Text by Cory West
Photos by Brian J. Nelson

Since the last AMA race in Salt Lake City, I have raced at a couple of different club races to do a little testing and get some more seat time on the motorcycle. The weekend after Salt Lake I headed straight to Road Atlanta for a WERA National. That track just got repaved during the off season and we figured it would be a good idea to try and get a feel for the new pavement before we head out there in August for the AMA races. The weekend went well and I ended up grabbing pole position and the race win in 600cc Superstock. After Atlanta I went straight up to Road America, in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin for the ASRA and CCS races. We already raced at Road America, but there was some good contingency money up for grabs so we decided to do it and came out with one win and two second place finishes. Both weekends were good practice and I gained a lot of confidence in the bike and had a good time staying busy.

After the races in Wisconsin I drove back to California to get ready for the AMA weekend at Laguna Seca. I always get excited for Laguna because of the MotoGP weekend being the same weekend as our races. I was even more amped up for Laguna because of our not-so-strong performance at the last AMA race at Miller. I really wanted to get back to racing with the big boys and get another good finish under my belt. The races there are always really tough though, because of the small amount of track time we get. My schedule was to practice on Friday morning, qualify Friday afternoon, practice Saturday morning, and then race Saturday afternoon. With only an hour and a half of track time before the race, I knew I needed to get up to speed ASAP!

The first time I hit the track on Friday, everything was going to plan except for the longevity of our tires. Laguna got repaved over the winter and just like most tracks that receive fresh pavement, it was chewing up tires before the laps got into the double digits. I was inside the top ten for the first practice session until the last few minutes, but I felt very confident that I could find more time because the gearing wasn’t perfect and the suspension wasn’t working perfect either. After the session was over I had a good debriefing with my mechanic, Chuck, and we figured out a plan for qualifying.

We fixed the gearing and set the bike up differently, and I immediately started dropping time in my qualifying session. The gearing change helped a ton but the changes we made to the suspension were really hurting the bike on corner entries and exits. I still managed to drop a second off of my time from the morning session and I ended up 12th in the qualifying order which was good for a third row start. After the qualifier was over, Chuck and I decided to go back to where we started in the morning with our set-up.
                                                            
Saturday morning we had the bike set-up to where we thought it would work best and we were trying a different tire combination to see if it would work for the race later in the day. I got going half a second faster than what I had qualified as soon as I got on track and felt really good about the way the bike was working. I stayed out for the whole practice session because it was only 20 minutes long and the tires seemed to work pretty well. The tire we chose in that session was the fastest tire we had been on in all the sessions so I felt like it would be a good choice for the race. The tire didn’t look very beat up when I came in too, so I kept leaning towards it for my race tire choice.
                                                         

For the race I left the bike almost exactly the same as when I rode it in the morning, except for a few adjustments to the front forks. When the race got going, my start was good off of the line but I got pinched off when we went up the hill towards turn two. I got shuffled back just a few positions but managed to make most of them back up by going around the outside of a bunch of guys in turn two. I made a few more passes before we completed the first lap and I was around 11th place, right behind a pack of 5 riders. I was right behind Tommy Hayden and felt like I was faster than him, but I just couldn’t make the right move to get around him. A few laps later I got a good drive coming out of turn 4 and got underneath him on the brakes going into turn 5. As soon as I got by Tommy, I closed the gap on the pack in front of me and turned my fastest lap of the race at a 1:28.5. That was a full second faster than what I qualified at and I felt like I was going to catch the guys in front of me easily. Just about the time I started making time on them, I started sliding everywhere. I kept pushing as hard as I could but that just ended up in another big slide or me running super wide. My rear tire was shredded before the half way flag was out and I just had to hold on to what I had.
I did my best to hang in there but my times dropped off into the 1:31’s and I slowly went backwards. The last six laps felt like torture, because I knew what I could do if the tire just had some grip. I got passed and passed and passed, and ended up in 14th when the race was finally over. When I got back to Chuck and the rest of the crew on pit lane they all smiled and knew what had happened. We all looked at the tire and it was completely shredded on both sides.

It was a bummer to have that happen in the race but picking tires can be a bit of a gamble sometimes. I won’t let the tire issue get me down, though. Mid-Ohio has always been a favorite of mine and I see a top five in my future soon!

http://www.shiftracing.com

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, DynoJet, GW Hoss, Labworks, The Trade Group, Razor’s Edge Motorsports and the Fellas!