For many years Tom Houseworth was a fixture in the AMA paddock. For the last five years, he worked with Yoshimura Suzuki as the Crew Chief for Ben Spies, and together they won five Championships, including three AMA Superbike titles.

This season, Houseworth accepted Spies’ invitation to join him on the Yamaha Motor Italia team for his debut season in the Superbike World Championship. In spite of working with a new motorcycle, a new team, new tires and at tracks that were unfamiliar to them both, the duo have teamed up to take the first six Superpoles of the season and win five of the first 12 races.

Roadracingworld.com: Things look like they have been going well for you. What’s been the key to your success so far?

Tom Houseworth: Ben’s hard riding. He’s been going out and getting the job done every week, basically. There’s been a couple of times we’ve let him down on some items, but for the most part Ben’s just going really good at tracks he’s never been to before. He’s getting the job done. The team’s working really well. We’ll just keep plugging away at it. At this point of the season, we’re just looking to win races right now. We’ll see how that goes.

Roadracingworld.com: How does the season match up, so far, with your expectations?

TH: Good and bad. At first, we were just wondering where he would land in all of this. We ended up winning some races in the beginning, so we were like, ‘Wow! We’re doing pretty good. Let’s keep going.’ Ben kept going, but we didn’t. Letting him down a couple of times hurt us in the points. Like I said, now it’s about winning races. He’s pretty damn good at those Superpoles, huh? We’ll see how that goes this weekend.

Roadracingworld.com: Ben’s always been a good qualifier, but is there a secret to your Superpole success?

TH: There is no secret. We did a couple of different strategies over the last couple of races, just trying to have enough left over for the last Superpole to get it. In South Africa with [Michel] Fabrizio, that was close. It’s all pretty much we put the tires on the bike, pat Ben on the back and say, ‘Good luck. Do your best.’

Roadracingworld.com: We know Ben’s good. How good is the new Yamaha YZF-R1?

TH: Well, he’s riding it. It’s good. Every bike’s got pros and cons. The Yamaha has the crossplane crank, the fly-by-wire throttle, variable intakes, all this stuff we’ve got to tune. It’s actually come along really well. But we’ve also had teeny weeny teething problems because it’s a new model. For the most part we’ve kept those to a minimum. The problems we have had are more human error on our end and nothing to do with the machine itself.

Roadracingworld.com: You’re really hung up on the DNFs at Monza (ran out of fuel) and Kyalami (shifter broke loose), huh?

TH: I am, yeah. Those things hurt. Those things could have been avoided, and we didn’t avoid them and now we have to live with it.