MILLVILLE, N.J. (Sept. 14) — It was a consistent day at New Jersey Motorsports Park with the GEICO Honda team recording another two top-10 finishes. Rider Jake Zemke finished seventh in the GoPro Daytona SportBike race, and Chris Ulrich scored his second ninth-place finish of the weekend in the American SuperBike race.
Ulrich felt the team made significant improvement throughout the weekend.
“Considering how everything started this weekend with qualifying, only being 14th on the grid, to fight for a top-six and then come home ninth, you know it’s OK,” Ulrich said. “It was a big improvement by the guys, even from this morning in warm-up, which was a disaster. We all kind of put our heads together and came up with a setting that I could ride and that I could get to the apex and drive the bike out and get it to steer.”
“Overall, I’m proud of how I rode today and proud of my team and especially really happy for Jake yesterday,” Ulrich said. “It’s been a long year, so now a lot of hard work for the guys. Now we’ll go back and those guys will get a little bit of time off and regroup for next year and see what happens.”
Zemke started his day off in eighth but was able to improve a spot in a race that gave him no real trouble.
“The beginning of the race was OK,” Zemke said. “We just kind of settled in. We were slowly just losing the lead group. It was just a few tenths a lap and a few tenths a lap. JD Beach was in front of me and he was just slowly falling off the lead group a couple tenths as well. We just kind of started falling back a little bit and then Danny Eslick kind of caught up from behind and passed me.
“There weren’t any big dramas or any big moments during the race. We just didn’t have quite enough to get Danny at the line and we came up a little bit short.”
Zemke also improved his points position for the season.
“All in all I’m just happy for the team,” Zemke said. “After we had the DNF at Ohio when we fell down after somebody lost a water hose and broke the frame so we couldn’t finish that race, we dropped from seventh in the points down to 10th. After having a good weekend with a podium yesterday and then seventh today, we’ve gotten back to seventh in the points. We got those positions that we lost the last race.”
The Devil’s Showdown at New Jersey Motorsports Park was the last event on the 2014 AMA Pro Road Racing calendar.
