Last weekend, after a week of hard work/last-minute scrambling, Ken had our new bike ready for testing day at Palmer Motorsports Park with Cyclesmith. Despite my run down to South Carolina to race Joe Melchioda’s RS125 with AHRMA, this weekend was the real start of Team Skippy’s race season. We had our bike ready to go and this was final testing beofre the USCRA season kickoff next month.
Everything old was new again. Over the winter we had…
- Acquired a JADA frame from the Davies Motorsports in the UK (a 30+ pound weight savings over the stock frame we’ve run for the last 8 seasons)
- Installed new rear shocks
- Swapped out our 35mm front forks and Yamaha TD3 front brake for 38mm forks with a double disk brake fitted to an XS650 front wheel with Brembo P108 calipers.
- Acquired a new tank and seat configuration
- Installed an AirTech (now GPCycleworks) full fairing
So, we’ve basically got a brand new bike from the bottom up, fitted with our race-proven motor. Saturday was testing time to see how well these pieces all fit together.
Given that we only had one day for testing, I got down to the track Friday night so that there wouldn’t be an early-morning scramble to get set up, tech the bike and get ready for testing in just a couple hours. Showing up Friday allowed me time to get our pit set ups so that when Ken rolled in Saturday morning, we’d be ready to go. Vin Borbone and his daughter Nicola showed up Friday as well and pitted with us. Vin bought Nicola a Yamaha R3 that they’re going to run in the USCRA’s Trackmaster Triple Crown Endurance Series. (BTW, if you’re a racer and you haven’t signed up for this race series, stop reading this post and go sign up. It’s the only vintage endurance series in the country! Don’t miss out on its inaugural season. Some day you’ll want to be able to tell your kids, “I was there at the first one!”)
Cyclesmith is a fairly typical Track Day club that features modern street/race bikes. Our T500 stood out and the new paint by Classic Bike Experience Guild member, Chris Washburn, brought lots of comments and “oohs and ahs” from others in the pit. Friday night was comprised of Bud Light, Reese’s Pieces and a discussion of the bike that Prince rode in the 80’s movie Purple Rain. (It was a damn Hondamatic CM400! It was tricked out to look like a badass Harley cruiser, but Prince was so damn small they gave him what was essentially a scooter.)
We went to bed around 9:30pm. I read in bed for about an hour and then began my typical pre-race-day night of flopping around in bed for hours with insomnia. The last time I looked at the clock it was 1:30am. I woke up at 5am and was up for the day. Ken showed up at about 7:45 and went right to work on some last minute tweaks he wanted to make to the bike before I took it out. The night before Vin and I had been talking about the attitude, or “stance” of the bike which was waaaay high up front and super low in the back. We had texted with Ken about that and while Vin, Cola and I were in the Riders’ Meeting, Ken dropped the front end of the bike 2 inches. While it was still high, we all deemed that good enough as a starting point for the day.
Cylcesmith runs four groups each for fifteen minutes out of each hour. Going from Faster to Slower, the colors are Black, Blue, Yellow, Red. I had signed up for the Blue group with the thought that I’ve raced a ton so I was good with tight passing and our bike is pretty darn fast despite being a vintage race bike. Saturday morning when I woke up, I had second thoughts. We weren’t here to go fast, we just wanted to test the bike out and get it sorted. I was worried I’d be too in the way with the Blue group so I went over to the Cyclesmith table and asked them to move me down to the Yellow group. I got my new Yellow sticker and prepped to go out with my Yellow comrades. As the clock ticked towards 9:30, the Yellow group’s launch time, we put the bike on the rollers and let her rip. “Spin, spin, BANG, spin, BANG, BANG, spin…” Hmmm… Not good. We checked the basics: fuel on, primers on, and tried again. Same result. We rolled the bike back into the pit and began ruminating. The bike had run literally 48 hours ago. Ken ticked off everything he had touched on the bike since we last ran it and the obvious flag was that he had swapped out a new stator plate for the one we used last year. Unfortunately, he hadn’t brought the new stator plate so we were stuck with the old one. However we had used that plate ALL year last year. It shouldn’t have been an issue. But we clearly had a timing issue. The bike was firing, but just not at the right time. Two hours later, after Ken went through the bike’s entire electrical system and Vin had joined the conversation, they came to the problem. Two wires needed to be swapped. Those two wires were ripped out of their housings and Ken went “caveman” and just wrapped the correct wires together and encased them in electrical tape. Those of you who know Ken will know how hard this was for him. When we had realized that wires needed to be swapped, Ken had said, “Well I can’t rewire it; I don’t have any solder.” With a little coaxing he came around to the idea of electrical tape.
The bike went back on the roller and fired right up sounding amazing! I clicked it into gear and headed out for the Yellow group’s third session. Since it was their third session, everyone else in the Yellow group had already done Follow The Leader with a rider coach and were now all up-to-speed. I, on the other hand, was out on a new bike with NO idea where they hell the next corner was going to go. I was way the hell too slow and was very much in the way. I had gridded myself dead last so that I wouldn’t be in the way of the faster riders for my first lap so I did have some time to get up to speed. As I rolled out of Turn 2 and saw open track in front of my I wicked up the motor a bit and the motor spun right up but the clutch was slipping massively. After Turn 3 I reached up and rolled the clutch adjustment on the perch inwards to try to get the clutch to engage. Coming out of Turn 4 I hit the gas and the motor spun up again. Now, bikes were starting to catch up to and flew past me! “I’ve gotta get the fuck outa here,” I thought as I threw up my hand and moved to the far left of the track. I rolled the clutch adjuster ALL the way in and still had no engagement.
I brought the bike in and told Ken what had happened. Seeing that all adjustment was taken out at the perch, Ken removed all the preload at the motor-end of the cable. So now the clutch lever and the clutch were disconnected. I went back out. Same deal. I was slow, had no acceleration and was dangerously in the way.
Ken triple checked every element of the clutch system that was accessible without opening up the motor. It was all functional. The problem had to be inside the motor but opening the motor would mean draining all the oil (with no catch pan or place to put the oil) and we’d likely lose oil during the process and we had not oil to get the motor back up to the needed level. So we did the unthinkable, and after much forethought and planning, we gently laid the bike on its side. This would give allow us to remove the clutch side cover and if we were meticulous and careful, we shouldn’t lose much (or any!) oil. We looked the bike over and carefully set up a combination of toolboxes, and knee pads that would keep the “pretty” parts of the bike off the ground. It was a game of inches but we managed it. With the bike tenuously secured on its side, we pulled the side cover – losing less than a teaspoon of oil in the processs! – removed all the clutch plates and Ken found the offending part, a needle bearing he had place in the clutch set up in order to separate two pieces of the clutch that had been rubbing and leaving microscopic particulate in our motor oil. Bearing disc removed, we quickly put the bike back together and I geared up to go out before lunch. While Ken was working on the clutch I went over to the Cyclesmith tent and asked to move down to the Red group. Given that we were just trying to get a bike that would run, slow and steady seemed the place to be.
The bike fired up and I rolled out with the Red group and, finally, we had a running bike! Having only turned two laps up that point and both of those on a bike with no clutch, I had no idea what was going to happen after each corner. I was wildly off-line and after one full lap a Cyclesmith rode up past me and pointed to his tail section, the universal “follow me” signal. Thank god! This allowed me to learn the track at least a bit. I followed him for two full laps and then he gave me a wave and took off. I used the rest of the session to continue working on learning the track and was able to go progressively quicker.
I came in from the session with a huge grin on my face! We had a race bike! I hadn’t gone at anything like race pace, however when I hit the front straight and went WFO, the bike was on song! Magic!
It was lunch time and Ken, of course, had brats. He forgot the mustard but we soldiered on anyway and were rewarded with Twizzlers. Sun was out, brats were hot and, after a tough morning, all was right with the world.
This next portion will be a little vague in an effort to respect people’s privacy. After lunch the track went hot again and the Black group went out. All of sudden, a few minutes into the session, we heard someone crying and yelling. We ran over to their pit and one of the riders was on the ground surrounded by the EMTs. The rider had come in from their session, gotten off the bike and while talking to another rider, had just, sort gotten woozy and started to sit down and then passed out. The EMTs were literally 20 feet away from the rider and they leapt into action. The rider was non-responsive as the EMTs worked on them. They moved the rider into the ambulance and continued their work. After about 20 minutes one of the EMTs came out of the ambulance and said it seemed like the rider was having a heart attack and they were taking them to a hospital three minutes way. The took off and Cyclesmith crew scrambled to get a car to drive the rider’s family members to the hospital.
The whole thing was scary as hell and suddenly how well our bike was running seemed pretty insignificant. I have since heard that the rider is currently doing OK and is awake and talking. They’re incredibly lucky that this happened right at the ambulance so that the EMTs were on the scene immediately. Again, it’s puts things in perspective. Suddenly the prospect of our bike not quite being read was nothing.
About an hour later, Cyclesmith staff got onto the announcement and said that riding would continue again at 3:30pm. Sobered up by the medical situation, going out on track felt strange, but others were heading out so I suited up and went out with the Red group.
This time, with the bike running great, I was able to focus on the track and within a few laps I was up to speed with the rest of the group. I was actually faster than most people, but at that point the downside of running with the Red group became apparent. Many, maybe most, of the Red riders are pretty new, not very confident, and as such extremely erratic. I spent most of the session clogged up in a group of 8-10 riders. I would get right up on people, but their entry points into corners were super unpredictable, and then when we’d get to Palmers incredibly long straight, their modern bikes would leave me behind. Pretty frustrating.I came in and reported that the bike was running great, but that I need some clear track to really push things. An hour later we lined up for our last session and this time I lined up early so that I was the fourth person in the line to exit the pit straight. The track crew waved us out and I went out hot right from the start. I had passed two of the three people ahead of me by Turn 3 and the third person was gone. I had clear track! Finally! The session was great! All the things you want when you’re on a race track! Sun, a newly-responsive chassis, great suspension! Coming on to the front straight with no traffic for the first time I came to learn that we were definitely not geared correctly; I was tapped out in 6th gear waaaaay before the end of the straight. A few bikes caught me, but they were faster than me and didn’t get in my way. It was magical.
One unfortunate thing was that as I went faster and started to push the bike’s traction, I began to get a lot of chatter on the front end. We had fitted a new brand of tire to the front end and all indications were that the front tire wasn’t up to the task. I’m going to talk to the dealer and see if they have any suggestions for the chatter. We may have to go back to our Continentals. Time will tell.
Looking back on the day, I’ve definitely got mixed emotions. We lost approximately half our day to trackside repairs however once, we got it all sorted, the bike ran great. So kind of a glass-half-empty-or-glass-half-full situation. However the medical emergency making us all appreciate our own health and the fact that we’re able to race motorcycles at all left the TSR squad with the strong sense that our cup runneth over. Health, happiness and racing… We’ll do it again in a month when the USCRA kicks off their season at Thompson Motorsports Park in Thompson, Connecticut.
Hey I like that direction! Tell Doug now!
Wrong track! Sorry!