thoroughbred horses, then opened a car wash and then a used-car
lot, called 2nd Chance Auto Sales, which he runs to this day.

“Tommy's first race was a week before he was 3, with training wheels,” Earl
says, as if he were discussing a standard rite of passage for toddlers. “The
week after, we took his training wheels off.” Did the boys ever ride bicycles?
It seems wrong to ask.

For 35 weekends a year, the Hayden family would pack the motorcycles, the lawn
chairs, the tents, the coolers and the Frisbees into an old trailer with “Earl's
Race Team” painted on the side and hit the road, moving from dirt track to dirt
track until the boys began to gain some notice. Tommy was the first to be signed
to a sponsored team, but once word got out that he had an even faster younger
brother, Nicky soon followed, and the whole ritual has repeated itself with
Roger Lee. All three of them would win multiple national amateur championships
and turn professional before graduating from high school, eventually advancing
to the top level of racing in the United States, the American Motorcyclist
Association Superbike Series, where Tommy and Roger Lee still race today.
(Superbikes are one step down from MotoGP, the primary difference being that
superbikes are modified general-production motorcycles, while G.P. bikes are
prototypes and don't share a single part with showroom models.)

Although all the Haydens were talented, Nicky was even more so. Tommy was three
years older, but when the two raced head-to-head Nicky would inevitably catch
and pass his brother. “That didn't bother Tommy,” Rose Hayden says. “He knew it
was coming.” Perhaps Nicky was merely born with a little bit more Earl in him.
“Nicky's been talking about being world champion since he was 5 or 6 years old,”
Earl says, “back when he was reading Cycle News by flashlight.”

You would be forgiven for thinking this is a familiar formative tale —
domineering father forces his kids to give up their childhoods to chase his own
unfulfilled dreams, working them by firelight, er, flashlight — but to visit
Earl's Lane is to find a contented clan.

“I know what opportunity I've got here, and I don't want to let it get away,”
says Nicky. “Winning races is the best feeling in the world, and I just feel
guilty if I do anything that is going to affect my performance. I just feel like
I'd be letting a lot of people down if I didn't take this as seriously as I do.
I don't take shortcuts, am not a party boy, don't get caught up chasing girls.”
This is not directed at Valentino Rossi, but it could be. Like many famous
racers past and present, the Italian has shown an affinity for the perks of
fame. Hayden less so. (This is not to suggest that he's monkish, by the way,
just that he's not nightclubbing or autographing breasts.) “If I do my job right
— work now and play later — I won't have to worry about it,” he says.

Hayden is gone most of the year, but when he's home, he lives in an apartment
above the six-car garage behind his parents' house. Until he left the United
States for MotoGP in 2003, he still shared his childhood bedroom with Roger Lee;
Rog, as he's known, has since moved next door, to a stone house across the
pasture where Earl's fluffy white alpacas graze. Tommy lives nearby with his
fiancée and her daughter. Every evening at 6, Rose sets out dinner, and whoever
is in town comes by to eat, including various friends and extended family.

“My first year was tough,” Hayden says. “Not only was I trying to learn the
bikes, everything was so new. The traveling, the way of life . . . ” The thought
trails off for a second. “I think coming from a big family made it a little bit
harder, because I grew up with two brothers and we were really close. We were
together day in and day out, riding, training, practicing, and then all of a
sudden . . . ”

Today all three Hayden boys have a retinue of agents, managers and trainers, and
so Earl mostly just provides moral support. He and Rose split up the travel
duties, one heading overseas to be with Nicky, the other to wherever Tommy and
Roger Lee happen to be racing in the AMA Superbike Series. The entire family
(except Kathleen, who was in school at the University of Kentucky) were there in
Valencia, Spain, last October to celebrate with Nicky when he dethroned Rossi
and won the world championship. “One of the proudest moments I've had at a
racetrack for sure,” Tommy recalls.

For one weekend every July, worlds collide when both MotoGP and the AMA
Superbike Series hold events in Laguna Seca, Calif., meaning that it's possible
to see three Haydens flying around the same track as the rest of the Haydens
cheer from the stands.

“I don't think they'll ever totally retire,” Rose says, when asked to imagine
what it will be like when the Hayden boys hang up their leathers and there are
suddenly 52 open weekends on the calendar. “It's pretty much all they know.”

But for argument's sake, what would she and Earl do?

“Have a life,” she says.

To view it from here in America, MotoGP seems pretty marginal, but it's actually
a global phenomenon that Mario Andretti, who would probably know, recently
called “the most exciting form of motor sports.” The circuit has 18 races (held
in 16 countries), and more than 300 million viewers tune in to watch each of
them. As many as 200,000 fans turn out in person, legions of them arriving by
motorcycle, in full leathers worn for the entire weekend, which is a little like
wearing knickers and golf spikes to the Masters. On Fridays, in locations as
far-flung as Qatar and Malaysia, the racers practice and experiment with their
bike setups, testing tires and tinkering with things like traction control until
the rider feels the bike is optimized for that particular track. The qualifying
laps come on Saturdays, when riders jockey for the all-important start position:
they make a pit stop toward the end of the one-hour session to switch from
regular practice tires to ultrasticky (and ultrasoft) ones that will produce the
fastest lap times of the weekend but can also begin to disintegrate after one or
two laps; thus, they are useless for races. There are no pit stops during an
actual race: riders must complete the entire 60- to 80-mile course on a single
21-liter tank of gas and on the same tires. So carefully calibrated are the bike
computers that racers will often run out of gas on their cool-down laps, riding
on the last threads of their tires more or less 45 minutes after they started.

Up to 20 riders compete in each race, starting on the grid in rows of three.
Starting position is crucial: a rider can't run at full throttle until he's
clear of the field; as long as someone is in front of him, he has to ride
carefully and wait for a chance to pass, meaning that any riders who can get in
front of the traffic tend to build big leads. The first corner is critical, and
one of the most important skills a rider can have is the ability to launch off
the starting line within milliseconds of the gun without overpowering the bike
and popping a wheelie. For a while, manufacturers were experimenting with
computerized launch control, but in a rare victory of man over machine, all have
reverted to the old-fashioned hand throttle.

Like Formula 1, MotoGP is a technological arms race, the nuances of which could
sizzle your synapses. Every single piece of a bike — every bolt and screw — is
custom-made, making the machines almost impossible to value. The result is a
mechanized sculpture able to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in just over two
seconds. Each bike is a work in progress, tinkered with after every ride and
modified to suit track and weather conditions or a racer's “feel” at that
particular moment. Once fired up, the motorcycles roar with such ferocity that
it's damaging to the ear to stand near them. At full throttle, the sound of a
MotoGP bike can approach 130 decibels, or only slightly less than that of a 747
at takeoff.

“The bikes are designed to do everything as perfectly as possible,” says Neil
Spalding, a British motor sports journalist and the author of the book “MotoGP
Technology.” “They achieve unbelievably well when they're correct, but they're
absolutely horrible when they're not. Finding that sweet spot is difficult.”

There are any number of theories why MotoGP has not caught on in the United
States, including the fact that races tend to take place overseas (the
three-year-old Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix at Laguna Seca has been the only
American stop on the MotoGP tour, though Indianapolis will be added next
season). But perhaps the most obvious reason is the lack of a consistent
American star.

In addition to Hayden there are three Americans currently on the circuit: John
Hopkins, Kurtis Roberts and Colin Edwards, who rides on Rossi's team. Because
American riders tend to come up racing on dirt, foreign sponsors rarely seek
them out, preferring to recruit from the ranks of Europeans groomed on pavement.
This wasn't always the case. Kenny Roberts Sr., known as “the Cowboy,” won three
world championships, starting in 1978, and several other Americans (most notably
the former AMA champion Randy Mamola) followed him overseas, but Roberts thinks
that the days of American dirt trackers switching over to Grand Prix are
probably gone. “Nicky was very lucky that he got out when he got out,” Roberts
says. “It's really difficult to transfer to this type of racing now.”

His son Kenny Jr. was the last American before Hayden to win a title. That was
in 2000, a year that is especially notable because it marked the end of the
pre-Rossi era. Rossi arrived the next season after winning championships in both
lower classes and went on to win five straight G.P. titles, an unprecedented
feat that has made him one of the world's most popular and highest-paid
athletes, at an estimated $30 million a year.

To go to a MotoGP race today is to attend a meeting of the cult of Rossi. Vast
swaths of any given crowd will be clad in canary-yellow Rossi apparel or
sporting his number, 46. So pervasive is the mania that, at Le Mans, I spotted
Rossi stickers affixed to laptops in that alleged bastion of objectivity, the
media room. “There was one Muhammad Ali,” Kenny Roberts Sr. told me with no
apparent irony, “and there's only one Valentino Rossi.”

Such was the scene Nicky Hayden entered in 2003, recruited by Honda (already his
superbike sponsor in the United States) to join MotoGP as Rossi's teammate.
Though most racers work their way up MotoGP's two lower tiers, a sort of farm
league that races the same weekends on the same tracks, Hayden was sent right to
the top. He had to learn new bikes and new tracks on the fly while playing
second banana to a global sporting god.

“Any young American coming in, let's be honest, 90 percent of people want to see
you fail,” Hayden says. “That's just a reality, and nothing I did at first was
ever good enough. Over time, I've got things straight.”

That first season, he finished fifth overall in the series and was named rookie
of the year. The next season was rougher — Hayden struggled with his bike and
took eighth — but when Rossi left to ride for Yamaha in 2004, Hayden became
Honda's top rider. He rewarded the team's confidence with a third-place season
finish and established himself as one of the most flamboyant riders in the
sport, dubbed the Kentucky Kid for his Appalachian twang and his seemingly wild
racing style. (Hayden says that to this day when he pulls out his passport in
European capitals, people yelp, “Kentucky Fried Chicken! Kentucky Derby!”)

The 2006 season was like something out of a heartwarming Disney sports movie:
the kid who grew up at the end of a dirt road in Kentucky wins the world
championship in dramatic fashion, beating the most famous man ever to ride a
bike. Like any feel-good story, this one had a crucial moment of truth. The
Kentucky Kid had led Valentino Rossi for much of the season, but Rossi overcame
his struggles to close within 8 points of Hayden by the second-to-last race of
the year. That's when Hayden's teammate, a diminutive Spanish rookie named Dani
Pedrosa, made a monumental blunder: he lost control and crashed into Hayden,
ending his race and seemingly his chances at winning the title.

In a post-race news conference, Hayden hid behind giant sunglasses and told
reporters, his voice cracking, that he felt his lifelong dream had just been
snatched from him. Asked if he could forgive Pedrosa, he answered, “If it costs
me the championship, it's something I could live with for the rest of my life.”

Rossi went to the season finale in Valencia with his own 8-point lead. Hayden's
only shot was to win and for Rossi to finish third or lower. In the view of just
about everyone, Hayden included, he had almost no chance.

Hayden appeared in Spain with new graphics stitched on the back of his leathers:
a hand of playing cards, a pile of poker chips and the words “All In.” He said
he was going to win or crash — which would have really hurt, since he had broken
his collarbone in the crash with Pedrosa. As it turned out — and always does in
the movies — the antagonist miscalculated. Rossi, who rarely crashes, slipped on
a corner early in the race, and Hayden cruised to a third-place finish. He won
the world championship by 5 points.

“I remember Sunday night I went to my pit box before the awards ceremony, and
there was the banner that said, *Nicky Hayden, World Champion,' and I just lost
it,” Hayden recalls. “The idea of growing up to be a world champion, it just
seemed so far away. My parents gave up a lot, and there are a lot of bumps and
bruises and it hurts sometimes. So you definitely have to be prepared to suffer
a bit. It's not always just a big cupcake ride.” Here it is worth noting that
one trait Earl Hayden surely passed on to his son is a natural gift for the
colorful, sometimes confounding aw-shucks aphorism.

On a sweltering day in mid-June, nearly a month after Le Mans, I found my way to
Earl's Lane, where Hayden was enjoying a rare three-day break from the grueling
— six races in eight weeks — European leg of the season. In contrast to the last
time I'd seen him, slumped in his trailer after the crash, he was smiling and
expansive, despite spending the previous day running a relay from couch to
toilet because of a bout of food poisoning caused by some bad airplane food.

“Welcome to the OWB,” Hayden said, strolling out of his garage in cargo shorts
and sandals. “Your first time?” Also on the scene at Earl's Lane was the crew of
the MTV show, which had just accompanied Hayden to the chiropractor, where he
had gotten a spine adjustment and taken a foot bath while chatting with ESPN's
Dan Patrick by cellphone. If an MTV reality show can be considered a marker of
stardom, then Hayden is finally on his way to becoming an American teen idol.
The show, called “The Kentucky Kid,” will follow a year in Hayden's life and
function like the Owensboro installment of “The Real World.”

At this moment, the cameras were trained on a nearby paddock where two of Earl's
donkeys were getting frisky. Recently, the donkeys have multiplied, as have the
miniature ponies that Earl is trying to breed into even tinier ponies, with the
goal of one day owning a horse the size of a small dog. Earl says he has also
“got a guy” shopping around for some giraffes — an addition that would require
an electric fence, “because I'd hate for them to eat up all my dang trees.” He's
also in the market for a zebra-donkey hybrid known, naturally, as a zedonk. “I'm
not sure we're ready for any giraffes,” Nicky said.

The Hayden brothers refer to their dad as Earl the Squirrel, or just Squirrel,
and the first thing Nicky did after crossing the finish line for his first
MotoGP win, in Laguna Seca in 2005, was to yank the Squirrel onto the bike and
take him around the track on a victory lap, an American flag fluttering
cinematically behind them.

“I can't say I've had as much fun this year,” Hayden told me, standing in the
shade of the barn. “The bike's not working for me. I'm fighting it and I
crashed, so I'm riding injured.” (In addition to the torn cartilage, he broke a
rib at Le Mans. He's also still nagged by his collarbone, the one he had broken
in the crash with Pedrosa.) “But still my job's a dream, and I'm sure it will
turn around.”

A few days before heading home from Europe, Hayden finally got the new chassis
he'd been wanting, as well as a new exhaust pipe. As a result, he'd had his best
finishes of the season and finally returned to the podium after the ninth race
in the series, in the Netherlands, moving back into the top 10 after taking
third behind Rossi and the point leader, the Australian Casey Stoner, who rides
for Ducati. He finished third again at the next race, in Germany, and suddenly
things were looking up going into Laguna Seca, where he'd won the last two
years. Laguna would also be special because Kawasaki had arranged to give Roger
Lee a bike and an exemption to take part in his first-ever MotoGP race — perhaps
a test drive for the next member of Earl's race team to join the circuit. Alas,
disaster struck again: another rider collided with Nicky on the first lap,
damaging his brakes and forcing him to drop out later in the race. (Roger Lee,
on the other hand, gave the Haydens something to cheer about: he rode well and
finished 10th.)

As Neil Spalding explains it, a motorcycle racer is far more important, relative
to his machine, than an auto racer is to his, which makes sense when you
consider how physically demanding MotoGP is. A rider leans hard into every turn,
getting so low that his 300-pound bike nearly brushes the track. As he comes out
of the turn, he must yank the bike upright, all while going at top speed. When
braking, he stands up, using wind resistance to help slow the bike, then drops
into a crouch for full-throttle sprints. Hayden is strong and lithe and, owing
to his long career on dirt bikes, very comfortable muscling his bike around.

More than ever before, the results this season have been influenced by
technology. Following the rules change, Ducati showed up with a superior bike,
and Stoner has dominated. The more manufacturers rely on computer controls, the
more it harms the guys like Hayden and Rossi, who are regarded as the purest
racers. “Futuristic things like traction control, it's cutting down the role of
the talent,” says Randy Mamola, the ex-racer and now a television commentator.
“If you put [Stoner] on Nicky's bike, he wouldn't have won any races. I
guarantee that.”

“I think we finally got the bike right,” Hayden told me in Kentucky. “I hope so.”
He was just back from a 35-mile bicycle ride with Tommy, part of a grueling
workout schedule set by his trainer (a former professional cyclist who lives in
Florida) and uploaded daily to his computer, where results are plotted and
studied. Rose Hayden told me that the first thing her son does when he gets home
from abroad is to go for a run or a bike ride and that the difference between
Nicky and Tommy, who's also a fitness nut, is “Nicky might overdo it. When
Tommy's body tells him that's enough, he'll quit. Where Nicky will think, I've
got another 10 minutes in me.”

When the Hayden boys were just starting out, they had promised their father that
they would never smoke, drink alcohol or experiment with drugs. “I'm not going
to put my life and savings on the line and then you go and waste it,” Earl says
he told them. Hayden had never tasted alcohol until after last year's final
race, when the celebratory Champagne was passed around the podium. For once, he
didn't just shake it up and spray it on the umbrella girls. “He said, 'Dad, what
do you think?' ” Earl recalls. “I said, 'It's probably O.K.'”

Accordingly, the humble Earl's Lane manor has begun to show the trappings of the
Hayden brothers' success. After winning his championship, Nicky gave his younger
sister, Kathleen, his Mercedes, and he told me he's thinking about giving Jenny
the blue Bentley that sits in the garage if he can win another title. The
compound includes a swimming pool and a tennis court, as well as the garage that
houses Nicky's apartment and the fancy cars. One entire bay is filled with racks
of used leathers (some of them dodgy vintage outfits once worn by Earl), a huge
case of trophies and a row of motorcycles that includes the 600cc Supersport
Honda on which 18-year-old Nicky won his first AMA championship, in 1999,
beating Tommy by 5 points to become the youngest-ever champion in United States
history. Next to it are the green Kawasakis on which Tommy won two AMA
championships of his own (in 2004 and 2005) and, Nicky said, a “spot saved for
Rog.” He pointed to an empty space between Tommy's bikes and his own
most-treasured possession: the Honda on which he won the championship.

“It's the one thing I put in my contract,” Hayden said. “If I ever won I could
keep it, and Honda came through.” The fluids had been drained and the battery
removed, but Hayden has promised his friends he'll fire it up again someday.
Maybe, he joked, he'll ride the multimillion-dollar machine in the Owensboro
Christmas parade, tossing out candy canes at 200 miles per hour. The only actual
working motorcycle in the garage is a replica of his Grand Prix bike, which
Honda sells in its showrooms. “I've only ridden it twice,” Hayden said. “It's
hard to do 35 on a side street. I'd get carried away — not meaning to, but I get
paid to go fast.”

He left the garage and headed into the hot Kentucky sun. Tommy had just arrived,
and Roger Lee would be there any minute. The next morning, Nicky was to fly out
early to meet his team in England, but right now it was just about time for
dinner.

“It's my way to get away from the drama of MotoGP,” he said of coming here to
far western Kentucky, enduring a couple of flights and a good hour in a car just
to have 72 hours on Earl's Lane. “I like to just come home here and kick it with
my people and chill.” Rossi, who lives in London, “had to leave his home country
because he couldn't go out in public. At least I get to come home.”
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Jandj_davis
Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 12:29 pm:   Edit Post Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Move Post (Custodian/Admin Only) Ban Poster IP (Custodian/Admin only)

Wow, that's an awesome article. Thanks for posting it. I was surprised to read that all of the MotoGP teams had done away with launch control. Anynoe know if that is really the case?
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M1combat
Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007 - 04:43 pm:   Edit Post Delete Post View Post/Check IP Print Post    Move Post (Custodian/Admin Only) Ban Poster IP (Custodian/Admin only)

Excellent read. Thank you : ). I guess I'll be rooting for Rodger Lee from now on : ).
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