Monday, October 1, 2012

Cuddebackville, AKA OVRP

We had another pretty great Sunday of racing at Oakland Valley Raceway yesterday.
Hannah came down with me to race the XR100, Scott came up with Hugh from 6th Street Specials.
It was a smaller turnout this time, but the racing was still great.

Scott raced in the Vintage Sportsman class, and this time was out gunned by the other guys. His rear tire is absolutely shot, and in this class you need to have good equipment.


The groove was pretty narrow, and obviously hard to stay on.

Hannah had a good feature race, despite problems with the bike during practice and the heat race. She ran out of gas in the heat race even though there was plenty of gas sloshing around in the tank. Then I remembered that we'd had similar issues before, and always raced with the petcock in the "reserve" position. Problem solved.

She took an easy win in class!

I had a rather poor showing. The best I could do in the Vintage Heavy class was a distant 4th behind Scott. I figured I'd have a better shot at a trophy in the 50+ class, but I had a weak heat race and had to start on the second row. I had a decent start from there and worked past a few riders in the first lap to settle into 3rd. Then I got a little impatient and tried to sneak under the 2nd place rider coming out of T4, but I ran out of room.




The track crew had put cones on the track racing surface in an effort to get us up higher on the track, and the cones in T3 and T4 were spaced kind of awkwardly, they almost made a short straight out of what has been a nice flowing line, turning it into a two apex turn. I wasn't thrilled with it, but I guess everybody else had to deal with it too.

Anyway, on about the 4th lap, coming out of T4, my front wheel hit the rear wheel of the guy in front of me. He had finished the turn a little earlier than I could, and I got catapulted off the bike in a pretty vicious high side crash. It took me a little while to recover from that, and I took a ride off the track in a golf kart, feeling embarrassed and beat to crap as well. It took me a good 15 minutes before I had the energy to look at the damage to the bike, and I was disheartened to see broken and bent spokes, a crushed exhaust pipe and mangled hanger.

A bad way to end the season for me, but maybe an opportunity to make it a better race bike for next season.





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