2003 AMA Supersport Champion Jamie Hacking crashed his factory Yamaha YZF-R6 during a test session in the middle of the 2004 season at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, breaking his right collarbone. The fracture was surgically plated, and Hacking raced at Laguna Seca less than two weeks later, placing an amazing sixth on his Graves Yamaha YZF-R1 Superstock bike. Then, during the AMA Superstock race at Mid-Ohio, Hacking’s rear tire had a catastrophic failure at high speed, throwing Hacking to the pavement at over 150 mph. Initial reports on Hacking’s condition said he bent the plate holding his collarbone together, and he finished the season without further surgery and with some success he nearly won the final Supersport race at VIR in October. Unbeknownst to anyone but Hacking, however, he had badly separated his shoulder in the second Mid-Ohio crash. “I got the same shoulder injury that Eric Bostrom had all of last year or the year before that. I raced the rest of the season with it. It didn’t feel good, that’s for damn sure. I tore the labrum in the front of your shoulder that holds your shoulder in the socket there,” Hacking told Roadracingworld.com Friday at Daytona. “The next day after Virginia I saw Dr. (Arthur) Ting. Sure enough we had to fix the labrum. It was torn and lying down here on my bicep. He had to go in there and fix it all up. “Everything was going OK. I was starting to rehab on my shoulder. Every time I started training on that shoulder, my collarbone would start hurting real bad. That thing never really got any good bone calcification, so it was like a rubberband. I kept sending (Dr. Ting) X-rays of it, and the little black gaps kept getting more pronounced. So we went out there, put the plate back in, did some re-adjusting of the plate, put it in a different position so it didn’t bother me as bad. A month ago I was just able to concentrate on training and getting my shoulder back up to strength. “This has been the longest injury recovery I ever had. I think if we had sat out the rest of last year we would’ve been healed up (by now), but that’s (not) what I chose to do. I’m paying for it a little bit now, because these guys have got a little bit of test time on me, but thank God we’re here to get some valuable track time.” Asked what his impression of the new Daytona infield road course was after his first few laps on the track Friday, March 4, Hacking thought for a minute before saying, “I read what they had to say, but I couldn’t judge it until I got here. I saw it and judged it in the motorhome yesterday without even riding on it. Putting whatever laps I just did now on it, it’s definitely a different racetrack. Good? I don’t know if I can say that. Definitely as far as not running that banking over there and getting the tire temperatures down, they accomplished that. But I think as far as safety-wise goes, I can’t agree with it.”