Winning at Summit Point had ominous implications for the rest of the season. After the broken crankshaft at Road Atlanta had guttered our season finish plans we had decided to have race to race goals instead of measuring our self worth by collecting points. That plan had to be revised when we not only caught back up to the other teams, but actually accumulated more points than many of them and found ourselves in second place again. Although the law of averages does not seem to apply to Arclight, Team Suzuki or Nielsen racing, we do not exempt ourselves from statistical destiny so after our three podium finishes we figured failure was imminent.

The fairing of the Yamaha was the first to show the strain when the bike was augured into the haybales in the infamous tunnel turn. John escaped unharmed and the bike showed remarkable constitution so the excitement did little more than break up the monotony of the afternoon's practice and provide a forum for Tim and Amy to rehearse track side repairs.

The GSXR 600, after running flawlessly for the last three races, was starting to show its mass produced origins. The bike is engineered to be so light and minimalist that some strange things were manifesting. The engine always seems to covered in a light mist of oil regardless of gasket replacement or secondary sealing, the shifter lever linkage wore out (this is 24 hours of running on a new bike) and we were starting to worry about brake rotors but they were still measuring out okay.

If you took the Suzuki school you could follow Jim around and try to figure out his obscure hand signals - Photo George Callender

Although happy with the performance of the EBC pads at Summit we had purchased some Carbone Lorraine pads to evaluate for this weekend. They seemed fine in practice but never developed the outright stopping power of the EBC pads, although they didn't fall apart like the Dunlopads we had tried either.

We were running some decent lap times (at least for us) and, as such, started to worry about the chewed look of the rear Michelin. Walt Schaeffer recommended a switch to a harder compound and a few select suspension revisions which seemed to cure the problem. Although Tim, Cici and Amy can do sub thirty second rear tire swaps, we prefer to just have the tires last a long time; it costs less.

The temperature of the air in Memphis was not proving to be conducive to either low rider or engine temperature. The bike was running at around 210 degrees and was causing some concern although it sounded normal (which is to say rattlely). There was also some new oil showing up on the front of the motor but after it was determined to be leaking from the exhaust ports (don't ask) not the head gasket, we gridded up the bike.

I started. Iannuzzelli (Ten-40) and Prussiano (Arclight) disappeared. Tray Batey hits the hay bales and then the wall but is able to get the TSE bike back to the pits quickly to rejoin the chase. The Carbone Lorraine pads were fading fast under race temperatures leading to higher than expected entrance speeds. Scott from Sharkskinz tried to out brake me into the bus stop but since my bike couldn't stop anyway he didn't quite pull it off and took to the grass briefly. I had pulled a gap on Cycle Speed early on which evaporated with my hydration. In the rider's meeting we were told there would be a red flag for crashes in the tunnel but there were two crashes and no red flags. After an hour on the bike I was starting to fade but not as fast as my brake pads. I ran straight through the M turn twice when I could not get the bike slowed. My biggest worry about running through the grass was picking up a piece of crap in one of the tires and deflating it.

Sam wishes he could stay this close to the 1100 on the straights. -Photo George Callender

All told I pitted the bike in seventh overall and third in class behind Ten-40 and Arclight.

After a 14.8 second pit stop John goes out and, after a horrible start, slowly claws his way back into the race. He found his faster groove but before he could settle in the wheel weights flew off the front rim causing a sensation not unlike severely warped rotors. His times became a little more erratic as he struggled to figure out what is wrong with the bike. A red flag came out and brought all the bikes back into the pits.

John was visibly distraught about the front wheel vibration and was pretty sure the brakes were about to come apart but the nice Metezler guy figured out our true problem from the absences of wheel weight retaining duct tape.

A sight riders hate. Photo-Peggy Fleming

A sight riders love. Photo- Peggy Fleming

John went back out after red flag and took some time to regain his confidence but then turned many fast laps. We were hoping to run out the rest of the race on the fuel we had but to no avail. We pitted with forty minutes left in the race, added fuel, and sent out Jim after the 11.6 second pit stop. Jim retook the track with the luxury of a 70 second lead over fourth place which goes to 100 seconds after Cycle Speed pits. Despite a retreat from the top position we managed to stay on the box taking eight overall and third in class. Ten-40 grabbed a well deserved second which moves them back ahead of us in points but that’s okay because they are such nice guys.

Jim made us appreciate the third all the much more when he told us that on the first lap of his stint he watched the second set of wheel weights pass him down the front straight. Apparently the wheel weight adhesive folks never envisioned a 150 degree rim. Once the weights started to move there wasn't much the duct tape could do about it and off they went. We are contemplating liquid or thermoelectrically cooling our rims but will probably end up with scuffing the paint on the rims to allow more surface area for the adhesive.

AOD with mysterious stranger rumored to be Johann Gastruder.

Apparently not all Ford exhaust seats are made the same. One of the seats on our 351 motor was a little softer than the valve and a lot softer than the rest of the head. After receding about a half an inch the hydraulic lifter bottomed out and the valve refused to seat. This resulted in the dreaded V-8 dead hole syndrome. At 130,000 miles it was time for some resources to be diverted into the transport system. After evaluating various options it was decided to have a local speed shop rebuild the engine. Discussions with the machinist lead us to the conclusion that the motor we wanted was "a basic street rod motor with a torque cam". Yup, that's exactly what we wanted. The bad news came that the heads on the motor were hammered beyond repair and would have to be replaced with new Ford heads with hardened seat. With valves the pair of new heads was $250. We should all be racing cars.

Van motors being sort of big and heavy I had contracted out the removal and installation of the engine. As the days turned into weeks and the 24 hour drive to Texas loomed larger in our immediate future many concerned phone calls were placed to the shop to determine the status of the repairs. This culminated with showing up at the garage to watch the bumper bolts tightened and taking the long way home to break in the new motor. After a 100 mile oil change we harnessed the trailer up to the van and set off to College Station.

Somewhere along the way we decided to take a detour through New Orleans and so, after a 27 hour drive, including lunch and beignets by the Mississippi, we arrived at our hotel replete with a Texas sized bathroom.

I had very low expectations for Texas World but it turned out to be a really nice track with a few challenging high speed turns. The slow stuff is blended well so that there is nothing that breaks up the flow of a fast lap. TWS was hot, but not that much hotter than Summit Point in August. 95 in the shade.

Practice went pretty well and on the 16^th lap of the track I turned a 1:16:10. As the day wore on I got a little faster, but not significantly. It was all about keeping the throttle open going into turn one.

Amy (mislabeled as Chris) awaits her fate. Tray wonders how he got roped into this. Photo Jim Williams

We were once again trying new brake pads, EBC HH. They were fine but had a weird periodic mushy brake lever. The brake lever felt mushy in pits, and then firmed up on the track. After running off at Memphis on the Carbone Lorraines the serious bite and predictable feel of the EBCs were welcome.

At dinner that night the conversations revolved not about the best lines through turns, not about gearing and not about brake markers, but about Amy riding around on the track on the back of a TL1000 with Tray Batey on the throttle. More than one student in the Suzuki School experienced a paradigm shift after watching the two of them enter turn one.

Even Sam's nefarious plot of planting an accomplice on Tray's bike still could not help him pass. - Photo-Jim Williams

On race day Jim was feeling sassy so we sent him out on the bike first. He put us in ninth overall 3^rd in class two laps up on fourth behind local (but national) boys Arclight and Sharkskins. We were staying on the same lap as Sharkskins but just barely. Ten-40 had done themselves no favors by crashing while leaving the pits costing them five laps.

Jim had been running some really fast laps early in his stint but had then slowed some by the end. I was hoping it was fatigue and not tire wear that had precipitated the variation. Many other teams had shortened their stints to help the riders cope with the heat but we thought our only chance of catching some of the faster local teams was by doing the entire race in five stints. We were running 100 minutes at a time.

The heat was pretty bad and the lack of humidity in the air helped to dehydrate much faster than any other race this year. Despite the soaking I gave my helmet, leathers and shirt before taking the track, I was desiccated and hurting after 30 minutes. My confidence was a sine wave on a 20 minute period. I would start to focus on how much my arms hurt and how dry my mouth was and how I was having trouble concentrating and start to contemplate the unthinkable, pulling in early. Then I would picture the end of the race and losing a position by the thirty seconds the extra pit stop would incur and I would suck it in for another lap, comforting myself with the thought that the other riders were suffering as well. I would see the next bike in front of me and chase it down savoring the pass, then the next bike and the next one, getting lost in the joy of competitive riding. Then the blisters on my left hand opened and I would start to think about pulling in early again. I surfed these waves of struggle and ease until the blessed "In" sign came at 100 minutes. I still had a gallon of fuel in the tank.

John's turn in the inferno. By this point we are two laps up on third place and on the same lap as second. After recuperating to the point where I could breath normally I am treated to local friend Jennifer driving me around to different corners to watch John romp. He seemed to be getting on fine when I watched him throw his hand up after sailing through the fast kink in the back.

My heart fell as my stomach rose and they met somewhere, agreed on a course of action, and wedged themselves in my throat. John got a helpful push back to the pits but even in the time it took to get the bike back to the pits our lead over third was gone. John said it quit with a bang and suspected a top end, piston/ rod problem. Various folks gathered around to watch the ensuing chaos and offered bits of advice including worried onlookers that advised not to attempt to resuscitate the bike for fear of causing more motor damage.

I suggested we just throw the bike in the trailer and go home but Tim refused to capitulate. He pulled the carbs to look at the valves, and all is okay. He pulled the valve cover, and all is okay, drained the oil, all is okay. Tim suggests that maybe the problem is not mechanical but electrical. Checked for spark, none, swaped black box, no spark. The fuse box was staring me right in the face so I pulled out the ignition fuse. It was blown.

Not worrying too much about what caused the blown fuse we hurriedly buttoned the bike back up and retook the track an hour behind. Jim went out and rode valiantly, pitting with an hour left in the race. For the last hour of the race I concentrated on passing as many bikes as I could but the blown fuse and resulting delay cost us the third place finish and subsequent second place in points. The mood was decidedly grim for the 27 hour drive home.

"Van" is not a synonym for "Beauty" as an adjective to "Sleep". P-Amy Pickering

In the interest of reliability I had left the stock ignition switch and after a few months it had begun to feel really gritty. Tim thought maybe the ignition switch was causing the fuse problem and so I spent the time to replace it with a toggle. The Suzuki ignition switch is an interesting window into the Japanese mind. There are six wires running into it. Two of those wires require a 100ohm resistor between them. No resistor, no spark. This was done in the interest of preventing the hot-wiring of the bike and demonstrates almost no understanding about how bikes are stolen. They are either thrown in a van or the lock is forced. By not mentioning the resistor in their manual Suzuki has guaranteed that the required resistor will frustrate only racers.

To test the hypothesis that the bike was now repaired I took it up to a local track day at Summit Point. The bike ran without drama for five hours. A little tragedy was provided by a friend levering his rear wheel off the deck in turn one leaving me no option but to run over him. It was one of those things that will be comedy at some point but his concussion and un-diagnosed broken shoulder had us a little worried at the moment. Safety Note: DO NOT LEAVE FRIENDS IN JEFFERSON HOSPITAL NEAR SUMMIT POINT!

With the Suzuki running well it looked like an end of year grudge match at Road Atlanta. Jim wanted to get a jump on the weekend and took the YZF down to sneak in a little extra practice. He practiced a number of slick moves under the bridge including washing the front end and pummeling the bike into the haybales. He suffered some knee damage and effectively took himself out of contention for the race.

The WERA GNF is exciting for the pageantry but the excitement 'caused by populated pits also means a curtailed practice schedule. We missed some of our limited practice when our new ignition switch shorted out to itself. We replaced it with the one off the crippled YZF.

To shore up my flagging ego Amy clocked some practice laps on the competition and discovered that our times were very competitive with the other teams in our class, with the exception of Arclight.

Hopelessly off line and using Beelzebub as a break marker, Sam tries to hold off the 1100s. -Photos George Callender

I started the race. Many of the bikes we wanted to beat were gridded ahead of me at the start but I was feeling bold and passed Sharkskinz before turn one, passed Cycle Speed on the first lap and set after Ten-40. My forward progress got balked by the Tapeworks 1100 but, feeling vindictive, I somehow made the under-the-bridge-on-the-brakes pass stick and set off after the Roswell 750. Dave Harman was riding well and it took me seven laps to finally make a desperate turn seven pass but it cut the gap between me and Ianuzzelli (Ten-40) to 7 seconds. The B & S Racing 600 caught up to me and we started dicing, lap times going to low 30s and we were looking for 29s soon. My front end started chattering but its not too scary if I stayed on the throttle through the turns.

30 minutes into the race I've managed to build up a fifty second lead on Cycle Speed and Sharkskinz and am still only 7 seconds down on Ten-40. Traditionally if we can stay close to Ten-40 on the track we can eventually beat them in the pits. This is all going through my head when the fuse blows coming out of turn five.

Bike dies. All of the bikes I spent the last 30 minutes fighting my way past march by while I stand in the dirt with sweat running into my eyes.

The crash truck came and gave me a lift back to the pits. Tim and the crew scrambled to fix the bike but my dejection over the loss of the race could not be overcome by the frenzy in the pits. I suspected that whatever had stopped the bike this time was not going to be rectified at the track, and even if it had, I was not in the mood to troll around for a sixth place finish. After attempts to defibrillate the Suzuki failed, the crew pronounced the bike officially brain dead and I walked away from our pit before I expressed my frustration with an inappropriate display.

Sam contemplates an inappropriatedisplay of frustration - Photo Jim Williams

I took my time walking around Road Atlanta letting the defeat sink in. After a thirty minute cool down period I walked back to the pit to grab some tools needed to make the crashed YZF rollable, and thus start our preparations for a retreat. I strolled back up to the paddock where our YZF had been parked only to find that three local miscreants (white, with shaved heads) with a dark pick up truck had decided to save us the trouble of fixing the crash damage by stealing the bike.

Although I hoped that it was a joke I knew that the bike was gone. This is a motorcycle that Tim had spent countless hours fortifying the transmission, porting the head, making quick release fitting, hand sanding a fiberglass airbox. Literally hundreds of hours. Had I arrived on the scene as their hands were full loading our hard work into their truck it would have been the perfect vehicle for my frustrations. But I didn't, and the bike was gone. That bike represented a $9,000 loss to the team that we can ill afford.

At that moment I understood why the courts won't allow clinically depressed people to disconnect their own life support. I felt betrayed by the machinery and the community. I would have quit there and then but…how do you quit racing? Racing is the constant struggle. To surrender to the hydra of adversity is to surrender one's life.

Epilogue:

As of November 13^th there was no word on the Yamaha; hope springs eternal.

We found the electrical problem on the Suzuki. The harness is not well insulated in many places and one of them had chaffed through on the frame. I would have gladly offered Suzuki an extra dollar for the bike if it had meant some additional electrical tape. I stripped out the wiring harness, cut and pasted as I saw fit, then wrapped the whole thing up with lots of additional chafe proofing.

At the end of October Amy, Tim and I packed up the trailer with the Suzuki, their street bikes and a few friends and drove down to Daytona to assist with the Team Suzuki Brand Riding School.

Amy dragged her knee for the first time. Tim saw 160mph on his FZR 1000 and all the bikes ran without so much as a hiccup. Following them around on the banking and hearing their excited anecdotes of the horseshoe and the kink and then the chicane, stripped away some of the disillusionment of the past few months. Despite mechanical failures, theft and death the process is as important as the goals. We'll try to get the money together for next year.