Birmingham, AL - September 17, 2017 – 

 Alabama rolled tide on Sunday at Barber Motorsports Park with a persistent rainstorm, and Yamalube/Westby Racing’s 2017 MotoAmerica Superstock 1000 Champion Mathew Scholtz not only took it in stride, but he and his #11 gold-and-black Yamaha YZF-R1 positively shined in the wet conditions and made MotoAmerica history.

 

Mathew became the first rider to finish first in his Superstock 1000 class and also win the Superbike race. Superbike is the premier racing class in the MotoAmerica Championship, and the Superstock 1000 class is universally regarded as one notch below Superbike, yet both classes line up on the starting grid in the same race, and there is a separate Superbike race winner and a Superstock 1000 winner. On Sunday at Barber, those two winners were in fact one rider: Mathew Scholtz.

 

Incidentally, it was also the first time in the history of AMA-sanctioned professional road racing that a South African rider won a Superbike race; yet another first-time accomplishment for the “Durban Dynamo.”

 

 

Shortly after Sunday’s Superbike Race 2 went green, the rain started to fall, and the event was red-flagged. After the restart, there was ponding on the race course from the rain, which caused Mathew to fall down in the treacherous conditions, and the race was red-flagged a second time. Following a lengthy delay, the race was restarted a second time under wet conditions, and Mathew, who started from the front row of the grid based on his Saturday Superpole qualifying result, was in the lead pack, and then, out in front, in fairly short order.

 

Except for a couple of hair-raising moments at the end of the final lap, Mathew’s race at the front went relatively smoothly all the way to the checkered flag.

 

After the podium celebration, Mathew commented, “On the final lap, I looked back and saw that Jake (Gagne) was maybe one second back, and I was just trying to hold tight lines. I had no idea that he had actually crashed, and I thought that he was right on me the entire time. I was focusing on getting a good drive that last lap and nearly tossed it away twice. I couldn’t be happier taking the overall win today. This means so much to the Yamalube/Westby Racing team, and I think they’re over the moon with what we accomplished.”

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