ENTROPY BITES BACK

Indy Cycle Jam:

Social psychologists have a term they bandy around when taking time off from designing advertising campaigns selling fungible commodities. This term is "group think". Group think occurs anytime the pool of intellect gets too shallow and all the analytical fish start swimming in the same direction. The two classic case studies of group think are: 1. The Bay of Pigs Invasion. 2. Army Of Darkness electrical trouble shooting at the Indy Cycle Jam in 1996.

As an endurance team we value consistency so we invariably miss practice due to reoccurring electrical misfires. It would have been completely unbearable to sit in the pits and watch other teams rehearse except we had brought along Dominique, our French massage practitioner, and somehow the waiting was not so bad. While we were not having tension converted into drool we group thought our way into believing that our problems stemmed from the wiring harness I had made for the bike. I am always more than willing to believe that malfunction is due to my malfeasance so rather than defend my wiring harness from the slings and arrows of my doubting teammates we approached Jim Roth once again and requested the use of anything copper off of his bike.

Jim Roth, being the terribly sweet guy that he is, graciously handed over his YZF 600 and Tim swiftly swapped wiring harnesses only to find that my maligned electrical skills were, in fact, adequate for the tasks and the new harness solved not a thing. Once again, Roth's entire ignition system was transplanted to our machine and, with the misfire banished, we gratefully took our first practice laps of the three day event, thirty minutes before the start of the four hour race.

At the beginning of the season I wrote of our decision to contract out our suspension setup to Lindemann Engineering. The notion made me nervous as the aftermarket suspension guys are always a little vague about what they do (understandably) but the forks he sent back felt great all season. The rear shock, however, was a different story altogether. We sent him the Fox that came on the bike for fresh oil and whatever else they do to them while they have them open. We sent along a selection of springs asking for the most appropriate one to be installed. He picked a FZR 600 spring at 750lbs.

We didn't think much about it for the first couple of races since the motor blew up in the first and we took second in the second but occasionally one of us would remark about how spine jarringly stiff the back end of the bike felt. We dutifully turned the preload adjuster and both the blue and red knobs but no relief was ever found. A little research found that the stock YZF spring is a 475lbs, quite a bit away from a 750lbs. We installed the 475 at one track and the bike felt better right away (although I still have lingering doubts about the valving in the shock being set up for a 750lbs spring).

Indianapolis Raceway Park has a bump of Nelson's Ledges proportions at the apex of turn one. The YZF was throwing me out of the seat at that point. A few laps did not make it any better but a red flag brought a break in practice and we were able to switch to a 400lbs spring. This smoothed the journey through turn one considerably (as well as the bit where you go through the parking lot) and made us feel sort of snazzy since, to our knowledge, changing spring rates at the track had previously been something only good teams did.

John Donnelly started us out and looked like he was having a good time hanging with a freight train of 600s for almost an hour. A disintegrating Kawasaki on the back stretch brought out the red flags and the bikes into the pits. John's comments about the bike were only positive and I took the grid with confidence.

The name ROTH on the back of the leathers in front of me sitting astride the Royale (as in "with cheese") F2 distracted me slightly, but not completely, from the water dripping from the overflow bottle under the F2's seat.

Green flag.

Indy is one of those multipurpose facilities with an oval, a drag strip and the road race course. I can't speak for the oval or the drag strip but the road course is a little cobbly. The last turn onto the front straight runs between bleachers and is known as "The Tunnel" . This turn points you out onto the front straight aimed more or less directly at a concrete wall. To ease our transition from the turn onto the straight WERA had, justifiably, placed a line of cones down the middle of the track to force us into a later exit.

On the fourth lap or so I entered the Tunnel on the tail of our electrical savior Jim Roth. The Royale F2's head gasket had gone the way of all gaskets and errant compression gasses were quickly evacuating the cooling system as a stream of water. This water was just to the inside of me, and, as we crossed onto the rubber coated drag strip my Michelins began to protest at the H2O interfering with their direct contact with the track surface. I attempted to stay to the outside of the watered part of the track, but, as Jim Roth is a talented rider, he took us all the way to the edge of the cones, with me on the outside.

I must have run over about four or five of the little buggers before I cleared the other side. Trying to put that little episode behind me I tucked into the bubble and set off after the three bikes which had decided to not follow my unorthodox line. Imagine my surprise at the end of the straight when the right side of the fairing folded up at 140 mph and pressed forcefully on the front brake lever. Tim's lower fairing mounts had not been designed to run through highway construction zones and had failed upon impact. I did not dwell on that logical progression as I desperately kicked at the fairing in an attempt to unlock the front wheel before my turn-in point had passed.

Once through turn one I thought it prudent to remove the offending fiberglass before rejoining the race and pulled into the grass on the inside of the track to remove the damaged bodywork. Unfortunately the bike stalled while I was tearing at the lowers and I had to bump start the pig, on slicks, in grass. This all felt like it was taking long enough for the checked flag to be coming out but all told it was more like 30 seconds. The remains of the fairing were flapping too much to prudently continue so I grudgingly pitted for a quick fairingectomy. Two minutes is an eternity in an endurance race so we were effectively out at that point. It was scant comfort to see the Royale bike retire 30 minutes later..

Putnam

Before we left for Putnam we went back to the Battley Cycles dyno in an attempt to track down which one of our ignition components was either residing in, or heading, south. We borrowed a friend's street YZF 600. This was a particularly stupid move on my part as I leant him my newly purchased FZR 1000 to ride to work which was promptly stolen making the cost of the dyno time that evening about $2,500 an hour.

Despite the loss of my new commuter bike, Tim and I strapped the street YZF to the dyno and proceeded to swap electrics off our bike hoping to find the component responsible for so much of our season's misery. Each component tested out good. The wiring harness tested good. It all worked, just not together, on our bike. Battley Dyno Dude Chris Sanders suggested we solder every connection on the harness and remove the few remaining electrical components which were not vital to the operation of the motorcycle. I spent a few hours soldering and, just to be certain, swiped my friend's ignition box as well.

The downside to running Michelins is the availability problem. If Michelin has a really good tire, they don't import many of them. As it was we had used up our supply of our favorite fronts and had to mount up our reserve compound for the race.

Putnam was probably the first race of the year that the bikes have run as planned from the initial practice. Consequently we were running competitive times in practice and actually looked set to have a good race. Jim had a lackadaisical start but soon was down into the 1:17s which had him steadily overtaking our faster starting competitors and was soon in third behind Excel who was following 10-40. The Excel rider was goaded to faster times by a pit board reading "Army".

Our Forrest Kerns transatlantic-sized gas tank kept Jim out for 90 minutes and he pitted in third just seconds behind Excel and 10-40. He came in fast and pulled to a stop only to sit motionless on the motorcycle delaying our re-fueling. After an eternal second he declared "help me off the bike" and we unceremoniously dumped him on the pavement. He had been tagging his knee on Putnam's high curbs and his left leg had gone completely numb. I erroneously attributed his slower last ten laps (all in the high 18 low 19 range) to his insensate leg.

I take to the track and struggle. I can't get below 1:19 without big slides. Jim is a little insufferable when he gets in the fastest laps so I continue to push even though the bike is not too comfortable with the pace. My crew is growing a little testy with my slow laps and start to hold out the "-" board in an attempt to motivate me. "I'm trying" I think as I slowly chip away at the "-33" 'til I can see the fluorescent 10-40 bike an enticing three seconds ahead.

(Amy checks for concussion.)

Poetry By Bobby Jones

I still haven't figured out if I ran over something in the track, entered the turn a little too fast or just ignored the warnings from a complaining front tire but as I entered turn five my chances of passing 10-40 evaporated along with the right engine cover. I hit the ground before I had really figured out that I had crashed and tumbled about eight times before I remembered to pull in my hands and feet. Figure skater style, my rotations accelerated and I was an object lesson of Newton's Laws before I came to rest on the grass outside of the track. I wiggled my toes and fingers before hauling my bruised butt away from the edge of the track.

Some gas was dripping out of the carburetor overflow tubes so the corner workers wouldn't let me ride the bike back to the pits although the point was moot since the rotational G forces had robbed me of my spectacles. A corner worker recovered my glasses at about the same time the crash truck showed up. Remarkably we were able to drive the crash truck back to the pits without the fascist Putnam track gnome reprimanding us. All in all we lost about twenty minutes and I had put us out of contention for the second race in a row. As faint consolation, John showed me his burned and abraded boot from a slide in turn one which he had to save on his leg. As expected, Jim was insufferable but John and I knew we had been riding a different bike.

I licked my wounds rock climbing in Utah with Amy while Tim rebuilt the bike, again.

Memphis

It is roughly 900 miles from DC to Memphis, Tennessee. Through a love of efficiency I invited 125 GP racer Chris Pyles and his girlfriend Jeanette Wallace to share the ride south: through a love of sleep, they accepted. A hurricane was due to make landfall directly inline with our route to Tennessee but through careful planning and execution we were on our way with plenty of time to beat the storm.

The distinctive sound of metal scraping on interstate indicated that our ETA in Memphis had just been postponed. The soft tinkling noise was not a loose safety chain, as we all hoped, but rather a leaf spring on the trailer dragging on the highway.

At 7:30pm on a Thursday night in a small town 75 miles north of Durham we did what any self respecting endurance team would do; kluged.

The two hour delay (the pick-up truck helper spring mounted backwards took a little time to get just right) placed a decent sized hurricane between us and Memphis. Driving out onto the deserted interstate with a questionably rigged trailer might not have been the dumbest thing we ever did (aside from racing in general) but it has to rank up there. The sky was lit with purple flares which, after some study, we determined were power transformers exploding. Often the rain would pass us on the highway despite our 75mph. The plastic construction barrels did not have enough weight to resist the wind and we were soon weaving through an endless chicane of yellow and orange. The oak tree down across one lane of the highway seemed to support the radio's report of ten dead in the town through which we were currently driving. The deluge was too strong to open a door on the van but the 38 gallons of fuel carried us through to the other side of the storm without requiring a fuel stop.

Although racing seemed fairly remote while we were getting through the storm, once the weather cleared the anxiety in the van increased as the thought of missed practice began to replace concern for survival. As luck would have it, a tired Suzuki oiled a fair portion of the track early in the day and our delay had only resulted in one practice being wasted.

Memphis ain't much to look at as race tracks go so to add a little spice the last turn on the track is lined with hay bales on both the inside and outside with cones lining the exit. With memories of Indy dancing in my head I made sure to never be on the outside of an overheating bike through that turn. The bales did make the last turn significantly safer than it had been in previous years with the added attraction of being able to tag the bales with one's shoulder as one enters the turn.

It was also hot.

Jim had injured his ankle jumping off a rock the week before and, although he practiced, we took his stint away from him for the race and told him it was for his own good. John and I were both close to the pace but still couldn't find the last second we needed to run up front. The bike ran well up top but was sort of gutless getting out of some of the corners and it was geared a little tall to boot which is, of course, our own fault.

I whined about riding on worn tires and got to start the race. Matt from Excel racing (YZF600) and I hooked up for a wonderful hour long dice for fifth (in class) which was brought to a close by a red flag. Mike took over the riding chore from Matt and John replaced me on our YZF. In turns out that the Excel bike was currently making about 15 more bhp than ours and Mike put it to good use quickly annihilating all the middleweight superbike field at the restart. The glory was short lived as, reminiscent of other YZFs I wouldn't care to mention, the top end turned out to be too sexy for the bottom end and the motor expired along with Excel's championship opportunity.

The first hour's excitement had proved to be a bit much for my delicate constitution and I tried to eat and rehydrate while John did an admirable job of holding us in 4^th place. Plano had long since established a convincing lead on the rest of the middleweight field which, considering the technological sophistication of their potato gun, is to be expected.

Needless to say the right side of the rear tire was worn considerably when John pitted and handed the bike over to me. The sight of the tattered, dot-less slick weighed a bit on my mind as did the ninety minutes (what's that, five sprints?) of race which said tire was supposed to complete.

I backed off my previous pace a second or two and played with the rear wheel slides through the hay bales while Tim and Amy figured out where we were in the race. Eventually a board showed up on the wall indicating a 34 second lead over fifth place. I was making my best approximations of how much race time was left and balancing my desire to run from my pursuer with my desire to not wad the bike from pushing too hard on worn tires a la Putnam.

With what I figured to be forty-five minutes left in the race I still had a 30 second lead but the presence of the distinctively colored 10-40 F3 spinning its rear sprocket helplessly on its sheared bolts (see part one of this series concerning Performance Machine wheels, cush drives and fatigued bolts) put us in third and dangled the podium carrot in front of Royale's Wade Buffington nary thirty seconds behind. My lead quickly began to diminish and I upped the pace to a sub lurid slide level and paid close attention to my pit board. The trick to riding off one's pace is to remember to be ruthless in passing backmarkers, be late on the brakes, turn in as hard as one can and then slowly nurse the bike out of the turn. It makes for a weird combination of passive/aggressive to which my girlfriend, no doubt, would attest my aptitude.

With twenty minutes (I guessed) left in the race and a lead of as many seconds I began to relax but the rear tire was warning me there would be no last lap dogfight. I tried to keep as many other bikes behind me as I could to put more obstacles between Wade and myself. The plus board dropped into the single digits and I tried to wick up my pace but all I succeeded in doing was filling in some of the blank spots of the track with black lines. I watched the lead board steadily drop to +8, +7, +6 and, in a act of mercy, the checkered flag flew.

By rights it should have been fifth as two of the teams defeated themselves but we have had enough weekends of leading races early on only to spectate at the finale that we were not willing to let the podium finish out of our teeth.

Usually we would have packed up the van (or at least Tim and Amy would have) and commenced the driving portions of the weekend's adventures but as we were traveling with the aforementioned125 GP guy Chris we stayed for the sprints on Sunday. Jim, denied his opportunity to express himself during the four hour, registered our endurance pig in the middleweight GP sprint and persuaded me to do likewise. I was to ride our aging 1988 FZR hybrid we used as a practice slug. I tried to get Tim to fill Jim's YZF up to its 7 gallon maximum for the race but Williams kept a watchful eye on me and the quick dump can.

We were both cognizant that this race was really only between the two of us and much was said of my reputation for allegedly kicking a rider off the team for turning faster laps.

It was just as well that we both jumped the start and were subsequently blue flagged. The announcer was trying to convince his audience that we knew what we were doing. "Honest folks, these guys are experienced racers that did real well in the Endurance race yesterday." I'm not sure anyone bought it, least of all when I stalled the FZR at the stop and go and gave Jim a four second lead bumping the recalcitrant Yamaha.

I could see Jim ahead and taxed the decrepit FZR for all it was worth trying to narrow the void separating us. Each lap brought me slightly closer to his copious draft and on the last lap he overcooked the hay bale turn. I hesitated to stuff my own YZF through that treacherous corner and elected to beat him to the line with the superior drive I was sure to enjoy coming out of the turn. To thank me for considerate mid-corner etiquette Jim pulled a TZ250 move on me taking a long weave on the front straight which brought him close, and me even closer, to the wall lining the right side of the track. Unfortunately I couldn't kick him off the team, for, although he had beaten me, he had been turning slower lap times. I searched long and hard for the remote control kill switch I was sure he had installed on the FZR's black box but he must have removed before I got the tools back out of the trailer.

Texas

We skipped Texas due to lack of funds. I heard it was really fun. To console myself I invited Jim and John over, we watched Tim and Amy swap the electrical system on the YZF, burned a small pile of hundred dollar bills in the driveway and then pushed the bike over.

GNF

Road Atlanta is one of the collective team's favorite tracks. Its beautiful sweeping turns and exhilarating topography is only offset by the fatalities which seem to occur every year. There is an emotion which cannot be expressed on a "No Sapience" shirt when riding by the spot where you have previously seen a racer converted into a corpse.

Much has been said, but mostly I think I just ignore the possibility of dying on a Saturday morning practice with the statistically questionable argument of "It won't happen to me." If I knew with a certainty that one day I would leave Tim and Amy crying in the pits while I died for something as banal as motorsports I would quit tomorrow. I know plenty of racers who have retired without catastrophic biological failure so I continue to squander resources on what is, ultimately, a hobby.

Road Atlanta, especially during GNF week, demands respect. A practice pile-up into the hay bales on the outside of turn twelve certainly gets one's attention as does having one's own event red flagged repeatedly with friends and comrades being evacuated from the pageantry and festivity for extended hospital stays.

That said, we had a great time.

Nothing broke on the transporter on the way to the track but the popularity of the GNF saw us pitting with the vintage folks. I remember riding CB 350s ten years ago and you've got to be off your nut to take one of those out onto a race track. Four weeks after the GNF, however, I found myself in a two hour race on a CB125 so at least some of the attraction must have rubbed off on me.

The upside to pitting with the vintage folks is the swell people; the downside is the parts which fall off their bikes, onto the starting rollers, and get launched through the headlight lens of the van. Anyone out there missing a brass looking rectangular machined bit with thread cut into it? I'll trade you a headlight for it.

WERA, being the playful sorts that they are, decided to host the first annual 125 GP endurance race. Who could resist such a formula? There was an unofficial WERA pool at stake as to how many of the bike would actually complete the event. Jim, the sweet talker on the team, convinced Chris Pyles to rent us his RS125 so we could flog it (as only neophytes can) for the 60 minutes. Chris was riding a Moto-Liberty bike for the weekend and was not too pressed about us damaging his ex as he was crossing the line from infatuation to love with his new ride.

The first problem I noticed with the 125 was that I couldn't move once I sat down on the seat. Try squatting on your ankles while balancing on your toes and you'll see what I mean. Jim procured some seat pad foam and we professionally shaped it with a hot wire supplied by the charging system of the van and a piece of race wire. The seat height was raised sufficiently to allow ankle movement.

The GNF means lots of bikes and therefore, little practice. There were arguments in the AOD pits every morning about the scant practice but October mornings in Georgia being what they are, the winner of the conflicts got to sit in the pits and drink coffee while the other two had to slide around on the dew covered track. The lack of drive in the mornings saw us geared short for the 600 race.

However, nothing compares to the joy and freedom of racing out of class. With no expectations of results and the perennial excuse of "pretty good for my first time" one can concentrate of the joy of surfing up the steep side of the learning curve effortlessly shaving seconds off each lap rather than struggling for tenths here and there.

Jim started our 125 effort and, like a rhino piggybacking on a gazelle, quickly slotted us into seventh place. He put in consistent laps but we were not even close to being in league with the regulars. My turn to simultaneously practice contortionism and motorsports came soon enough and I settled into a half hour duel. Being an endurance scored race (which ends on time not the checkered flag) my track mate's last lap pass was wasted effort, especially since his partner had put them a lap ahead in the first thirty minutes.

As Jim and I were helplessly giggling in the pits about the 125 race we decided it would be prudent to let John start the race. John worked his way through traffic for twenty or thirty minutes before getting his head down and reeling off a series of low 32s.

Jim made the transition from the 125 to the 600 fluidly and turned the fastest laps he has ever turned on the 600 by using the throttle open points picked during the 125 race. I took a good look at the tires before taking the bike out for a 80 minute stint. They still looked to be in good shape but after reviewing our position after the first two red flags there was scant reason to push. I was sure I was giving Tim hives as I repeatedly bounced the bike off the rev-limiter as the short gearing ran out of legs.

Jim took the last stint which turned out to be very short as a heinous accident involving BHR, Screamin' Howie and a third team ended the race.

After all the inevitable protests were done we finished fourth in class giving us fourth in class for the season and fourteenth overall. A little despondent about our results, the WERA's affable Sean Clark noted that fourth isn't bad with a season containing three crashes and two mechanical DNFs, but we all know he was just trying to be nice.

EPILOGUE

Yamaha has quit paying contingency on anything but '97 YZFs (which is still better than Honda) so we've got our downpayment on our first ever new motorcycle. Kinda seems a shame to take a oxy-acetylene torch to it. We are trying to figure out how much of a Thundercat needs to remain bolted together to be considered a Thundercat. For instance, can we use a GSX-R 600 frame and just affix the Thundercat logos?

John, Sam, Amy, Jim, Tim.