Harley’s Kyle Wyman clinches 2021 King of the Baggers title

2021 King Of The Baggers
MotoAmerica Superbike Championship – Round 5 – Laguna Seca

Images by Brian J. Nelson

The three-round Mission King Of The Baggers Championship wrapped up on Sunday at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, making up Round 5 of the MotoAmerica series where Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle’s rider Kyle Wyman left no doubt why he was the favourite. When the lights went out he took the lead, with a dominant performance that saw him clinch the title in the same fashion that he dominated the championship.

Wyman started from the pole and was never headed in the eight-lap race. He gained more than a full second on second-place finisher and Mission Foods S&S Cycle Indian rider Tyler O’Hara on almost every lap of the race until he decided to slow his pace just a bit towards the end, with victory well within reach.

At the checkers, he took the win by just under four-and-a-half seconds over O’Hara. Third place went to DTF Performance/Hoban Brothers Performance Racing Harley-Davidson’s Michael Barnes, who added yet another podium finish in yet another motorcycle road race class on yet another brand of motorcycle to his record.

Wyman, who had broken his elbow in a crash last month at Road America, made a miraculous recovery from his injury, and he talked about it after the race.

Kyle Wyman

“Those guys are world-class doctors and surgeons, putting me back together, knowing exactly the timeline and how he needed to fix everything for me to be able to get what I needed to get done. Honestly, we didn’t make any changes to the bike ergonomically for me to ride it. It was just a matter of Friday it was like, okay, this is the lap time I can do without braking so hard that I’m screaming in my helmet. Then here’s a lap I can do when it really sucks. Then just decided from there how hard I wanted to push. I pushed pretty hard in the beginning of the race and saw the board grow pretty quickly, so I was pretty happy with that. I could kind of keep a steady rhythm from there and not have to brake too hard. That’s all it was. It was just more brake force and the more I have to hold my body weight, especially these downhill left-handers in 2 and 11 and stuff like that. Structurally it’s been good. It’s been a very fast recovery. If I was only racing Superbike this year, I probably would have ridden the Superbike, but both would have been a lot. I would have jeopardized both. So, my plan was just to focus on this. Pretty minimal laps for a race weekend. After doing double duty riding on the Harley only is like a vacation, so it was pretty awesome. Got it done.”

Travis Wyman and Ben Bostrom completed the top five respectively, ahead of Hayden Gillim, Frankie Garcia, Patricia Fernandez, Zack Nation and Eric Stahl.  Five of the top six on the day were Harley mounted, with three Indians in the top-ten.

Kyle Wyman’s title win was a dominant one, finishing the season on 70-points, to runner up Tyler O’Hara’s 45-points. Hayden Gillim was third on 39-points, ahead of Frankie Garcia (36) and Travis Wyman (33).