Race Report

It's really too bad when having a motor blow up on you and getting taken out by a lapper seems like just a regular old race weekend. Unfortunately, that seems to be the norm.

Early Friday afternoon my motor dropped an exhaust valve and that was that. I rented a stock street motor that was down quite a bit on horsepower, and used that for the remainder of the weekend. I ended up qualifying fairly well (7th) for the 750SS race with the stocker motor, so I was feeling pretty good going into that.

At Pikes Peak the starting grid is actually off of the pit lane. I remembered this being a problem last year as the first turn in the race is actually a turn that you never get to do in practice. I made sure I started my warm-up lap from my grid position so that I could get a feel for how hard I could run it into that turn off of the start. It paid off as I got a great jump from the middle of the second row. Me and Chris Ulrich made contact in the first turn but I stayed on it and held him off for a lap. At the start of the second lap my bike got a little out of shape on the brakes and it cost me 4 positions. Ulrich, Ortega, Dugan, and Meiring slipped past. I repassed Meiring into the very next corner and closed up on Dugan the corner after that. I got the drive on Dugan heading onto the straight and managed to slip by even with my weak motor. 3 turns later I was past Ortega and set chase after Ulrich and Lupo. Chris Ulrich was on a charge and was past Lupo before I could close the gap to the two of them. He checked out after that and ended up on the podium. The group behind me couldn't hold the pace and dropped back around the length of the straightaway as me and Lupo took turns making time on each other with him always in the lead. Our battle for 5th place lasted nearly the entire race until on the last lap Lupo had enough of a gap on me that I would have to risk it all in order to catch him, so I decided to play it cool and cruise to a safe 6th place. I blew past a lapper on the brakes going into the hard braking turn 3. Just as I was about to let off the brakes and bend it in, I heard the unmistakable sound of fibreglass on pavement. I caught a glimpse of a front wheel laying on its side on a collision course with my line. I tried to stand it up to avoid it but there was nothing I could do. This weenie was trying to pass me back in the same corner that I just LAPPED him in!! You can guess how pissed I was about that. Even though I had a gap of around 4 seconds to the two bikes of Dugan and Ortega behind me, they both swept past as I was fighting to keep my bike off of its side. I never let go of my clutch, to keep the bike running, and since it went down on the left side I assumed that there would be no shifter left on it. I picked it up and just spun the rear tire through the dirt until I got to the pavement. The whole infield I just kept it in second (the gear I crashed in) while I prayed that I had a shifter come the straightaway run to the flag. I was prepared to shift with my hand but my foot found it (even though it was now in a strange place) and I made it to the flag with that lap being 16 seconds slower than my slowest flying lap, and it cost me two places. I finished 8th, moving me into 9th place in the points standings.

The Superbike race on Sunday was a bit of a let down. I took a chance on a type of tire that I had never used before. It was a bad mistake and the traction was way less than what I had been running with for the rest of the weekend. I should have had the rear suspension a lot softer to compensate and the result was very poor grip at max lean over any kind of irregular surface. My times were about 2 seconds off what they were in the Supersport race. I finished a dismal 22nd.

The motor's getting wrenches spun on it as I type, parts have been red labelled all across the country, and we're hoping I'll have some horsepower under my ass for next weekend's FUSA race. I've got the best people in the country working on things for me so I'm confident that if it's possible, I'll be in the race. I've pretty much convinced myself to race the R6 in the Sportbike class as well. I haven't ridden a 600 all year and I think it might be fun.

Anyway, hopefully my next race report is going to be full of a bunch of successful ranting. I could use that for a change. I want to say a huge thank you to all of my sponsors for sticking with me while my roadracing world seems to tumble down around me. I've been plagued with occurrence after occurrence of "out-of-my-control" bad luck situ's, and I just have to say that I have more respect for the people that support the race effort than I ever have. You guys rule, you know who you are.