This was written in 2009 at Imola WSBK. 2024 Note: In case you doubt for peace in the Middle East or that North Korea and South Korea will at any time in the future stop trying to annihilate one another (or Korea), consider this: Ben Spies and Mat Mladin are friends today. Totally serious. They talk on the phone about kids and stuff. Truth. You could have knocked me down with a feather when Spies told me this is so.


Ben Spies says that after racing against Mat Mladin in the US that racing WSBK is “a cakewalk”.

You wouldn’t think that Ben Spies is racing for a world championship title if you talked to him today at Imola. Spies is the epitome of calm and collected, loose. He jokes around with his mechanics in the garage, walks easily to fans wanting autographs and nurses his iPhone, looking for a text message from a friend.

“I haven’t changed anything,” he says from the Yamaha garage at Imola. “I’ve been doing a few things different in my training, but other than that my job has been the same since I got here—try to win races.”

“Now that I have a lead in the championship, there’s leeway,” Spies says. “I was down eighty-eight points at one point. Now if we have a good weekend here, then that will dictate how I play the next four races.”

Ben Spies talks about the period he spent on the Yoshimura team in the US like someone might talk about serving in the military during a time of war. “A lot of people would be pressured right now (if they were leading the world championship) but in AMA I have been in this position a couple of time (racing for the title). It’s not a hard situation, the racing is hard but the situation is something that I’m familiar with and I’m happy to be here.”

Mladin and Spies were never friends and while at times they seemed on the edge of collaborating, it never really jelled that way. Instead they almost came to blows on several occasions. It’s just not in Mat Mladin’s nature to give anything to anyone on the racetrack. For Spies his time in America was sort of a student in a Mladin finishing school. And he disliked the teacher very much.

“There’s no getting around that me and Mat had our differences,” Spies says. “He’s the hardest guy I have ever raced and I don’t think it can ever get any harder, honestly.”
The depth of the antagonism between Mladin and Spies is rife with chapters and stories. “It wasn’t always in a bad way, not always,” Spies says with a smile and flash of his eyes when discussing his relationship with Mladin, “but I am not going to lie: Mat is a difficult person to race against and to be teamed with. Being teammates with him … I think if I hadn’t been pressuring him then we’d have gotten along. But when you pressure Mat, then it changes for him. I know he doesn’t have anything against me.”

Spies won’t go so far as to say that being teamed with and racing against Mat Mladin in America was good for him, or it’s required duty for anyone hoping to race at the world level. “It made me mentally stronger as a rider, the stuff Mat did, and that’s fine. So now this (WSBK) is easy. And it made me realize what kind of person I want to be, too. I don’t need to hate someone to race against them. I don’t feel like I need to protect so much. I don’t need to hate Nori or Michele or anyone just because they are capable of racing against me.”

“The speed here is the hardest thing, not the mental stuff,” he says of WSBK.

Regardless of depth of antagonism in their relationship, and how it impacted his life and career, Spies is satisfied with his first season in WSBK.

“Whatever we do next season, we know how strong we were this year and that we exceeded a lot of people’s expectations,” he says.”