Unfortunately, due to the shared AMA/MotoGP weekend we would have only one practice session before qualifying so I’d have to get up to speed quickly. Superstock practice wasn’t until 4:00 p.m. so I had to wait anxiously all day to get on track. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to get up to speed and ended up riding too stiff for most of the session. I managed to put in 25 laps and matched my best time from last year with a 1:35.5 so I was pretty happy with the start to the weekend.

Qualifying would be first thing on Saturday morning, I was a little worried because you never know what the weather will be like in the morning in Monterey. It turned out to be perfect so I was pumped! Bridgestone brought some new tires to try out for the weekend with a little different profile. The compounds were the same as before but the new profile is said to help the bike with a smoother turn in and also help in the transitions. I did a better job of relaxing during my qualifying session and ended up with a 1:34, a second faster than I went last year in qualifying so I was happy with that.

I was having a lot of trouble getting out of turn 11 smoothly all weekend and it was affecting my trap speeds. I seemed to be getting lots of headshake and the bike was very unsettled accelerating from first gear. When I checked the time sheets, I was only doing 130 mph at the start finish, about 15 mph down on the leaders. There was definitely some time to be made up there and I would have to try some changes in Sunday morning practice to get my top speeds up. For morning practice I decided to try going through turn 11 in second gear, the drive became much better and my trap speeds increased by 8mph!

I felt good for the race. Normally I get very nervous but I was actually pretty calm considering I was about to race in front of 50,000 people. So I’m sitting there on the ninth row chatting with the hot umbrella girl Bridgestone was nice enough to provide me and I look over to my right and the guy beside me is on one knee proposing to his umbrella girl! I thought, wow this guy is pretty aggressive with the brolly girls, but it turns out it was his long time girlfriend. I was hoping she would say yes because I wasn’t looking forward to going into turn one next someone who had just faced that kind of rejection in front of 50,000 fans, he may feel the need to take it out on his nearest competitor.

I jumped off the line ok and started to settle into the 1:25 lap range in the opening laps. I had a group of four riders just ahead of me and on lap 8 I set my sights on them. The lap times started coming down and I started running 1:34’s and was closing in. I was trying to make some time up in turn 3 and was pushing the front pretty good there every lap. It’s the type of corner you can’t really rush. If you apex it too early you’ll end up pushing the front though the whole corner and it will kill your drive into turn 4 and essentially kill your whole lap. You want to sacrifice a little bit of entry speed there to get a good drive out.

So why then did I go into turn 3 on lap 11 even harder than I had all weekend? Maybe I was caught up in the excitement of the MotoGP weekend, maybe I didn’t want my Canadian crew members calling me a hoser the rest of the weekend because I rode too slow. Whatever my reasoning, it finally bit me on lap 11. In the heat of the battle I just tried carrying too much speed into turn 3 and pushed the front all the way to the curbing on the exit and had to stand the bike up in the gravel to avoid crashing. I thought I would just be able to stand the bike up and ride back on track. The gravel traps at Laguna however seemed about 2 feet deep and the second I hit the gravel the bike was heading straight for the air fence. Once I hit the gravel, I had about as much control as a 97-year-old’s bladder after a night of Keg stands at the local Community Center. I desperately tried to get the bike turned before getting launched over the air fence. It must have been quite the sight because I could hear the crowd cheering madly. I’m not sure if they were cheering because they wanted to see me hit the air fence or if they wanted me to save it. I was heavily contemplating throwing the bike down and trying some type of baseball slide but I could see there was about 3 feet of hard dirt right before the wall so I hung on in the hopes I could get the bike turned once I hit the hard pack. My plan worked and I managed to get the bike turned after just barely clipping the air fence. I didn’t go down but the impact knocked my bike between gears and I struggled to get going again in the deep gravel.

It was a very disappointing end to what was a great weekend. I did get to meet some interesting people over the weekend though. Dainese had a hospitality suite and put on a seminar for invited guests talking about the safety and design of their equipment. Kevin Schwantz was one of their guest speakers so I was able to meet him. He is such an ordinary guy, and you would never guess you are talking to one of the best riders to ever live. I kind of had this impression of him even before meeting him however. When at Infineon Raceway this year I saw Kevin tearing down canopies and helping pack up trucks after the weekend. My guess is you wouldn’t see too many other World Champions doing that on a race weekend.

The plan is to do the Virginia race in late August. It looks like a pretty good track so I’m looking forward to getting a chance to race on it.

Thanks again to everyone who helped me this weekend, especially Sheldon and Myles who came out from Canada as well as my sponsors Bridgestone, Dainese, Opencheck.com, OC Powersports & Motorex.

Brad Puetz
AMA #85