After finishing sixth in Saturday’s Superbike race at Road America, Westby Racing’s Mathew Scholtz bounced back with a podium finish on Sunday. With his third-place finish, Mathew has reached the podium in five out of the six races thus far in the 2021 MotoAmerica Superbike Championship.
Starting on the outside of row two based on his sixth-place finish in Saturday’s race, Mathew got off to a good start and quickly went to work moving towards the front. He raced the #11 Westby Racing Yamaha YZF-R1 all the way up to third place by lap three and maintained his podium position all the way to the checkered flag, while also successfully holding off a strong challenge from Bobby Fong on the run up the hill to the finish line.
Mathew Scholtz: “We made some pretty huge changes with the traction control just to try to drive out of the corners better,” Mathew said. “Yesterday, we could see that the top speed wasn’t bad, but it was that third, fourth, fifth gear coming out of the corners where we were losing big time. So, we decided to turn off the traction control, which made it really hard, but it definitely drove better. You could see the lap times were better for the first couple of laps. It worked out perfectly that I got past (Bobby) Fong, (Josh) Herrin, Kyle Wyman, and just rode my own race from there. Then, with maybe four laps to go, something started happening. There was liquid shooting back up at me, and the clutch lever was bouncing backwards and forwards. Everything wasn’t really working well, but I managed to hold on. I’m happy to be third and back up here on the podium. Thank you to the Westby team. Everybody has been working hard. We have our work cut out for us to try to catch up to Jake, but we’re ready for the challenge.”
Next up for Westby Racing is round four of the MotoAmerica Championship, which will take place at Ridge Motorsports Park in Shelton, Washington, on June 25 through 27.
