Thompson Turns The Suck Level Up To 11

Nigel Tufnel’s explanation of his amplifier in Spinal Tap and Kevin Dinsmoor’s middle finger from the front straight both provide a nice summation of the weekend at Thompson. Ok, it wasn’t that bad, but the weather was…. rough. And the worst part was my faithful companion WeatherBug made me think it wouldn’t be so bad. Driving down Thursday afternoon it was looking good for Friday, a little rain (40% chance) on Saturday and then blue skies on Sunday.

On the good side, this was the USCRA’s first foray into a three-day race event. That’s why I was driving down on Thursday afternoon in order to set up for Friday. Friday would be a half-day practice followed by the First Round of the TrackMaster Triple Crown Endurance Series Presented by Rick’s Electrics. Saturday and Sunday were regular sprint races.

Thursday night as people arrived at the track and set up, the recurring theme for the evening was different versions of “Holy Crap. Your bike looks amazing!” And the people saying this weren’t wrong…

After making the rounds visiting people and talking about our off-season activities and bike-builds, I called it a night and crawled into bed to begin my usual flip-flopping in bed all night in anticipation of getting to race the next day. Finally around 1am I managed to fall asleep.

Friday morning was supposed to start with the track going green at 9:00. Unfortunately, there was some kind of kerfuffle (or as Ken would say, “festoosh”) with the ambulance which didn’t show up until 10:30. So already things were off to a not-so-great start. The plan was for two rounds of practices before lunch and then one more after lunch and then the TrackMaster Endurance Series Round 1 Presented by Rick’s Electrics. During the first round of practices, a rider blew the clutch pushrod seal on his Honda and oiled about 3/4’s of the track. So that shut things down and the club called an early lunch. When I went out in the first practice, I was very, very, very aware of the new paint on the new bike. In the forefront of my mind was “Do. not. crash. under any circumstances.” That, plus not having ridden at Thompson since last May, made me a very tentative rider.

After lunch — brats, of course — I went out for second practice and began to feel a little better. The first practice had really been about finding my way around the track, checking, verifying shift points, etc. This practice I was able to begin to up the speed a bit, and unfortunately, I began to get some chatter in the front end of the bike. Not great.

The third, and last, session of the day I went out and was able to, really for the first time, think less about the track and more about the bike. I began to go faster and I still felt chatter on the front end. I was very glad that we were running three days which gave me an extra three practice sessions to begin to figure out what was essentially a completely new bike from last year.

After the third session, I parked the Titan and shifted gears into TrackMaster Endurance Race (presented by Rick’s Electrics) mode. Caleb French, Patrick Mack, Scott MacDonald and I, The Worst Team Ever — that’s our actual name — were going to ride Caleb’s Honda CB550. True to team form we were scrambling at the last minute to try to get the Honda ready and we came up short. Moments before we were due on the grid to start the race, we called an audible and ditched the Honda for Ian Bisshop’s MZ Skorpion that Caleb had bought over the winter. I haven’t ridden in an endurance race in many years as I generally find them to be too much effort for the pay-off, but given that the club had started a three-race series (presented by Rick’s Electrics) , I decided to buy in and join The Worst Team Ever. Another last-minute issue bit us in the butt in that Scott MacDonald couldn’t find the required health insurance card that was necessary to ride so we again called an audible and recruited Josh Gurley to our team.

The race was fun. I ran two sessions before the bike broke. (More on that below!) The first session was a real challenge. While the bike felt familiar — I raced my dad’s Skorpion for a few season — going from a high-revving two stroke with GP shift to a powerful four-stroke with regular shift took a lot of thinking on my part. It was like going from a Mazda Miata to a tractor — a very fast, powerful tractor, but a tractor nonetheless. The second time I went out I was able to adjust my thinking and had a really good session. My lap times in the second session were about 7 seconds lower than my first session so that felt good.

When Patrick Mack came in from his second session and we started to gas the bike up, Mike Corcoran (from Team Pasta & Potatoes who were pitted next to us) looked over and said, “Uh, guys? You’ve got oil all over your rear fender. Might be on your tire too.” Yup, our sump overflow tank was full-to-bursting and we declared our race “done.” Patrick fired up the bike just to ride it off the hot grid and over to the other side of the wall. As soon as he fired the bike, the clatter from the top end was massive. He shut it right down and we pushed the bike off the hot grid. D.O.A. with valve issues

After the endurance race ended — we came in 5th (out of 6 bikes in our class) with 78 laps — I hung out with Rabbie, Dave Evans and Craig Hirko and went to bed pretty early. Again, rolling around in bed for hours before falling asleep.

Saturday morning was when the suck got genuinely turned up to 11. I woke up and it was raining and the temperature was 45º (but “feels like 31º!” WeatherBug cheerfully told me!). And that was going to be the high temperature of the day. By 2pm it was supposed to drop to 41º, and it did. I skipped the morning practice sessions as it was just too damn cold and the track was soaking wet. The morning was mostly people standing around grumbling. To add to the rain and cold, the wind was howling the whole day. Like, invert-your-umbrella windy! My first race of the day, Heavyweight Supervintate was not until Race 10 (out of 15) and I had been hoping, foolishly, that the weather would improve. It did not. It was cold and wet. As we rolled out for our out lap, the rain started up again.

The race, honestly, was embarassing. The entire time, all I could think about was “just don’t crash.” There was no way to get the temperatures up in the tires and the rain made the ground slick. As I left our pit, Ken said, “Just keep it upright.” And that’s literally all I did. In a race with eight riders, I came in 7th… and the 8th guy crashed. So, yeah, dead last. To make matters worst, Team Skippy had our first fan/visitor to the pits. Jim Winters who has been working on T500’s for many years and who Ken has been helping to build a race bike came to watch us race. How do I know he’s a fan? Well, he actually brought a copy of my book and asked Ken and I to sign it. (You can order your own copy here and I will gladly sign it for you for free!) So, this new guy and his friend were both at the track literally only to see our bike and see me race it and I was tiptoeing around the track terrified of crashing the work of art Ken had built over the winter. Like I said, embarrassing.

The second and third race of the day were back-to-back. The first was our new class, Period IV Formula 1. At this point in the day, races had been shortened to four laps due to weather and timing (lots of crashes had made the schedule run long) and many racers had just decided not to race in the last races. So as I lined up for Period IV Formula 1, there were only two other racers on the grid, Kevin Dinsmoor and Wendy Clark. My original plan had been to exploit a loop hole in the rules. I was going to start the race when the green flag dropped, complete one lap and then pull into the hot pit, and wait for the white lap signaling “last lap.” Then I would pull back onto the track, run the last lap and take the checkered flag. No one else on the track was in my class, so I would technically “win” the race and get 10 points towards the class championship. However, I did not do that because the race I really wanted to win was the next race, Masters and I wanted to use this race to get some heat into my tires to give me an advantage during the Masters race. All the other racers in that race would be going out on stone cold tires and my tires and bike would be warmed up. So I did my four laps — alone with Kevin long gone in front of me and Wendy far behind me — and came in ready to immediately line up for Masters.

A word about the Masters class: The Masters class is a run-what-ya-brung class based only on age and there are actually three different age classes: Masters (over 50) Super Masters (over 65) and the newly-minted, Junior Masters (over 40). Given that the only specification for this class is rider’s age, the race is kind of a mess; there can be someone out there on a 70cc two stroke and someone else on a modern Kawasaki 4RR. All of that said, the reason I wanted to be ready for this race was that Caleb was running in Junior Masters and I was running in Masters and that would put us on the track at the same time. Frequent readers — I see you Tom Jester! — may remember the famous Grateful Dead showdown in Canaan two years ago when Caleb beat me on his FZR 400. Well, this year is going to be a year-long Booth/French Throwdown with Caleb on his new FZR400 and me on the Titan. Saturday’s race would be Round 1 and I wanted my tires warm and ready to go.

When the green flag dropped, I got a good start. To be clear there were 5 or 6 bikes ahead of me, but like I said, most of them were on modern bikes, and all I cared about was the fact that Caleb was behind me. The race was only four laps long and given that he was on a four stroke, I felt like beating him into T1 was the first hurdle of the race and I had cleared that hurdle. Through Lap 1 there was no sign of him. I did my best to not think about the bike’s new paint and not crashing as I pushed myself to stay in front of Caleb. On Lap 2, coming out of T4 and heading for the bridge, I saw the front wheel of his bike. I managed to out-motor him to the bridge and held him off. At some point later in that lap he got past me. I chased him hard through Laps 3 and 4, but the more I pushed, the more pronounced the chatter on the front end became and in the last corner where the chatter was actually the worst, I rolled off an admitted defeat in the Round 1 of the 2026 Booth/French Showdown.

Saturday night a group of us — Ken, Vin, Nicola, and Frank and Matt Camillieri went out to dinner at the surprisingly busy and good restaurant right at the Motorsports Park. During dinner the topic of not being able to sleep on race days came up and Vin said, “You know, the answer is to have a few beers to make you tired..” and I immediately jumped in said, “but then you have to get up to pee at 2am and again at 5am and you still get no sleep!” All the men at the table laughed and Nicola just kept sipping her weird drink that had cucumbers in it. “You know what the answer is” I said! “Shots! Shots and Benadryl! That’s it. I’m going to get three shots of whiskey from Caleb and then take a Benadryl! I’m a genius!” Nicola, a recent graduate from Nursing School shouted, “You idiots! You can’t mix alcohol and Benadryl!” We collectively told her she wasn’t the boss of us.

After dinner we went back to the pits where Dave Evans’ band, The Cheap Brew Band, were playing a gig right in the pits and it was awesome!

People were standing around listening and eating food from the club’s potluck. The band was fabulous. Classic bar band playing all the things you’d expect including a version of The Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones with lyrics re-written to commemorate Dave’s racing career. “High on cocaine” became “High on octane.” That’s all I was able to catch. Caleb was also there and I told him about my whiskey and Benadryl plan. He was all in and gave me some whiskey which I sipped over the next half-hour and chased with a Benadryl (don’t tell Nicola) and then I was off to bed.

In short, it was the best night of sleep I’ve ever had at the track. Bar none. It was amazing. Whiskey and Benadryl is my new track cocktail. I’m going to have to ask Caleb for a name for the combo. He’s good with making up names.

Sunday morning I awoke at 9am very well rested (wink, wink) and ready for the day. I was able to sleep so late because of a stupid Connecticut blue law that says you can’t race motorized vehicles before noon on Sundays. 🙄 So there was no rush to get started. And the weather was amazing! When I got up, it was 65º and cloudy, a far cry from the nightmarish 41º and rain that had been the hallmark of Saturday. When I checked my phone, Ken had sent me a text asking about the spring rate of the fork preload we had set up over the winter. Clearly he had been thinking about the chatter I had experienced Friday and Saturday. Given that we couldn’t get on the track until noon, we felt we had enough time to open up the forks and look at the preload. After some internet research, we decided to remove 35mm from our existing preload.

The whole task was done before noon. We also talked to Dave Roper and Jim Jowers about chatter, what can cause it, how to find the cause, how to eliminate it etc. etc. They both said, that there are a ton of possibilities: tire, preload, fork oil weight, rebound settings, emulator springs and on and on. Dave said, “It’s a guessing game and the key is to try one thing at a time and if you get a signal from one of your changes, use that signal to decide on your next move. And Pete Talabach once told me, ‘no one ever regretted going with a lighter fork oil.’ ” Jim Jowers recommended we give Matt Wiley a call over at Race Tech out in California and we’re doing that. In the end, we were ready to head out on track as soon as it went green at noon. Unfortunately, the track was green for less than 30 seconds. Heading out from the pit and down to Turn 1 a rider crashed and the red flags were out before I even made it to T2. The rider was hurt (collar bone and ribs) and the ambulance had to transport her.

About an hour later we were able to get back on the track and I was finally able to push the bike. The previous night I had decided that I needed to worry less about crashing the new bike. It was a race bike, not a show piece and I needed to race it. The wam weather and dry track allowed me to focus and push the bike where I had not been able to on Friday or Saturday. I pushed hard and got a lot of chatter in the front end coming off the oval at T9 and then even more at the last right-hander heading for the front straight. A few times the chatter carried me to the left, near the side of the track and I was forced roll off. Despite all of that, I finally felt like I was riding the bike well and other than the chatter the bike was working perfectly. I had hoped that lowering the preload would lessen the chatter (thus giving us a “signal” that would tell us we’d made a good move) however, if anything the chatter seemed worse. I couldn’t tell if that was because of the change we made in the forks or because I was finally pushing the bike.

Because Sunday’s schedule is Saturday’s schedule flipped, all my races were early in the day. And this was great news because it was clear that there was more bad weather coming in pretty soon. My last two races on Saturday had been back to back and that meant that my first two races on Sunday would be back to back, with the first one being Masters (aka Round 2 of the 2026 Booth/French Throwdown). When the green flag dropped this time I wheelied off the line and got a good jump. Again the same modern four strokes all beat me into T1 but critically I never saw Caleb. I put my head down, determined to keep him behind me. The track was dry and the bike was on song. I was able to manage the chatter into T9 and T11 I went as quickly as I could — in order to get a good drive onto the front straight — without losing control of the chatter. On Lap 4 as I came out of T2 and raced up towards T3, I looked over my right shoulder and saw Caleb still on the front straight. I had a huge lead on him, but knowing how quickly a lead can disappear if you lose focus, I kept pushing. Coming out of T3 I suddenly felt my rear tire breaking free while I was hard on the gas in a straight line. “Holy crap!” I thought. “What was that?!?” I thought I had run over something on the track. It happened again coming out from under the bridge. When I got hard on the gas, the rear tire was breaking free. “Jesus! I’m spinning the rear wheel! I’m flying!” I finished the race well ahead of Caleb and rolled off on the last corner to give myself some time to breath and relax a bit because my next race would be starting as soon as I pulled off the track.

No time to gloat over Caleb, I completed the cool down lap and pulled in to line up for my next race, Period IV Formula 1. Soon after I pulled in the Hot Grid flagger waved us out. I clicked the bike into gear and the bike immediately stalled. Shit! Bob Bove ran over and pushed me down pit road to try to get me started. The bike would fire but wouldn’t catch. I waved him off and pushed the bike as fast as I could over to the nearest set of rollers I could find. Neil Jester saw me and waved me to his rollers. The bike fired up and Neil pushed me off the rollers but the bike immediately stalled. He pushed me back onto the rollers and the same thing happened: started, off the rollers, bike stalled. I realized that the clutch wasn’t disengaging; as soon as I came off the rollers, the clutch engaged and the bike stalled. Understanding the situation, I knew I had to start the bike and then come off the rollers “at speed” and keep the bike moving. I did that and was able to get the bike moving. At this point, the race had started but if I could get out, I could still get some points. As I came around the corner of the building a track worker in a friggin’ side-by-side was coming around the same corner in the wrong direction. I was forced to slam on my brakes and, of course, the bike immediately stalled. I (inappropriately) screamed at the track worker, “You’re going in the wrong fucking direction! What the fuck are you doing?!?” He came over to my pit 5 minutes later and apologized and I apologized for screaming at him.

Our weekend was done. There was defintely something wrong with the bike and that, plus the rain coming in, made it an easy choice to fold our hand for the day. I changed out of my leathers and Ken headed home soon after that. Later I went over to Kevin Dinsmoor and asked him what it felt like when you spin the rear tire. After a little back and forth, Kevin said, “That doesn’t sound like you’re spinning the rear tire; that sounds like you’ve got a clutch problem.” And I hadn’t even mentioned the fact that I hadn’t been able to disengage the clutch. So, yeah, that was clue #2 that we’ve got a clutch issue.

With Ken gone, and the our race day done, I slowly began to pack up. Because of having the suck turned up to 11 (late start, bad weather, etc.) racing didn’t stop until around 6pm and I didn’t head home until 7:30pm Four-and-a-half hour later I pulled in at home and fell into bed.

In retrospect I would say it was one of, if not the, worst weekend of racing I’ve ever had. (Some have said that Labor 2022 at Loudon was worst last year, but at least that was only one day and not three!) Regardless, the good news is that it’s less than two weeks until we’ve got another three day event. This one is at Loudon and will feature Round 2 of the TrackMaster Triple Crown Endurance Series (presented by who? That’s right, Rick’s Electrics!) and Rounds 3 and 4 of the 2026 Booth/French Throwdown!