|
WHAT'S NEW WITH CAMCHAIN?
We Got A New Bike!
Earlier in the season we killed our primary motor at a Summit ET series race. With only a week to go 'til the Division 7 race held at Famoso Dragstrip in Bakersfield,Ca, I was faced with a tough decision...try to race the JUNK YARD DAWG with our "little" back-up motor that is very much a "spin or bog" deal...OR spend my whole year's sponsor budget on a used TRAC DYNAMICS pro stock bike from a guy in Pheonix,Az. Well the deal was just too good to pass up. The deal was put together in two days and my dad,"TUFFY" and I were off to Arizona.Eleven hours later we arived at Jeff Peters' house to pick up the bike and a ton of extras he was throwing in also. JACKPOT!!! Well I gave him the green and I took ole' BLUE. twelve hours later it was 9:00 am thursday morning...24 before the first round of qualifying!
The bike had sat for awhile so friends had "borrowed" some of the electronics from it so there was quite a bit of work to be done on it before it was track ready.
We arrived at the track just in time to tech and RUN to the lanes for the first round. And what a run it was!! It was my first time ever SITTING on a car tire bike let alone RIDING one! It left pretty good, 1.16 60 footer rode the bar into third and headed hard to the left wall. That in itself isn't so bad, except I was IN the left lane. At half track I was between the painted line and the guard rail at 135 mph! ABORT ABORT ABORT!!! After listening to several people we made changes for each round with no improvement. Next round, Eliminations, and not one clean pass!!!
There was 27 bikes entered. To list a few riders, Karen (perfect reaction time) Stoffer, #4 Jay "RODZILLA" Matthews,#2 Gary "OUT THERE"Oaks, 4 years in a row #1 plate holder Sean Conner, Chris Rivas, Greg "Best Engineered" Liskey, just to name a few.
Well as luck would have it, I drew Conner in the first round. GREAT! He dialed an 8.94 so I did too! My best pass up to that point was a 9.29! He treed me by .03 and i picked him up at the 1000 foot mark when he had some electric problems and got him! Well we made it all the way to the finals as the emotional favorite and with ALL KINDS of help from Gary Stoffer whose wife Karen's bike melted a piston in the last qualifier. I was racing a guy on a stretched Hyabusa running 9.60's all day. I staged and he didn't, I sat there on the 2-step for 9 seconds before he staged. When the lights came down he cut HIS best light of the meet .424 and I cut my worst .525. Thre margin of victory was .087 seconds.
That was quite a day, let alone the fact we debuted our new bike with those kind of results. God I love racing!!
|
