Harvest event recap: After July we all left with heavy hearts, so going back was different for many, myself included. Jason was ready with the Nissan and shooting for 200 in the mile. Carl was without a motor so he decided to run his Harley Davidson Rocker C and I was going for 175 on the GSXR. Friday was typical tech and setup day with only one real dissapointment. That was that Steve Van Blarcom was there without his race car due to other commitments. Steve drove all the way up just to tech, make a couple passes in his Duramax and head home. Great commitment there! Bike tech was pretty normal for the most part. The team that Joe put together really works well together, but more on that later. Carl rolled in like a rockstar around 3:30 with a unprepped bike. No big deal, a little work and we had his bike legal, safe and ready to race. Saturday started with a wet track, so track drying was the topic in the morning. Just like with circle track keep going up and down the runway in cars and trucks and it dries off very fast. We held a moment of silence at 9:58 for Bill and made the first pass at 10:00. We had great conditions with a 7 mph tail wind. My first pass the bike went very lean on the top end and I shut it down and coasted through at 143 and change. Back to the pits to add some fuel (computer mapping). Carl Theriault clicked off a 118 and a 119 on his first pass of the day. Jason Theriault ran a 203? I think on his first pass. More tuning and his goal of 200 in the mile looked very possible. I made a few more runs but I just couldnt get enough fuel to the motor. 99% sure the pump just dosnt have the pressure to support it. So I parked the bike to not hurt the motor. I will have to check but I think my best pass was 150 and change. Far from the 175 I was looking for. Oh well, if it was easy everyone would be doing it. At noon we put up the sign renaming 1R 19L (Loring runway) to 311 Bill Warner BLVD on race days.Carl was making all kinds of passes at this point and gaining on every pass. Jason made another pass and sucked a side window out of the truck! Hows that for aero? Obviously with the widow out the truck slowed considerably. On the next pass a missfire developed and the truck was parked to work on that issue. About this time the 306 Vette decided one of the connecting rods was going to try out the durability of the oil pan. Slight oil down in long shut down but was easily taken care of. By now I have gone up to staging and was helping the guys out up there. Marvin who was running the line asked me to take over after his back was giving way. It is a real neat experiance to run starting. Gives you a first hand experiance on what really goes on. Carl kept making passes and managed a 129.8, so close to 130! Shawn was there with his Vmax making some passes and clicked off a very impressive 164, I am sure Bill was smiling at Shawn as he made those passes. As some of you may or may not know Bill started land speed racing on a Vmax. That pretty much summed up Saturday, we ran untill after 7:00 and we were all beat. Sunday was pretty much a carbon copy of Saturday, starting out with more track drying. Breakfast by Janet Bosse and Stacy Robey in the pits was great. We started racing @ 10.00 again. We had a 7 mph head wind and that was drastically slowing the speeds. Carl lost 10mph on his first pass. Jason made another pass but the truck was still missfiring. Later investigation looks to show that a faulty fuel pump is also his issue. I was helping at the line and Carl said I could make a few passes on his bike so I did. We tried a few different things but that headwind was tough. I managed a 124 in the mile and a 124 in the mile and a half setting a 2 new records in M/TF-2000/4. Everyone was either blown up or too tired to run any more by 3:00 so we closed the curtin on the harvest event and the 2013 season at Loring. As we were picking up everything and picking on Toms poor dog Joe Daly approached me and asked to talk for a minute. He asked me to take over all of the motorcycle operations for the LTA since he is now the event director. That means alot to me. Working under Joe has been a great experiance. Joe is highly respected in the motorcycle community, extremely knowledgeable and to even be considered to replace him is very overwhelming. Thank you Joe for that. On top of that the tech team we have needs a big thanks, Marvin, Frank, and Tom, thanks! And obviously thanks go out to JRT Customs, Willettes Automotive, Jason, Janet, Carl, Shawn, Stacy, plus many more I am sure I am forgetting. I cant do this alone and you all play a great role in making this all happen!
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 14:29:39 +0000
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