Illustrative photo of naked-bike racing. Photo by cnrdmroglu via Pexels.
Andy DiBrino topped Friday’s opening Mission Super Hooligan practice at Circuit of the Americas with a 2:17.070 lap, but the number worth circling wasn’t his time — it was the 0.375 seconds separating him from second place. That’s BPR Racing Yamaha teammate Bryce Kornbau, and the gap is a near-perfect scale model of the championship situation the two carry into the weekend. DiBrino leads Kornbau by five points, 168 to 163, with 50 left to score across Saturday’s and Sunday’s races. Everyone else on the Mission Super Hooligan grid is racing for position. These two are racing each other, and have been for most of the season.
A Five-Point Gap, and an Awkward Org Chart
The wrinkle that makes this title fight different from most: Kornbau doesn’t just ride for BPR Racing Yamaha, he owns it. For four straight rounds now, he and DiBrino have traded race wins, and DiBrino’s margin at Mid-Ohio was a last-lap pass through the esses worth 0.216 of a second — part of a run that’s put him on the podium six races running. There’s no evidence of team orders here, and Super Hooligan doesn’t carry the budgets or politics of a factory grand prix effort where that kind of thing tends to surface. But a five-point championship gap between a team owner and the rider he employs, decided in the closing laps of his own pit box, doesn’t need any embellishing to be a good story.
Rodio’s Uphill Climb
Gus Rodio is the only rider left who can turn this into a three-way fight. The Rodio Racing owner-rider sits third at 149 points, 19 behind DiBrino, and he’s doing it aboard a Ducati Streetfighter V2 rather than a Yamaha MT-09 SP. Friday’s practice suggested that gap in machinery might matter as much as the gap in points — Rodio’s best lap was 1.373 seconds off DiBrino’s pace, fifth quickest overall, slower than both Yamahas and slower than James Rispoli’s Harley-Davidson. COTA’s 3.41-mile, 20-turn layout punishes bikes and tires over a full lap, and with the series forecasting serious Texas heat for the weekend, tire management across two seven-lap sprints could move the pecking order more than raw pace does. Still, on Friday’s evidence, closing 19 points on two faster bikes is going to take race craft and misfortune for the Yamahas, not one-lap speed.
The Champion Who’s Already Out
James Rispoli’s practice lap was actually good enough for third, ahead of Rodio. His championship position isn’t nearly as good. The Saddlemen Race Development rider and defending Super Hooligan champion sits fourth in points, 53 behind DiBrino with only 50 left on the table — mathematically eliminated before Saturday’s qualifying has even run. It’s a sharp illustration of how unforgiving a short, sprint-format championship can be: reigning champion one year, unable to defend it the next, without so much as a poor result to blame. His teammate Jake Lewis was fourth-fastest in practice, ahead of Rodio, so Saddlemen still has something worth chasing even with the title out of reach.
A Finale Tucked Inside a Bigger Weekend
Here’s the detail easy to miss amid COTA’s five-class schedule: Super Hooligan is the only one of the weekend’s championships that actually ends here. Quad Lock Superbike, Supersport, Talent Cup and Mission King of the Baggers all carry more rounds after Texas. Super Hooligan runs a shorter, five-round season, so its number-one plate gets decided this weekend while the paddock’s longer-season classes race on toward finales elsewhere. It’s also not the only garage fighting itself for a title at COTA — J&P Cycles/Motul/Vance & Hines Factory Indian’s Hayden Gillim carries a 23-point lead over his own Indian Challenger-mounted teammate, Troy Herfoss, in Mission King of the Baggers. Two of the five MotoAmerica classes racing this weekend, in other words, have their championships being fought out between teammates on the same equipment — a reasonable sign of how close production-based racing has gotten when the bikes start life on a showroom floor rather than a factory drawing board, a dynamic that manufacturers like Yamaha and Ducati are watching closely as they weigh how much factory support these categories deserve.
What to Watch
Super Hooligan gets two shots at settling this: Race 1 Saturday at 4:45 p.m. local time, Race 2 Sunday at 2:10 p.m., both run over seven laps. Short races leave little time to claw back points through attrition alone, which means Kornbau needs results immediately, not a slow build. DiBrino’s assignment is simpler on paper and harder in practice: keep finishing ahead of the one rider on the grid who also happens to be his boss. For the rest of the weekend’s five-class schedule, MotoAmerica streams every session on its MA Live+ platform.
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