Intentional Destruction of Laboriously Engineered Artifacts.

With Team Hammer taking their bat and ball to another sand pit and Arclight stepping up to take over the heavyweight superbike class, the path seemed clear for Army Of Darkness to perhaps, just maybe, sneak a look up the inside of the middleweight superbike championship. Those thoughts were converted to doubts with the appearance of an advertisement in the pages of this magazine.

For Sale: Arclight Racing’s GSXR 600 endurance superbikes.

Although the thought crossed our minds to purchase them just to keep them out of the hands of the enemy, real world budgets, and even perhaps a misplaced sense of pride, stayed our check writing hands. We had some vain hope that the bikes would end up a regional series in Washington state but, like a superpower dumping cheap AKs into your African nation of choice, the 1998 middleweight field was a fractal for regional conflicts all around the globe. Without weapons the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda would have had less impact on the local residents. Without the superbly prepared machines supplied into middleweight superbike the races might have had less impact on us.

We were expecting the delivery of a 1998 GSXR 600 from our good friend Johann Gastruder but as the weeks drifted by and no bike materialized we realized we would be using our trusty old 1997 for at least the first part of the season. Despite wasting a week not running the Daytona 200 and other such distractions Tim did find the time to make a few improvements on our old nail.

Any time in the pits in an endurance race is time rider’s have to make up on the track. Since it is comparatively safer to do something fast in the pits than something fast on the track Tim focused on shaving our pit time down a few more seconds. With some input from various corners Tim made his own quick change front wheel set up to allow fresh rubber to be installed on the bike in a reasonable 30 seconds. Although 300% longer than a comparable stop by the Yoshimura team at Daytona, it is still only a tenth of the ill fated Harley extended dance mix pit stop. Tim also spent a few nights of machining with the head and pistons of the bike. Growing weary of all his hard work being imitated ("but Tim it’s the sincerest form of flattery") he then refused to tell me what he had done in order to prevent a description appearing in this space. I propose Sodium Pentathol, a polygraph and a 130w driving light.

Roaming thunderstorms cast a pall over the track

Despite spending a fine February day infuriating brake pad companies at Talladega we still didn’t seem to know how to set up the bike. All the turns seemed to be either too slow for one gear or too fast for another and the front end was chattering rather viciously through the fast kink on the back straight. Confronted with such dilemma we responded as any primitive tribe would; we sought divine intervention.

The goat eventually quit kicking and Mark Junge answered our sacrifice with the sacred numerological answer of 15/45. The chattering front end almost took more than a horned mammal to solve as suspension man Max McCallister was forcible thrown from his feet by an errant bolt of lightning. Perhaps we should have known better than to put dagger to ungulate in the bible belt.

Seemingly no worse for wear (and certainly cured of any traces of depression for the foreseeable future) from his 1,000,000,000 joule stimulation, Max revalved the forks and switched out the blown forks seals. We rewarded his efforts by dropping another half-second off the lap times.

The recipients of the Arclight arms transfers did not seem to be encountering any of the same set up problems which we were whining about and instead set about ripping around the track at great rates of speed.

With the light of day fading and with it, the hopes of our rider’s improving on their times, the tireless pit crew arranged their equipment on hot pit lane and rehearsed their dance for the following day. The delicate choreography of stands, air lines, knee pads and wheels was set against a twilight back drop of Canadians dragging a beleaguered GSXR 1100 behind an ATV. With the front wheel mounted atop a low trailer and the rear wheel futilely churning the recalcitrant engine, they completed lap after lap of the hot pit lane. This apocalyptic vision of machine torture ended with a new battery.

"We’ll beat them in the pits" we assured each other around the dinner table. Along with hollow talk of rapid pit stops and respectful consumption of fried pickles AOD was graced with a few tales of previous careers of Michelin tire hombre Buff. Lasting impressions of the very enjoyable evening include A. It costs about $1,500,000 to get third place at the 24 hours of Daytona. B. Buff can build a GT40 replica. C. Buff is a very disturbed individual as evidenced by his beater Toyota pick up truck which sports a 500hp small block Chevy motor under the hood.

Race day.

Although always hectic I usually like to start races. A great deal of endurance racing entails being on the track at the end of the race; invariably at least three of the bikes in the top ten at the first hour mark will not be there by the fourth. Rider’s late in the race receive the satisfaction of climbing the leader board while the first stint usually bears scant fruit. In this case it was a grueling ninety minutes long and the only truly fulfilling moment was slipping by a verbal critic of the AOD brake article, on the brakes.