posted on July 10, 2010 22:35
Road America Team Challenge
Road America is by far one of my favorite tracks. So needless to say I've been looking forward to this event. I had not ridden my bike or any bike for that matter since Blackhawk, so I was ready to go racing again.
I had missed out on VIR because I was in a wedding. Scotty and Chris Quillman had went out to collect our points needed for that weekend and finished 2nd in class and 2nd overall. Going into Road America we were sitting 35 points out of the lead. So 9 points a weekend is all we need to gain from here on out.
Going into the weekend we knew it wasn't going to be easy. We had both Jason Farrell on his SpeedTech Kawasaki and Team SRT on there Yamaha to compete with. At the start of Friday morning we had three rounds of practice in the morning and two in the afternoon before the race started. I went out for the first two rounds as I had not been on the bike since Blackhawk. Times were not looking good for me as I was struggling with front end chatter on the brakes. We went over everything. Worpped rotors, lose stearing steem, valving in the forks, new pads, everything and we could not figure out the problem. The bike had no problems stopping so both Scotty and I just dealt with it. The thing that still gets me about the whole problem is, the chatter was not noticeable going into 3, 8 the chicane or canada, just turn 1 and turn 5?
Scotty started the race like he always does and got us out to a killer lead over 3rd place, SRT. SpeedTech had checked out from us on the first lap as well to put us into 2nd. We were running VP fuel and were burning a lot of fuel per lap. We had done a fuel consuption test and figured out that we would have to do three stops and we could only do 15 laps on a tank. Scotty ran his stint and pulled in, we fueled, changed the rear tire and out I went. I was able to ride around the chatter better in the race then I was in practice and was able to drop 3 seconds in the race to put me back down to my best laps that I've ever been able to do at Road America. My stint was quite lonely though. I did catch a few lapers about half way through my stint but it didn't last long. So I really concentrated on my lap times and going as deep as I could on the brakes with the chatter. My stint was also over before I knew it, and in I came. More fuel and another tire went on. We had a crowd of people over by our pits for that second pit stop because they couldn't believe how quick our stops were. We have all the quick change equipment on the bike from doing the Daytona 200 back in 09. It takes just as long to change a tire as it does to fuel the bike.
So as I'm sitting on pit wall I get the scoop as to where we are at. The debris flag that was on the front straight the one lap I came through was SpeedTech racing and a blown motor. So I'm thinking, ok great we are winning because I never saw SRT come by me. To find out they were running Sunoco fuel and it wasn't burning as fast and they made it 20 laps on a tank. So we were still sitting in 2nd place. Couldn't complain too much with it considering the problem we've been having. Scotty finished the race and we ended up 2nd in class and 4th overall.
We did manage to gain the 9 points that we needed on RNR and that put us in 3rd in points, 23 points behind the leader and 3 points out of second. So now on to Roebling Road to try and cut the gap even more. Three rounds to go and it's going to be a close championship.
megryanracing.com