SHERIDAN, WYOMING – October 6, 2024 – During this weekend’s rainy last round of the 2024 MotoAmerica season at New Jersey Motorsports Park, Real Steel Motorsports rider Hayden Gillim wrapped up his second consecutive Stock 1000 National Championship, with wins on Saturday and Sunday. Racing a CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP with significant backing from Tennessee dealership Southern Powersports, Gillim dominated the series, winning seven of 10 races.
A 29-year-old native of Owensboro, Kentucky, Gillim is a racing veteran, having won his first Amateur Dirt Track Grand Championship at age 6. He’s a cousin of the famous racing Hayden brothers (who he is named after), and typically runs number 69 as an homage to the late Nicky Hayden, who rode Hondas to the 1999 AMA 600 Supersport Championship, the 2002 AMA Superbike Championship and the 2006 MotoGP World Championship.
This season, however, Gillim ran number 1 in Stock 1000, having earned last year’s crown with a different brand. He topped both races at the Alabama opener, but the next two rounds in Minnesota and Washington saw him win the opening races but crash out of the lead in the second races, making for a tight points battle. He was victorious in race 1 at Laguna Seca and finished on the podium in race 2 (with fellow Red Rider Ashton Yates getting the win), then closed out the season the way he started it—with a sweep at this weekend’s finale.
“We raced against Geoff May last year and saw what he was able to do on the Honda,” said Gillim, who has now won four professional AMA road racing titles. “Then when Honda’s contingency numbers came out, that was a big factor in us switching, as well as the support we got from Southern Powersports. I raced Hondas when I was younger, first getting on a 600, and [team co-owner] Jerry Nickell has a big Honda collection and was excited about it. The guys gave us a really good bike, and the team did a good job setting it up. It was a great year. We were making 25 horsepower more than last year’s bike, and every track we went to, I was going a second or two faster than my previous best lap times. After I put it on the ground a couple of times in the middle part of the season, I started managing things better and not overriding the bike, and we were able to finish the season out strong.”
This was the first AMA road racing crown for the CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP platform, and Honda’s first since Jake Zemke took the 2008 Formula Xtreme crown aboard a CBR600RR.
“On behalf of everyone at American Honda, a huge congratulations and thank-you to Hayden, Real Steel Motorsports and Southern Powersports,” said Brandon Wilson, Manager of Racing and Advertising at American Honda. “We knew that the CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP is a competitive machine, and we hoped that upping our contingency program for 2024 would give some top riders the nudge to show its potential. That said, we couldn’t have expected the dominance it has shown in Stock 1000, with Honda riders taking 80 percent of the wins. It’s great to see Honda back on top in an AMA professional racing series, and hopefully it’s a sign of more to come.”