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Saturday felt like I should have just hit myself in the head again and stayed home, but adding a race on Sunday got me giggling again.
Saturday practice was slow as usual, but with my new Woodcraft rearsets I could finally drag knee without grinding footpegs and boots at the same
time.
Saturday, race 3 Am GTL:
.I got a great start from row 3 and was first into T1. I think I stayed in first through the first lap, then spent the next few laps fading back to 4th? place with laps in the 1:26's before a red flag and restart. I was sitting on the grid waiting to be the holeshot hero again until a rider behind me starts yelling and pointing at the tail of my SV, which is belching electrical smoke. I roll it off to the left, make sure there are no flames and hop the wall to watch the rest of the field go roaring by. Couldn't retrieve it until GTL was over so I also missed my back-to-back race 4 as well. The regulator/rectifier had fried itself but fortunately hadn't affected anything else. I got some quick advice to remove it and run a total loss system off the battery, then went to registration to beg. They let me add race 8 LWGP at the back of the grid along with LWSS on Sunday.
Hanging out with the rest of my pit mates back in the infield as race 7 ended, we talked about the usual break between races 7 & 8 to service the corner workers and how we hated showing up early on pre-grid only to be sent back, as happened on Saturday. Turns out an unsurprising failure of the infield PA coincided with the calls for race 8 and/or an announcement that there would be no break, so four of us were scrambling when we saw the LWGP bikes go out for the warm-up lap. Three of us were held at pre-grid to start the race from pit lane and my Saturday fiasco continued. The remainder of the race was a frustrating attempt to get my head back in it, but the tight pack of experts buzzing by on both sides in the early laps was at least entertaining. Finished way back with slow lap times again.
Sunday, race 3 Am LWSS:
I was gridded in 2A and anxious to shoot between my pit mates #398 Bruce Marshall on pole and #773 Doug Santerre in 1B into T1. I wheelied the launch, lost a bit getting it down and the gap was closing by the time I got there, so I moved outside Doug into T1 and almost alongside Bruce into T1a before I backed off. The rest of the race was just awesome playtime, either shadowing Bruce's back tire or getting back onto it after I missed shifts three times (an updated shift star is overdue).
Bruce had me on the drive out of most turns, but I could have reached out and touched him many times into T1, T6-7-8, T11, and T12. It got even more fun as we caught up with Novice traffic, but we never got held up much as we passed them simultaneously on both sides or in close tandem. I was waiting too patiently for Bruce to make a mistake when the white flag flew, but there was enough traffic that I couldn't make a clean move. A novice in T12 was my last chance. I held back a bit in T11, went for an early but outside drive out of T12 as Bruce cut inside. The novice drifted wide, I cut back inside but was gaining ground on Bruce and pulled alongside as we crossed start/finish to take..................2nd place by only a few feet, with the fast lap of the race: 1:23.8, a second off my PB but at least back in the ballpark.
The most fun I've ever had losing a race to be sure, and that one race made up for the agony of Saturday, as mild as it was compared to what many other racers went through.
A big thanks to my infield pit mates and wives for the company and troubleshooting: Link, Doug, Tyler, Sal, Brad, Bruce, Mike, Dave, etc.
LWSS start:
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Originally Posted by ThunderCycle
