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June 25-26, 2011: Bowling Green, KY AMRA Summer Nationals |
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During our short down time, we altered the carburetor a bit, so we decided to go ahead and take advantage of more test and tune passes on Friday when the opportunity arose. We were joined by good friend and mentor Nate Thompson of Super V Cycles, who helped with some of the tuning decisions for this racing weekend.
We ran ten passes on Friday, the last four being pretty fruitful and we felt confident we would make good use of our test and tune session on qualifying day the next morning. We never got beyond 112 miles per hour, though, and we were running 118 in Norwalk just 3 weeks prior. By the end of the day, though, we were consistently in the 11.50s. |
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Lucas Oil products and Z1R Helmets showcased in half of Team Half Fast’s pit area. |
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Our DEI display at pitside (our trailer & RV are pictured in the background) |
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Chip at the hit of the throttle during Qualifying |
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Saturday greeted us with a bright and sunny gorgeous morning. At 10 am it was already 85 degrees. By the afternoon, we were at 92 with a heat index of 101. OUCH!!! Water, and lots of it, kept us going all day long. If you’ve read about our Norwalk outing two weeks back, you’ll know this all sounds familiar. We chased the tune-up as much as we chased the shade the entire day—we made a total of 14 passes, and the right tune-up for the weather and our carburetor eluded us. Our fastest run of the day was an 11.242, but that was during E. That would have been great for our PE. The closest we got to an 11.50 was an 11.519—but that was, again, in E, not in SE. y time we tried to slow the bike down, it went faster. The whole day was like that. Our first qualifying run was in E class, and we ran a little too fast for our SE number, so we slowed the bike down, causing our first run in SE to be an 11.733—which was our slowest run of the day in the first SE pass. Our other two SE passes were breakouts at 11.376 and 11.290. At the end of the qualifying, we really believed we didn’t even qualify in either PE or SE, although we thought we may have managed an alternate spot in PE. As it turned out, we qualified in BOTH classes. |
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Above: Zena, David Stanley’s dog (from Grey Ghost Racing) Below: Nate picks a spot for Chip on race day |
Nate Thompson (Super V Cycles) walks out to pick a good launch spot for Chip, who waits for fellow racer to do his burnout |
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Race-day Sunday— the morning was very warm, and the temperature was decidedly cooler. It stayed high 70s—low 80s all day long. The first round of eliminations was for the PE Class (10.90). We got the win light for that one, but it wasn’t pretty. We ran an 11.685 against Burris, who broke on his run and ran a 14.363. First round eliminations of ET and SE didn’t go as well. In SE, a rider error (double-bumped a shift) gave us an 11.658 against Dennis Roberts’ 11.582. In E, we dialed an 11.31 and broke out with an 11.258. Our second round of PE, we ran our lowest ET of the weekend—an 11.230. It wasn’t fast enough to win against Dennis Roberts (this is the 2nd race in a row where we had the same opponent in two different classes). Dennis ran an 11.096. We did have fun, though, and we had a chance to watch some of the pros run. See you next at Martin, Michigan in July!
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