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Cory West at VIR.

Posted by Staff
Friday, 24 August 2007
Page 1 of 2 By Cory West After the AMA weekend in Ohio, Chuckie and I headed down to Birmingham, Alabama for the ASRA/ CCS weekend at Barber Motorsports Park. We raced there with the AMA earlier in the season and just went down to try and make a little bit of Yamaha Contingency money. My biggest competition for the weekend was Jeff Wood, who is the ASRA #1 plate holder, and Robert Jensen. I came out of there with the win in the ASRA Superbike race and 2nd in the ASRA Sportbike race behind Jeff Wood. Two podiums and a good chunk of contingency money was just what we were looking for on our off weekend. From Birmingham we went straight up to Virginia International Raceway for the AMA Big Kahuna National. I’ve had pretty good luck at VIR in the past so I was pretty excited going into the weekend. I rode the promoter practice on Thursday and it was probably the hottest day that I have rode in all year. The temperature under our tent in the shade read 104 degrees! We still managed to get a good base setup for the bikes and got down to some pretty decent lap times. As soon as I woke up on Friday morning, I looked outside and saw that it was pouring down rain. I wasn’t sure if we would ride or not in the rain so we hurried up to get to the track for the first timed sessions of the weekend. When we got to the track I noticed nobody was getting rain tires mounted up on their wheels and then I heard from the AMA that we wouldn’t race here in the rain, just like at Mid-Ohio. The weather passed over pretty fast though and we only sat around until noon until the track was all dried up. I used my first two timed sessions in Supersport and Formula Xtreme for evaluating race tires. I was just outside the top 10 in both classes after each session was over and we found a tire combination that worked very well with the hot conditions. After the practice sessions were done, I had to qualify for Saturday’s FX race on Friday afternoon. Chuck and I figured out a pretty good game plan for what tires we were going to use during the qualifying session and it seemed to work out pretty well. I was sitting in about 10th position while I was out on what would be a race tire and then when I came in for my qualifying tire I dropped about half a second and ended up finishing the session in 8th. That put me on the second row for the race which made Chuck and I pretty happy! Saturday was a pretty action packed day for the team. Everything was fine during the morning practice sessions but it was the Supersport qualifying session that brought the drama. We were pretty much using the same strategy in the Supersport qualifier as we were in the FX qualifier but we had about 20 fewer minutes to do it in. Everything was going pretty well at first but I got into turn 14 a little hot about halfway through the session and when I tried to keep the bike on the same line as before, I ended up tucking the front and crashing. Now the crash was pretty gentle at first but when the bike slid off the track and caught the grass, it started barrel rolling in spectacular fashion. I had finished sliding and was sitting on my butt in the middle of the track, watching Chuck’s motorcycle completely destroy itself, and couldn’t stand the thought of what was going to happen to me when I came back with a crash truck full of smashed motorcycle parts. I got up and helped the corner workers pick up the miscellaneous parts and pieces and waited for the session to end. << Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>

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