Scott Hussey, the amazing photographer who takes photos at all of the USCRA and NEMMR races wasn’t able to make it to the USCRA kickoff event two weeks ago, so this weekend’s FIM Vintage Roadracing Championships event at Loudon was his first event of the season with our club. Ever a supporter of Scott and lover of discounts, I pre-ordered photos at the start of the weekend. The last field in Scott’s pre-order form is a text box where he asks the rider to leave him a note about your bike so that he can find you on the track. In that box I wrote, “Hi Scott! My race number this year is 725, not 802 and my bike has been rebuilt so it’s now blue and silver with a yellow strip on the side. Make me look fast and sexy!”
At the rider meeting the next day Scott popped up and shouted across the garage, “Hey Peter I got your note. I can definiteluy make you look fat, but sexy might be a challenge.” We all laughed.
Fast forward to Saturday after when I got the following message from Scott:
At first I thought he had photoshopped MILF into the background on the wall at NHMS. Nope! A moment later he sent me this:
Either by accident or by some more nefarious means, the bottom of the E in New Hampshire Motor Speedway’s “The Magic Mile” sign had been scratched off. Hilarious? Absolutely, however, the sad part is this was the highlight of an otherwise nightmarish three-day-weekend for Team Skippy Racing
Our season kickoff at Thompson had ended with a non-functional clutch. In the short two week break between Thompson and Loudon, Ken had ordered and installed new steel plates, friction plates and springs and had adjusted the clutch pushrod. Due to the short time period and life being crazy we weren’t able to test the clutch until 10am on Thursday, one hour before I had to pack up the bike for the weekend. In that test, we could tell that something still wasn’t right, but I had to be at the track by 2pm to help set up airfencing so we agreed that Ken would come down later on Thursday and work on the clutch at the track.
Working in parallel to us was the newly-minted Classic Bike Experience race team, Classic Bike Works who had scrambled Wednesday night to get their 1974 Norton Commando race-ready. So between helping the CBE team, getting our own bike ready and juggling several fairly major life issues between the two of us, Ken and I started the weekend pretty frazzled.
I got to the track and helped with air fence set up along with a bunch of other volunteers. By 4pm I was able to set up our pit area, including fencing off space for the CBE team on one side of the our pit and the Borbone/Camillieri contigents on the other side. By 5pm people started rolling in and Ken went right to work on our clutch. By evening’s end we were through tech, gassed up and had our fingers crossed that the bike would be ready to roll coming morning.
The frazzled energy of Thursday continued into Friday morning as the gates to access the track were locked and I needed to get the timing wire set up before practice could start. After much running around and help from others, we got the timing wire loop set up and made it back to the garages for Riders’ Meeting. The newly-minted volunteer team headed up by Joe and Kirsten Melchionda had their first pre-race-day meeting at 7am and volunteer jobs were all covered for the day.
With the track ready to go hot, I geared up and we rolled out the bike. The schedule for Friday was a half-day practice followed by Round 2 of the Trackmasters Triple Crown Endurance Series sponsored by Rick’s Motorsports Electrics. Having a full day to work on the bike’s set up was definitely good as we would spend the day working hard to get things right. The clutch which Ken had put a ton of time into Thursday night was suddenly just about unpullable on Friday morning. It seemed stuck as if pulling on it too hard would snap the cable. Something wasn’t right. We decided to roll the dice and fired the bike up. Nothing free’d up. I had no clutch. I rolled around the pits in first gear trying to get the bike to shift into neutral. However, I was completely unable to disengage the clutch plates so neutral wasn’t possible and in fact every time I revved the engine, the bike leapt forward. So I spent 2-3 minutes lugging the engine, fearing that I was fouling the plug. Finally after 3 minutes I said to myself, “This is nuts. I can’t go out like this.” I killed the motor and brought the bike back to our garage.
Ken tried a few different things and then finally landed on one that seemed to work and I was able to go out for practice. I went out pretty slowly and just made sure that things were working. The bike ran well, but I was only getting up into 5th gear so when I came in Ken changed the front sprocket to try to get us up into 6th gear on the straight.
With the new front sprocket installed, I went out for Practice 2 and for some reason the bike — which had run well in Practice 1 — ran horribly. It was misfiring all over the place at all different throttle positions and all different RPMs. Additionally, the clutch was slipping because Ken had needed to put in a ton of preload in order to get it to work. I spun out all the adjustment I could at the perch and got the clutch to stop slipping, but with the bike running so poorly, I came in after only 2-3 laps. We pulled the plugs and they looked fine but we changed them anyway. I took the bike out for a quick rip up/down pit road and the bike seemed to work well.
However, joke was on us. I went out for Practice 3 and the bike was still misfiring everywhere. I brought the bike in after 2 laps and Ken continued his investigation. Finally we removed the tank and bingo, there was the problem! The gas line had kinked itself.
We scrambled around the pits and got some gas line donated from Lauren Miller and Bob Demetrius and were back in action. After a short lunch break, I went out for Practice 4 and the bike ran great! A couple times I missed an upshift on the front straight, but when I became more deliberate in my shifting motion it shifted cleanly. I still wasn’t getting deep enough into 6th gear so Ken changed our rear sprocket as we had already reached the limit of our front sprocket options.
When I went out for the last practice of the day, I had the new CBE rider, Griffin Smith, go out in front of me so I could watch him, give him some pointers and hopefully catch him on the GoPro so he could see himself riding. I followed Griffin for one lap and then as we came on to the front straight, I passed him and took off to run my own practice. Downshifting into T3 the bike suddenly sounded weird. I looked down at the exhaust as the bike sounded a bit like it did when we had blown off one of our header pipes at Thompson. Everything looked OK, so I motored on. As I came out of the chicane onto the front straight, I saw something on the ground directly on the race line. “Oh,” I thought. “that’s my muffler.” I thought about pulling off, but then decided that I wasn’t a safety risk and if I was too loud they would just black flag me. They didn’t and I finished up the session. When I came off the track into the Pit-in inspection station, Johnny B pulled up next to me on his golf cart and handed me my muffler. I tucked it into my fairing and head back to our pit, practice day over.
Ken confered with all the local welders — Frank Camillieri, Vin Borbone and Caleb French — the consensus was that the weld job could be done. That said, we had another set of pipes with us. They weren’t as good as the pipes currently on the bike, but after some debate we decided to err on the side of not inconveniencing Vin, Frank or Caleb, and Ken would put on our sub-par pipes for tomorrow’s race day. I left Ken to that job and headed over to Caleb’s pit to get ourselves ready for Round Two of the Trackmasters Triple Crown Endurance Series. In the first round we, The Worst Team Ever, had run Caleb’s new Skorpion, Grimace, hard for two hours, eventually blowing it up and taking 5th place in the Modern Endurance class. Grimace could not be resurrected within the two week window of time and so Friday afternoon we rolled out Caleb’s Honda CB550 in all its glory. The Honda qualifies for the Super Endurance Light class so we’d be running a different bike in a different class. Glory would surely await us today!
In short it didn’t.
Caleb went out and started the race. At the end of the first lap he came screeching back into our pit announcing that the handlebars were not secured properly. Knowing it was a literally a marathon, not a sprint, we calmly removed all the mounting bolts at the top of the triple clamp, loaded them up with locktite and cranked them back down. Caleb took off again, only to come back a lap later when the race was red flagged for a rider down in T2.
Caleb went out for the third time and was able to run cleanly for 10 laps or so. Patrick took the second shift and ran all of his laps quickly. I got my gear on and prepared to go out. When Patrick came in, however, there was oil on the rear fender. We poked around and found that the crankcase breather hose had slipped off. We grabbed some safety wire to lock it back down but the wire cut through the aging, hot rubber of the hose. Finally Scott MacDonald, after 10 minutes of poking the hose and burning his hand/fingers, managed to get a hose clamp secured in position. I jumped on the bike and took off. The bike, which I had previously described as “the worst bike I’ve ever ridden,” was actually a joy to ride. Caleb had taken off the murderous clip-ons and had instead secured proper Superbike bars. This made a huge difference and the bike was fun and easy to ride. That said, in the middle of my first lap, the tank broke free as I was rolling through the bowl of Turn 6. I brought the bike in and Caleb and Scott resecured the tank with two “fresh” zipties and I was off again. Thirteen laps later, they signaled me to come in and Scott took over for his shift. Two laps into his session, the battery died on the bike and just like that, we were dead after 2 hours. Round 3 will be at the Labor Day event in September. Surely glory awaits us there!
After our endurance race came to yet another not-so-illustrious ending, I headed back to our pit where Ken had the bike buttoned up with the other set of pipes and ready for battle the next morning. Ken and Jack Manning, CBE’s Team Principal were heading back to their Vrbo house and CBE’s Rider, Griffin, had headed out for the evening with his family who had all showed up to watch his first racing adventure. After a half hour of shut-eye in the toy hauler, I showered and headed over to the Vrbo house for some Chinese food with Ken and Jack. Sag, one of the wrenches from CBE showed up at the Vrbo house with mint chocolate cookies courtesy of his sister. I snagged a few of those and headed back to the track where after dispensing my now-famous Whiskey, Whiskey, Benadryl cocktail while hanging out with the Dinkered Antler gang I went to bed.
Saturday morning started with a bit of a scramble to organize volunteers and then out onto the track for two rounds of practice. The bike ran well and we felt like we were ready for the day. Our races were all after lunch and the CBE gang pitted next to us had a ton of visitors from Vermont all of whom brought food and good energy so the pit area was a lunch time party.
After lunch I went out for my first race of the day which was Period 4 Open. That class was scheduled to have four racers: me, Tom Bishop, Mike Corcoran and Neil Jester. When the flag dropped Neil and Mike took off on their four-strokes leaving me behind out of Turn 2. I chased Mike for two laps and then got him on Lap 3 heading up over the hill after T3. Knowing his bike was fast I put my head down and rode the bike hard. I kept thinking I heard his four stroke motor coming up on me, but after the race he told me that once I passed him, he couldn’t keep up and was left behind. At the other end of the spectrum was Neil Jester who I think was on an FZR600. That man was just gone! I never saw him after the green flag dropped.
On the second-to-last lap of the race, my right footpeg got pushed up and I fought with it from T10 all the way onto the straight where I finally had to get off the racing line, roll off the gas, and reach down with my hand to get the foot peg back down. The whole time that I was fighting with the footpeg, all I could think was that Mike Corcoran was going to come shooting by me. While a bunch of the guys on modern Formula 400 bikes did lap me during my footpeg struggles, Mike didn’t catch me and I managed to hang on to 2nd place. Not a great race. I came in 9th overall but 2nd in Period 4 Open.
Then things just went to shit…
My next two races were back-to-back. First was Heavyweight Supervintage, followed by Masters. Ken and I gassed up the bike for back-to-back races and Ken brought some water out to the hot pit so I could grab a drink between races. Alas, when I was sitting on the hot grid waiting for our out lap, the bike died on me. They held the other bikes while Johnny B pushed me but the bike wouldn’t fire and they had to let the other bikes go. I pushed the bike back to our pit and quickly started it up on the rollers. By the time I got back to the hot grid, the other bikes were all lined up for the green flag. Race Director Heather Carroll told me I could start from Pit Lane once the bikes had all cleared Turn 1. Not great, but at least I’d get out there with a chance to catch people. Green flag waved and 10 seconds later Heather let me go. I ripped down pit lane to to Turn 1 and the footpeg again came up on me. To deal with the footpeg I had to go back up to the hot pit in order to be ‘released’ safely into the race. I ripped back up to the hot pit and took a second to rotate the footpeg so that it would stop popping up on me. By this time Lap 1 was completed and Heather released me (again!) from the hot pit. I raced hard and caught a bunch of people but all I was doing was “unlapping” myself; I was still in last place. At the top of the hill heading for T9 on the last lap the bike suddenly sounded odd and so I rolled off and brought the bike across the finish line at about 3/4 speed. As soon as I crossed the finish line and downshifted into T1 the bike died and I coasted through 1,1A, and 2 and came to a halt between T2 adn T3. AAA came out to pick me up. I missed my back-to-back with Masters. So our bike was dead and our day was over.
Ken pulled the plugs which looked ok and then took off one of the heads and the cylinder and piston both looked mint. Finally we settled on vapor lock as the answer. Vapor lock, I learned, occurs when liquid fuel in the engine boils and turns into a gas which then cause the engine to misfire or, in our case, not fire at all.
Saturday night the awards ceremony was held at the New England Racing Museum which is just down the road from the track. The museum provided pizza and drinks and our FIM Grand Marshall and total badass Gina Bovaird talked about her time as a professional roadracer in the 70’s. She was the first woman to qualify for the Daytona 200 and to celebrate her, Doug Donelan reached out to Kayla Yaakov to get her to say a few words to the club. This year Kayla became the first woman to take pole position and to land on the podium at Daytona! Nice historical bookends for the weekend.
Sunday morning I took the bike out for first practice with the “back up” pipes on it and the bike felt super underpowered. The tachometer and temperature gauges had stopped working on Saturday (it really was just one of those weekends; if it wasn’t for bad luck, we’d have had no luck at all) so I couldn’t tell Ken what was happening at specific RPMs but when I described the general behavior of “no power down low and then finally getting power just before the rev limiter” he said that the behavior I was describing matched up with the dyno chart for those pipes. Our first race of the day was Heavyweight Supervintage which was after lunch. The bike fired up OK, but was not running properly right from the start. Regardless, I took it out and lined up for the race. I got a fairly middling start and managed to go around the outside of Steve Harry on his Moto Guzzi heading into T1. Knowing that Steve was in my class and was on a strong four stroke, and that my bike was running poorly, I wanted to get out in front of him early. I went as hard as I could for three laps but as we crossed start/finish at the end of Lap 3 Steve passed me and two turns later Rabbie lapped us both. Ugh. The bike was running so badly. I chased Steve hard and was able to close up on him in a few spots, but he just outmotored me time and again. In the end I limped home in dead last place overall.
I brought the bike in and told Ken, “That’s it we’re done. The bike is running horribly. There’s no point in even going out.” We sat there glumly for quite a while. At that point, we were just ready to fold up for the weekend and be done. We’d take the bike back to the shop and then head down to Vin’s dyno to try to figure out what was going on. About an hour later, we decided to throw a Hail Mary by putting in new plugs and putting the old pipes back on the bike without the muffler. If the bike ran well, at least we’d have learned something and would have a bit more information for diagnostic purposes. The bike fired up well and sounded strong albeit crazy loud with one muffler missing. I rolled out to the hot pit and managed to get the bike into neutral which was a good sign. We got the whistle and headed out to line up on the grid. Coming out of T12 I clicked the bike into neutral and coasted up to the starting grid. I sat in my starting slot, revving the bike to keep it going while others lined up in their grid positions. And then the bike just died. I rolled it to the side of the track and sat there as the other bikes prepared to launch. Scott Hussey, always on the scene, got these photos marking the end of our weekend…
And that’s how the weekend ended. With our bike sitting on the side of the front straight waiting to get pushed back to our pit.
For those of you keeping score Team Skippy Racing is off to an 0-2 start in the 2026 Race Season in terms of having a good time racing. We’ve only completed 7 of the 12 races we signed up for. When we pushed ourselves up to the Period 2 class by adding a front disc brake, we knew that the competition would be harder but we didn’t count on all the outside factors just destroying our first two race weekends. Clutch problems, vapor lock, freezing temperature with rain, broken tach and temperature gauges, more clutch problems, Africa-hot temperatures melting our gas line…. The race gods have thrown everything at us and all we can do is lick our wounds and try to get things sorted in time for the first Canaan event of the year four weeks. Hopefully The Magic MILF will smile down on us then.
A few nice shots from Scott Hussey…
Great content! Keep up the good work!