Copyright 2003, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.

By David Swarts

Yoshimura Suzuki’s Aaron Yates, the 2002 AMA Supersport Champion, will not continue to race in the AMA Supersport series during the 2003 season.

“It was kind of up in the air whether or not I was going to ride the Supersport bike this year,” Yates said Tuesday in a telephone press conference organized by the California Speedway Public Relations department. “In my contract it was actually an option of mine, and we decided with the new Superbike – and actually as good as the 1000’s been in pre-season testing – and the first race (Yates placed fourth in the Daytona 200) and all that we wanted to start concentrating on winning the Superbike title for Suzuki.”

Yates said that he made the decision at the urging of his team and Suzuki. “It was really hard for me to make the decision,” said Yates. “My Crew Chief (Chris Weidl) and the team (manager) Don Sakakura, they all have kind of been wanting me to just try and concentrate on Superbike for the last couple of years.

“Through my years of road racing, I’ve always competed in at least two different classes on a race weekend. I (didn’t) really felt like riding the 600 affected my Superbike riding that much; I actually felt like it was a good thing.”

But as much as the encouraging performance of the GSX-R1000 factored into Yates’ and Suzuki’s decision, the discouraging performance of the unchanged-for-2003 GSX-R600 compared to new 600cc Supersport models from Yamaha, Honda and Kawasaki was another factor.

“After Daytona, we realized our bikes were down a bit on the new bikes,” said Yates. “We hadn’t done a whole lot of testing over the off-season. I mean our bikes were pretty good, but Suzuki’s the only manufacturer that didn’t come out with a new 600 this year and everybody else’s are pretty hot. When we saw that our bike was going to be down on power, they (Suzuki) were concerned with me trying to ride the thing and make up for it and riding too hard and maybe going down with the ship.

“I tried to work some things out with Suzuki…but Monday morning I got a FAX from Suzuki that said Suzuki wants to have the Superbike Championship and would prefer me just to concentrate on that. So that pretty much took care of it. That was this Monday, yesterday.”