AMA

Spanning the globe, bringing you the constant variety of 2 wheel motorsports,  Motomatters comes to you live from Road America, located in the lush, verdant, rolling hills of the Kettle Moraine.  Road America is a 4+ mile, 14 turn, circuit on a 525 acre plot of land located between the small towns of Elkhart Lake and Plymouth, WI; about an hour north  of Milwaukee.

With 3 very long straights, fast sweeping corners and numerous elevation changes, including a staggering 10 storey climb from the last turn to the Start/Finish Line, Road America has the reputation as a "horsepower track", where a bike needs plenty of ponies to be competitive.

In this moring's qualifying session, Graves Yamaha's Josh Hayes continued the dominating form he showed at the last round at Sears Point where he took both races. Hayes reckons that his R1 has an advantage due to it's stability on the brakes and tire wear. Team Rockstar Makita Suzuki's Tommy Hayden and Blake Young, a Wisconsin native, slotted into the front row behind Hayes. Fourth place qualifier Larry Pegram said that he wasn't going for ultimate top speed but was looking at tire durablity.

For our non-American readers, the AMA format sees a race on Saturday and a race on Sunday. More updates as they occur.

The guys over at OnTheThrottle have another video up in their series of conversations with former 500GP star Kevin Schwantz. The Suzuki legend was at Auto Club Speedway, Fontana last weekend, attending the second round of the AMA championship held there. OTT's Dave Williams talked to Schwantz about riding in windy conditions, about the final MotoGP test at Qatar, about Ben Spies' expectations for the first year of MotoGP,  about the difference between Grand Prix bikes and production bikes, and about how the differences between tires can affect your riding. Here's what Revvin' Kevin had to say:

The enormous success of MotoMatters.com has seen our traffic grow tenfold over the past three years, and we are starting to become the victims of our own success. We have completely outgrown our current hosting situation, and after DNS problems made MotoMatters.com unreachable for a small part of our readers earlier this year, it was clear we had to act.

The time has now come for us to switch to a bigger, better and faster server. Unfortunately, this means some inconvenience for our readers for the next week or so, as the internet gets used to the idea that http://www.motomatters.com is located on a different server. Consequently, the website could become unreachable for a short length of time, and mail may not be delivered correctly.

Fortunately, this situation should not last too long. We're hoping everything should be back to normal by next Monday at the very latest, though the inconvenience should only last for a couple of days.