By Cory West

After the crazy weekend riding at Laguna with the MotoGP circus, I was excited to know we were going to get back into our regular AMA racing routine at Mid-Ohio. The track at Ohio has one of the most fun layouts of all the tracks on the calendar, but there have always been some issues with the track surface. Last year they freshly re-paved the track and for the most part is was the best thing they could’ve done to the place. I knew going into the weekend that the tires would be good and our chance of running up front would be good as well.

When we showed up on Thursday for the promoter practice the weather looked great for the whole weekend except for a chance of rain on Sunday. The only problem with having rain at Mid-Ohio is the fact that we can’t race in it, so everyone was hoping that the rain would hold out. The track is a very fun place, like I said, but it definitely has a few areas that are a bit dangerous because of the lack of run-off room. In the dry it’s pretty safe because of the use of airfence and other soft barriers, but when it’s wet the chance of crashing is much higher and the distance and speed that a rider carries when they slide on wet grass or pavement is greatly increased. Because of the run-off issue, the AMA just can’t risk everyone’s safety by putting us out on a dangerous track.

Thursday’s practice was very valuable for the set-up of our bikes and the lap times were looking very promising straight away. I heard a few of the times that the guys on some bigger teams were turning and I felt like I was getting close to their pace in the first few sessions and the best part was knowing that we hadn’t put any new tires on yet. We spent the whole day riding on left over tires from past events and I really couldn’t wait until Friday morning’s official timed practices.

The first hour long practice session on Friday was for Supersport and it was a good one. As soon as we put some new tires on the bike I went from turning high 1:29’s to mid 1:28’s. I turned about 15 laps in the session and when I came in we were inside the top 5 in the running order. I waited for about 20 minutes while Chuck and Cyle changed tires out and I just watched the monitor to see what everyone else was doing. I slowly started going down the order as everyone got going quicker so I went back out to see if I could improve my time. When I got on the track I latched onto the back of Josh Hayes and the first lap I did with him was a 1:28.1 and then the next lap was a 1:27.8. I came back into the pits after I did the 1:27.8 and that put me 3rd fastest, right behind Jamie Hacking and Josh Hayes.

The team and I were super pumped after the session was over, knowing we were closer to the front than we have ever been. Then the drama started. Somehow on Thursday when the bikes were supposed to go through tech inspection, only one bike ended up going through. The bike that went through was the FX bike, so while I was out turning laps in the Supersport session on the Supersport bike, I got busted and my times were removed from the time sheets. That wasn’t that big of a deal but it did mean that I was going to have to ride in the slower group for qualifying. All that mattered to me was that I did turn the time and I knew I was competitive.