Peter Doyle, Mat Mladin’s longtime Crew Chief, is dismissing reports that Ben Spies’ Rockstar/Makita/Yoshimura Suzuki GSX-R1000 at Road Atlanta was fitted with a crank out of a streetbike the team purchased at a nearby dealership, and says that all three of the Yoshimura Suzukis were fitted with the same engine parts. “The thing about that is that I handle parts allocation for all 3 riders and passed out the parts that are installed. I know what was in each bike,” Doyle wrote in a forum on mcnews.com.au, where he writes an occasional column on AMA Superbike racing. Doyle argues that Mladin’s bike was fitted with a crankshaft that was obtained in 2006, when the factory offered to provide them to the team in bulk. Doyle contends that the team ordered “in the vicinity of 50″ of the cranks, all of which “have near-perfect phasing, all of which are nearly identicle (sic) in weight (and)”¦all journals are near identical in size.” Doyle says the AMA’s evidence that the cranks in the GSX-R1000s ridden by Mladin and Tommy Hayden were not production-line pieces during Friday Superbike qualifying at Road Atlanta can be easily dismissed. The well-publicized “color variation” could be explained by “the forging process, oil type, age, temperature, etc., etc.” The lack of production markings, Doyle writes, is because the batch of cranks the team was working from was produced when the company used an “ink-type stamping method” that used to wear off or could be removed with chemicals. The crew polishes and finishes the crankshaft bearing journals before installing them, and therefore the original bearing journal sizes are off, so the builder removes the original markings from the crank and writes on the correct ones using an “electric pencil,” Doyle writes. “Mat had his crankshaft removed and checked at Fontana earlier in the year and was passed (also the year before that and the year before that),” Doyle writes. “Mat had his crank checked at VIR and in the eyes of the AMA it’s now no good. Ben’s crank has never been removed for inspection. It has even been sealed for later inspection but never done.” It is noteworthy, however, that in his mcnews.com.au postings Doyle never specifically addresses Mladin’s comments about Spies at the Laguna AMA Superbike round, that Spies knew what parts were in his engine. Riders at the factory level typically know little, if anything, about the parts that go into their engines. (In a follow-up e-mail to roadracingworld.com, Doyle wrote, “What I will say is Ben, like Mat have no idea what goes inside there engines and anyone who thinks they do is either totally stupid or very naive.”) Mladin, meanwhile, insists that his bike was the same as the other team members’ bikes, and wonders if he was the victim of selective enforcement on the part of the AMA. “As Peter’s comments read, all three bikes have always had the same parts,” Mladin wrote in response to a request for comment from Roadracingworld.com. “Maybe you can add to your story something about the original reason as to why my bike was stripped to the crank and not the other riders’, and then the fact that it was quoted that they had prior knowledge to the Virginia race that our crank was apparently not standard issue, so why weren’t all the bikes stripped?” Tom Houseworth, who is Spies’ Crew Chief, declined to comment specifically on any of Doyle’s Internet writings. “The engines were built exactly as management wanted them, and everyone on the team knew what was in them,” Houseworth said in a telephone interview today.