A cool weekend welcomed the World Superbike series to Miller Motorsports Park on the Memorial Day Long Weekend.

Ducati Althea’s Carlos Checa continued his love affair with Miller Motorsports Park in Utah all weekend at the United States round of World Superbike, the track a clear favourite of his on the calendar.

Checa’s form was to be expected though, however what wasn’t exactly expected was the sheer coldness of the weather experienced all weekend long.

Snow-covered mountains outline the 4.9-kilometre circuit, which supposedly cost $200,000,000 to construct, and it would have to rank as one of the quietest atmospheres of a WSBK event that I’ve ever witnessed.

The fan count on Sunday’s qualifying day was incredibly low on a day where the Indy 500 was being held, but it did pick up somewhat for race day Monday on the Memorial Day long weekend.

As an event itself there was a good amount of entertainment including live bands, a stunt show including the one and only Chris Pfeiffer (man, that guy is good!), plus plenty of ever-popular grid girls strutting their stuff despite the cool air temps.

Just how cool was it? Well, the warmest part of the day was WSBK race two, which had an air temperature of 13 degrees Celsius – a huge shock to the system after the Freestone round of AMA Pro Motocross that I attended on Saturday was run and won in temperatures over 35!

The on-track action of World Superbike was exciting enough throughout the pack, even if it was clear from the start that Checa was the man to beat, and the AMA Superbike race held in between the WSBK races was action packed.

Of the Aussies here this weekend, Josh Waters rose to the occasion on race day aboard his Yoshimura Suzuki endurance-spec GSX-R1000 despite two bad starts.

Troy Corser was quick at the start of race one, but had the wrong traction control settings apparently, burning out his rear Pirelli and eventually dropping outside the top 10 after leading early on. His weekend was over with an early crash in race two.

Mark Aitchison continues to put in the hard yards aboard the Pedercini Kawasaki, a tough task on a slowly developing privateer machine, and you do have to admire his determination week in, week out, to get the job done. The end result is that he’s usually quicker than highly credentialed teammate Robbie Rolfo.

In the AMA races Dave Anthony was the best performer with a top 10, but what’s just as impressive is the team set up that he has over here using privateer Suzukis. He has Jordy Burgess onboard, but he unfortunately crashed early on.

Trent Gibson rode to a solid 13th in the crash-marred AMA race, while Chris Trounson was another to crash after running strongly in the early stages. They have a long way to go if they want to challenge for wins, but considering their equipment and hard work they put in, these Aussies make up a good chunk of the regular AMA field.

As for us at CycleOnline, we’ve been splitting our time between the race weekend and Pirelli’s launch of the Diablo Rosso II tyre, which we’ll get to sample tomorrow around the streets of Salt Lake City and also at Miller.

After watching a weekend of racing, I can’t wait to get on track! The best news is, it’s supposed to warm up to around 20 degrees tomorrow just in time for our test. We’ll let you know how it goes…