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March 26-27, 2011: Brrrr-Bowling Green, KY AMRA Spring Nationals |
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March 2011. My weather notes for Saturday say, simply, “Cold, yucky, cold, windy.” And it was! It was 50 degrees when we made our first run, and it never got much warmer.
Even for the Spring Nationals, which is often a slightly lower turnout than in other national events, the turnout was light this weekend. There were 35 bike entries in “E” class, 23 bikes in SE (11.50) Class, and only 12 bikes in PE (10.90) Class.
We spun a bit coming off the line on our first Time Trial—running an 11.340. Our second run spun worse and we didn’t hook at all and our ET, as would be expected, dropped down to 11.42—which is the wrong direction for preparation for our 10.90 class. For the third round, we switched to the left lane and it hooked and we ran an 11.182! Much better! |
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Above, Chip sporting one of his new helmets from Z1R. This design is the Venom Headcase—and it is SO cool! This picture doesn’t do it justice. Check out the Headcase helmet on Z1R’s site. |
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Above, Chip preparing to stage while Pro-Mod’s Mark Colburn (far left) and Official Starter (middle) look on. |
Above, SE’s Erik Nelson of Shoestring Racing prepares to stage. |
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For our remaining time trials, we played around a little with jetting, trying to tune for the cold air, but the track wasn’t tight enough at first to give us consistent 60-foots. By the time qualifying started, it was all the way up to 53 degrees! The track was tighter, too, and our 60-foots were far more consistent, and better. Our first round of qualifying was for the SE class. We ran a stellar 11.515! After this round, we were the #1 Qualifier. The #1 went away in the second round, but we were able to hold on to the #2 for the day. Qualifying ended at 3 pm due to rain after the 2nd round. We all had hope that the weather would work on out and clear up for morning racing. |
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Team Half Fast’s Chip Sutinen (left lane) and Shoestring Racing’s Erik Nelson launch during qualifying. |
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Race-day Sunday— the morning was cold and the day got colder. It started out at fifty-three degrees at 10:30, and by 12:30 in the afternoon it was 43. Brrrrrrr. In our morning Time Trials, we hit an 11.510—we were READY to race!!! The good people of AMRA managed to fit in the last Qualifying round that we missed yesterday because of the weather. We ran an 11.013 in that third qualifying run in PE (the 10.90 class), which was good enough to land us the #6 qualifying spot! We held on to the #2 position in SE. The first round of eliminations was for the SE Class (11.50). Our opponent was no where near Chip at the top end, so Chip did everything he could to slow the bike down to ensure against a break out. We happily took the win light. We were far underpowered for the PE Class, but we gave it everything we had and went out in the first round with an 11.414. Andy Horn got the win on that one. For our “E” class, we dialed an 11.49. Our bike, Snappy, decided to get a burst of energy and Chip, despite our efforts to de-tune and slow it down for the 11.49, broke out and ran an 11.295. Too bad we didn’t have that number for the PE run! Our second round of eliminations in SE (the only class we were still in) brought us another win! Chip skillfully wheel-raced our opponent and took the stripe for the win with an 11.571! We’re going to the third round! The cold took its toll on Snappy, though. If we had realized how bad of a cold, maybe we could have given him some cold medicine. The bike sneezed at the hit of the throttle and stalled out. With all of that, we still ran a 13.634. The fastest re-start I have ever seen! All tolled, we made 21 passes this weekend. Not bad for our first event of the season, and far, far better than the March event last year (to see the slide show of the carnage, click here). See you in 2 weeks in Reynolds, Georgia! |
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We look forward to seeing our friends again in June here at Bowling Green’s Beechbend Raceway Park. Look for more updates on our Main Gallery Page. |
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