Race Report

Just the fact that I was actually at the Canadian Nationals in Calgary has a little bit of a story behind it. I was scheduled to go on a roadtrip with Hester Racing comprised of Pikes Peak and Road America AMA Nationals when, just before, I got severely ill. Of all things to happen to a motorcycle road racer, my intestine got clogged up. I ate a T-bone steak that never really made it's way too far. It stayed like that for 10 days. I couldn't hardly sleep from the pain, ate no food, was stuck in the hospital, had about a zillion needles, and lost 10 pounds. Anyway, by the time I was clear of that fiasco I'd already missed my ride to Colorado and Wisconsin. Rather than brave daytime TV any more than I had to, I decided to go to Calgary. To top things off, I'd just traded my 750 built to the limit of AMA Superstock rules for a stock 1000, so I was riding a bike I wasn't used to with bone stock forks and a borrowed shock.

Unfortunately there's not much for track time at the Canadian Nationals if you only race one class. The first practice session I spent the whole time trying to learn which way the track went, and roughly what gear to use in each corner. The forks were garbage in their stock state, and the shock I borrowed was from Matt Zurbuchen's 600 (Matt's even more of a flyweight than me). I was bottoming the shock everywhere. Friday night I stayed up and changed shock springs and forks.

Saturday went a little better. At least I knew which way the track went. The suspension was finally liveable and I started to work my times down to the tail end of the factory guys. I still hadn't put on a new tire for the whole weekend, and was confident that I could shave a lot more time off.

Things clicked even better Sunday morning and I was starting to feel really good about things. I dropped another 0.6 of a second on the same tire that I qualified on the day before. I'd moved my standing well up into the factory boys' category and was totally looking forward to the race. Then the weather came. It was wet, wet, wet, for most of the day after that. We had the bike all set up for a wet race, with intermediates mounted on the spare wheels. Then it dried. We traded the wet tires for the drys and rolled the bike out onto the grid for a dry race. Then it rained. We tried to get the tire guy to change our other rims back to a wet set-up, but it was too late. I got stuck out on a totally wet track with the intermediate tires on. I basically just spun the rear tire to a dismal finish.

I was happy to leave that place. At first while driving away my thoughts were that I'd just never enter Alberta again, but later I came to the realization that I'll feel better if I came back to conquer it. I'm looking forward to going back there now. And I'm going to go back mad.

A special thanks goes out to M-Speed Performance. They bucked up some travel money for me to make it out to Calgary. I also traded the 750 for the 1000 with them, and I think both of us are really happy with the deal.