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Cory West - Round Three Race Report

Posted by Staff
Friday, 04 May 2007
AMA ROADRACING REPORT – CORY WEST Here's privateer roadracer Cory West’s latest report from Round 3 of the AMA Supersport and Formula Xtreme Championships at California Speedway in Fontana. By Cory West After Barber, the team and I loaded up in the motorhome and cargo van and hit the road for California Speedway. We made it to Cal-Speedway on Wednesday afternoon, unloaded the trailer and got right back to business where we had left off in Birmingham. I have gone pretty well at Cal-Speedway in the past, but I’ve also had some races here that I would like to forget about. The track is not a beautiful flowing track like Barber, but more like a cone filled Wal-Mart parking lot with a Super-Speedway around the outside of it. Definitely a horsepower track and a place where you have to work hard to get a fast lap time. I rode the FX class again for the extra track time and things were going pretty well in that class but we were definitely struggling with top speed compared to all the regular Formula Xtreme contenders. I did get going well enough to qualify 9^th on Friday afternoon for the FX race, which happens to be my best qualifying effort to date. I knew the race would be a tough one though because the top 8 riders were separated by a pretty good gap. If I could hang onto the draft on the straights, then that would be the only way I could keep up with the lead group. Supersport has really been crazy this year. I’ve never been in a class that is so competitive and full of top riders and teams. Our first practice session went well and we were right in the hunt for a strong top 10 finish again for the weekend. Supersport has been very intense so far this year in practice sessions all the way until race time. Everyone is riding so hard right out of the gate and it’s hard to get an inch of real estate on the track. No time for messing around and definitely all business when you’re out riding. Qualifying in Supersport was going really well for us up until the last 5 minutes. We have been getting some good support from Pirelli and I’ve been getting to use some special qualifying tires to try to improve my lap time and grid position. So we had two qualifying tires for this session to try to get us onto the second row. We threw our first one on with about 10 minutes to go in the session and it moved us up to around 8^th which would have put us on the second row but I knew that it wouldn’t last for long. With around 5 minutes to go I got bumped down to 12^th and so I went out for one last effort. The field was so tight that if I could’ve dropped just half a second I could’ve moved up 4 to 5 positions. I did my out lap on the qualifying tire and just started my flier with about 2 minutes left on the clock. When I made it to turn three, the session got stopped with a red flag! I was pretty bummed out because I felt like we could’ve done something really good with that last tire but I think everyone had the same issue and we had to just deal with it. The FX race was on Saturday at the very end of the day. My start was pretty good and I was in the big pack of riders going down into turn three, and then Ryan Andrews on one of the Rockwall Honda’s came diving under everyone and ended up losing the front at the entrance of turn 3. I stayed clear of the crash but he took out Ben Attard on the Attack Kawasaki and ran a few more guys off the track. So that moved me up to 8^th right away and I just tried to get in a good rhythm and stay out of trouble. I think it was around lap four when I had my little moment though and fell down. My mechanic, Chuck, had put a different set of bodywork on the FX bike that required a bracket for the right side fairing lower to keep the thing from flopping around. The thing was making the bodywork drag a little bit in qualifying but didn’t think much about it until I drug it so hard in the race that it levered the front wheel off the ground. We really could have had a strong finish but things like that happen and we were just happy it didn’t happen in Supersport. Sunday’s Supersport race was action packed from the start. We were scheduled to race at 2:00 but we had a total of 3 restarts the first time we tried to go racing so they delayed us until after the Superbike race. Turn 3 funnels down to practically one line, so when you try to fit 50 guys in there on the start of a race it can turn out bad, and that’s what kept happening. Luckily I was never involved and got to keep lining up for the restarts. When we finally went green after the Superbike race, things went pretty well. I found myself in around 9^th place chasing Danny Eslick and the rest of the leaders. We kept everyone in sight for a long time but ended up having a small battle of our own. Chaz Davies got pushed off track early in the race and was playing catch up at the end and caught me and Danny with 2 laps to go. I hung with him and really wanted to get him back to be the first Yamaha across the line and thought I had a pretty good chance. On the last lap we all ran into some lapped traffic and Danny made it through the best but I kept trying to line up Chaz for the pass. Coming into the last few corners I was giving it all I could and got into a big slide coming onto the front straight and had to settle for 10^th place. I was happy about the finish though because we moved up to 7^th in the points race and I haven’t finished outside the top 10 yet this year. We got through the few tracks where the Pirelli tires don’t work as well as the Dunlops and now we are headed to some tracks that I really like. I think if there is any place that we are going to have a chance at a podium, it will be the next two tracks we race at! So now I’m going to go back to training on the bicycle and dirtbike and wait for the next race at Infineon! Thanks to all the sponsors!! Team Hunter, Kneedraggers.com, Yamaha Motor Corp., Pirelli, SHIFT, Premiere Home Entertainment, Double Life Corp., Graves Motorsports, VP Fuels, Vortex, Sidi, Suomy, GP Tech, Motul, GPR, DynoJet, GW Hoss, and the Fellas! From Shift Racing (photos by Brian J Nelson)

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