Meet Jake Gagne, 2021 MotoAmerica Superbike champ

Gagne won three times at New Jersey Motorsports Park this weekend, giving him a 108-point lead over Mathew Scholtz with three races left next weekend at Barber Motorsports Park. (An extra Superbike race was added to each of the last two rounds to keep the season at 20 races to make up for MotoAmerica not racing with the Red Bull Grand Prix of the Americas MotoGP race.) Gagne actually clinched the title after the second race of the weekend, his 15th consecutive win.

"I wouldn't have thought going in that we'd be 15 wins deep," Gagne said. "It's pretty surreal."

"I'm happy for Jake," said Scholtz, second in all three races this weekend and solidly second in the championship. "We've been friends since Red Bull Rookies Cup. It's good to see a close friend winning something."

Gagne's 16 victories tie the record for most wins in a single season, set by Josh Hayes and tied last year by Gagne's former teammate, Cameron Beaubier. But nobody has ever won 16 in a row like Gagne. The only Superbike race he didn't win this year was the first one, when his motorcycle expired after two laps at Road Atlanta. Even when he crashed at Brainerd International Raceway — a scary situation in which he was stranded in the middle of the track with the entire pack roaring toward him at speed — he not only escaped without injury, but his bike was also only mildly damaged and a subsequent red flag allowed him to get back in the race. And win that one, too.

So who is this guy who went from non-winner to record-setter? He's a laid-back Californian recently transplanted to Colorado whose attitude has guided him toward quietly amassing the lessons from his last five seasons, which have often been a struggle, while not dwelling on the setbacks.

"Those years kind of made me into what I am today, especially the tougher times," Gagne said. What he is today is a MotoAmerica Superbike champion.

It takes a decade to be an overnight success

Gagne's success exploded this year, but he is anything but an overnight success. He won the 2010 Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup championship, finishing ahead of such talent as MotoGP race winner Brad Binder, former Moto3 world champion Danny Kent and Scholtz, his top challenger in MotoAmerica Superbike.

In 2015, Gagne won the MotoAmerica Superstock 1000 title and then moved up to the Superbike class, riding a Honda for Danny Walker's Genuine Broaster Chicken team. That tie to Honda led him to fill in for the late Nicky Hayden in a few World Superbike races in 2017 after Hayden's death in a bicycle crash. The next year, Gagne moved to the WSBK series full time. Nobody thought it would be easy, but his trials in WSBK went beyond that. Gagne is not the type to trash a former team or motorcycle, but anyone who looks at Honda's lackluster results in World Superbike can understand why racing that bike as a rookie at the world championship level would be a struggle for anyone.

"I knew I was thrown into the deep end," Gagne said of his year in World Superbike. "I gave it hell. I gave it everything I've got. Had some big crashes along the way, so I learned from those. I learned the hard way from hitting the deck a couple too many times."

Despite the struggles, Gagne maintained his positive attitude.

"I got to travel around the world. Racing some of the coolest tracks in the world," Gagne said. "Even on the tough days I told myself, 'Man, I'm traveling the world racing motorcycles. It can't be that bad'."

That attitude — living in the present, keeping setbacks in perspective, learning from struggles but not dwelling on what went wrong or might have been — is an attitude Gagne said he inherited. It's the way he was raised. And it's clearly served him well.

"My mom and dad are pretty mellow," Gagne said. "I started racing motocross at five or six and my dad was awesome. He was never one of those crazy mini dads, you know. He just wanted me to have fun, told me he believed in me."

In addition to gaining knowledge from his difficult times, Gagne also learned from his 2020 teammate on the Attack Performance team, five-time MotoAmerica Superbike champion Cameron Beaubier, who is now off racing in Moto2. Watching Beaubier dominate the series last year drove home some lessons that helped Gagne dominate in 2021.

Three big changes

Adjusting his riding style was one of a few significant changes for 2021. Gagne was always known for riding hard. Beaubier was known for looking like he wasn't working hard at all, even while he was winning week after week by solid margins. Gagne changed his style to find greater success.

"Last year, I was trying to override the bike," Gagne said. "I learned a lot, especially from seeing how Cam was riding the bike. A lot smoother, a lot more efficient.

"You know, these things have got a lot of power, they're beasts, and you can't try to manhandle them. They just manhandle you right back."

The other big change Gagne made in the off season was relocating to Colorado. It was a serious adjustment for a San Diego native who loved swimming and surfing and riding the numerous SoCal motocross tracks. But he replaced that with mountain living, hiking and mountain biking in what he calls his own little nine-acre bubble in the lingering age of COVID-19. Though he still loves motocross, he'd already scaled that back as part of his training, just because it's so easy to pick up a nagging injury. Despite that, his new lifestyle has him in his best physical condition ever, he said.

"I live at almost 8,000 feet, so at that elevation, when you come down, you really do feel it, after living up there and training up there," he said.

"The happier you are at home, the happier you are coming to the races, the better things work out," he said, crediting his change of lifestyle with contributing to his success.

The third significant change was a new crew chief for 2021, Jon Cornwell. A Canadian who is a former racer himself in a wide variety of disciplines, from road racing to flat track to ice racing, Cornwell had been an Öhlins technician working with Westby Racing and other teams in the MotoAmerica paddock but this is his first year as a crew chief. Which means, I pointed out, that he almost certainly has the best winning percentage of any crew chief in motorcycle road racing history, currently at 94 percent. It was an observation he immediately waved off.

Both Gagne and Cornwell agree that their communication has been a key part of their success this year.

"As soon as I got the news Jon was coming on board, I was stoked," Gagne said. "He's got a lot of experience and he's an ex-racer, too, so he can understand what I'm talking about and how it feels on the bike."

Sometimes, both men agree, finding a solution to a problem may lie not in changing the motorcycle, but in getting the rider to take a different approach. For that, a former racer's perspective is invaluable. Cornwell describes his job as "trying to reduce the distractions and make sure Jake is able to focus just on riding the bike on the race track with confidence."

It helps, he added, that Gagne is so focused and motivated.

"Working with Jake has been really good," Cornwell said. "He's a super-motivated guy and he always comes prepared. Even in pre-season testing, it was pretty evident that he had a goal in mind and he was going to do what he needed to do to try to make that happen."

Now that the hard work has paid off, with records broken and a championship in hand, Gagne has a week off before a three-race weekend at Barber. How will he celebrate his new number-one plate? I mean, you know how wild motorcycle racers are, right?

"Go to sleep early," he answered. "We've got a race next weekend."

Meet Jake Gagne, Superbike champ.