Rising star Taylor Knapp has secured the ride of his career.
After a strong 2009 season in which he finished ninth in the AMA American Superbike Championship (with a best race finish of fifth) and 11th in the Daytona SportBike Championship (with a quartet of fourth-place finishes), the 22-year-old from Michigan will race one of Mat Mladin’s 2009 Championship-winning Yoshimura Suzuki GSX-R1000s in the 2010 AMA American Superbike Championship thanks to backing from personal sponsor Ridersdiscount.com.
“Ridersdiscount.com has helped me out with smaller stuff in the past,” Knapp told Roadracingworld.com, “so we thought we would throw it out there and see what they could do for us [for 2010]. We arranged a meeting. We had a budget put together for the year, and they said no problem. I guess business is really good for them. Their sales have almost doubled since last year, so it’s worked out good for both of us.”
While Ridersdiscount.com will support the majority of Knapp’s 2010 racing program, Yoshimura Racing will also contribute to the deal, according to Knapp.
“There’s definitely some support from Yoshimura,” he said. “I don’t how to explain it really. We’re not getting enough from Ridersdiscount.com to completely pay for everything, but it’s going to be a better program than we did last year and we’re going to spend less of our money than we did last year. So in the end it’s going to be a better deal for us.”
And as mentioned previously, that deal includes use of Mladin’s GSX-R1000K9 racebike as it rolled off the track at the end of last season.
“Yeah, it’s really his bike,” said Knapp. “I’ve been talking to Don Sakakura [Yoshimura R&D of America Senior Vice President], and he’s asked me, ‘Do you want me to take these bars off? He’s got these longer bars, and no one likes his seat pad because it’s so big.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m about six-feet-tall, so leave it all on there and I’ll go from there.’ But it’s definitely pretty exciting because it is his bike.”
Knapp will get his first taste of his new motorcycle (which may be maintained at the Yoshimura Racing shop in Chino, California, between races) during the AMA team test February 2-3 at Auto Club Speedway, in Fontana, California.
The down side to Knapp’s new ride is that he will have to abandon plans he had already made to ride the Latus Motors Racing Ducati 848 in the Daytona SportBike class. That ride may go to Steve Rapp, who tested the team’s Buell 1125R Daytona SportBike at Auto Club Speedway in January.