Josh Herrin didn’t just beat Darryn Binder twice at Ridge Motorsports Park this past weekend — he did it in a way that makes MotoAmerica’s tightest rivalry suddenly must-watch again. But scroll past the podium quotes and championship math in the official recap, and there’s a bigger story sitting in the undercard results: Yamaha, a brand that’s fielded competitive naked bikes in the Mission Super Hooligan National Championship for years, finally cracked the win column. Almost nobody outside the paddock flagged it.
We’ll get to that. First, the headline event earned its ink.
Herrin Turns Up The Heat On Binder
Supersport Race 2 at Ridge looked like a formality for most of its 15 laps. Pole-sitter Kayla Yaakov, aboard her Rahal Ducati Moto Panigale V2, jumped into the lead and set a pace only Herrin — running his own Panigale V2 for the Rahal-backed Desnuda Organic Tequila squad — could match. Tyler Scott slotted into second early on the M4 ECSTAR Suzuki, while Darryn Binder, who’d started eighth, was already carving forward, up to fourth by lap two.
That’s when it got interesting. Binder spent the middle stints shaving nearly a full second per lap off a 2.7-second deficit, closing to within 1.4 seconds of the front as the laps wound down — the kind of charge that makes a points leader’s stomach turn. Then, with five laps remaining, Herrin dove past Yaakov at the front-straight chicane. Yaakov lost the front and crashed right as Binder arrived at the same corner, forcing him onto the escape road to avoid the wreckage. He compounded it with a mistake at Turn 11 that ended any shot at catching Herrin, who pulled away to win by more than eight seconds. Binder salvaged second, while Scott held off BPR Racing’s Josh Hayes for the final podium spot after Hayes ran wide at Turn 13.
Blake Davis rounded out the top five aboard the Strack Racing Yamaha YZF-R9.
The result trims Binder’s championship cushion to 24 points — 193 to 169, with Scott a distant third on 136 — heading into WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca. By his own account afterward, Herrin has won three of his last four Superbike-class races at Ridge, so the form wasn’t a total shock. Whether that momentum survives a track he hasn’t dominated the way he owns Ridge is the actual thing to watch this summer, because a 24-point gap with multiple rounds left is very much alive.
Worth a footnote: a rider named Josh Herrin also lined up in that same day’s Super Hooligan race — the very same Josh Herrin, doubling up on an electric OrangeCat Racing Lightfighter V3-RH after his Supersport heroics. Multi-class weekends aren’t unusual in MotoAmerica’s support-class ecosystem, but racing a 600-class Ducati and a battery-powered street fighter on the same Sunday is the kind of scheduling that should make any crew chief nervous.
The Result Nobody Flagged: Yamaha’s First Super Hooligan Win
Here’s the part that got buried under Sunday’s bigger headlines. In Mission Super Hooligan National Championship Race 2, Pacific Northwest native Andy DiBrino put his BPR Racing Yamaha MT-09 SP into the lead with three laps remaining and held on to beat ARCH Motorcycle Racing’s Corey Alexander by nearly two seconds, and his own teammate Bryce Kornbau by 2.5. MotoAmerica’s own recap didn’t bury the lede: it was “Yamaha’s first-ever victory in the class.”
That’s a bigger deal than it sounds. Super Hooligan has become the closest thing MotoAmerica has to an open proving ground for street-bike-based race platforms, and the Ridge entry list shows exactly why manufacturers treat it that way. Race 2 featured Alexander’s boutique ARCH 2S-R — the small-batch cruiser brand co-founded by Keanu Reeves — an all-electric Lightfighter, Suzuki- and Ducati-based builds elsewhere in the field, and a pair of factory-adjacent Yamaha MT-09 SPs up front. Unlike World Superbike or MotoGP, where purpose-built prototypes rule, Super Hooligan runs largely stock-internals street bikes with upgraded suspension and brakes. That means results actually reflect how a given production platform behaves at the limit, not just how deep a factory’s development budget runs.
For years, that limit-testing favored torque-heavy V-twins and triples from Harley-Davidson, Indian, and Ducati’s Monster line, with the occasional Triumph Street Triple upset. Yamaha’s CP3-powered MT-09 platform — the same 890cc liquid-cooled inline-triple making roughly 117 horsepower and 68 lb-ft of torque in stock SP trim — has been a fixture in the paddock but never quite closed the deal. DiBrino did it at his own home track, which makes this read less like a footnote and more like a story that deserved its own headline.
Why should anyone outside the Super Hooligan bubble care? Because the class functions as unpaid market research for the naked-bike segment. A Yamaha win here is a credibility data point for anyone cross-shopping an MT-09 SP against a Ducati Streetfighter V4 or a Triumph Street Triple — the kind of proof-in-competition marketing that used to require a full World Superbike campaign. We’ve covered that crossover from the Ducati side before, and it’s worth remembering how far manufacturers lean into a competition halo — Ducati’s has stretched into everything from streetwear collabs to repeated partnerships with Lamborghini.
DiBrino sounded almost as surprised as everyone else, crediting his BPR Racing team, his family, and the home crowd at what he called “our sports park,” admitting even he hadn’t quite believed he could pull it off until he did. The championship math still favors his rivals — Gus Rodio leads Rispoli by five points, with DiBrino 15 back in third — but with three rounds left, Yamaha’s naked-bike racing program is now on notice in a way no press release could manage.
Elsewhere At Ridge
The undercard wasn’t done delivering drama. Talent Cup Race 2 came down to a genuine photo finish, with Quarterly Racing’s Nathan Gouker beating Team Roberts’ Kensei Matsudaira to the line by 0.008 seconds after the pair traded the lead ten times in the closing laps — Matsudaira ran slightly wide at Turn 15 on the final tour and never recovered the inside line. In the Royal Enfield Build.Train.Race. finale, Tati Paze picked off race-long leader Bryanna Everitt in Sector 1 with three laps to go and pulled away for the first win of her career, while Jasmine Noelle now holds a 27-point championship cushion heading into the season finale at Mid-Ohio.
The Owner Takeaway
If DiBrino’s win has you eyeing a Super Hooligan-spec build of your own, or just a stock MT-09 SP for the street, remember a race-proven platform is only as good as the paperwork behind it. Modified or track-prepped bikes routinely run into insurance and registration headaches that catch owners off guard, a lesson underscored recently when a Top Gear host learned the hard way what an uninsured classic motorcycle can cost you legally. A factory naked bike with a competition résumé makes a great story at the dealership. It’s an even better one if you’ve sorted your coverage before you start chasing lap times.
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