This race report will be shorter than my last one, if only because
it's slightly harder for me to type now. :-(

Friday evening:
Arrive at hotel to find the desk had screwed up my reservation along
with tons of others. Steve Chan, my roomie, had arrived before me and
discovered that they didn't have my reservation, and he quickly nabbed
the last room the place had available. Unfortunately that room had
only one bed. It was the best offer I had, so I spent the night on the
floor of Steve's room, and he got the bed. I managed to sleep OK
anyway.

I didn't expect the weekend to be any good because it was raining
Friday night, and Steve said more rain was forecast for Saturday. If
it rained all day Saturday, we wouldn't get any practice and then
Sunday would be lousy even if it was dry, since I didn't know the
track well at all. I had done just over a half day there last April
before my crankshaft broke in two, making me miss the Spring races
there.

Saturday:
Wake up to no rain and drying roads. Good! The weather is still
chilly, though, and the surface of the track is still wet when we get
there. They put blowers out to dry out the track, with decent but not
stellar results. I'm in the first practice group, so things are still
quite dodgy when I get out there. A number of conversations in the pit
have centered around "the arc," a turn I always describe as "that
decreasing-radius U-turn where almost everybody runs off at least
once." And sure enough, I come around on the second lap of practice to
find that John Rabasa has sacrificed his pride and a bunch of plastic
fairing bits to take a sideways trip through the mud and keep the
turn's reputation alive. Two laps later John is joined by the second
in a crowd of that turn's mud-wrestlers whose ranks will grow steadily
as the weekend passes.

During the first practice session there are a number of puddles on the
track, and the entire surface is cold, so every time I try pushing at
all, I get worrisome results. The puddle where John fell and the one
in the left-hander before the long sweeper are the worst, and they
establish the two points of greatest fear for me. This fear of those
two corners will last the whole weekend, long after the surface is dry
and traction is great.

The second session was uneventful; traction had improved and the
surface was dry, but the asphalt was still too cold to let the tires
warm up, and things were still pretty slick. I just rode around slowly
trying to remember which way the track went.

The third session lasted about 3 corners for me. I went out in a pack
that included a number of slower 250 production riders, and I passed a
few of them before I found myself behind Jack Walshe. Jack wisely
realizes that it's the first lap of the session, and tires and track
alike are still chilly, so he's going slowly and prudently. Lacking
his prudence, I set up a tentative pass in what they call turn 4 (it's
really turn 6 if you count them all), planning to go under Jack at the
apex if he leaves room, and to slow gently and pass later if he closes
the door. He closes the door, and I try my best "slow gently" maneuver
just like I'd planned. scree-BLAM! Ouch. I thought I had plenty of
traction left over for braking because I was cornering so slowly, but
I was wrong. Shouldn't have tried that move. As I came to rest at the
edge of the track, I saw Paul Somerville go motocrossing to celebrate
my crash. I had passed him a couple of corners earlier with quite a
speed difference, and he said afterward that he was far enough back
from me that he could have kept going, but the voices in his head must
have told him to pay me a visit off-track. Luckily he kept the bike up
and didn't come close to me. He courteously rode over and asked if I
was OK before motoring back out on course.

My bike was completely unscathed except for a slightly (but visibly)
twisted front end. Not even a broken footpeg! I, on the other hand,
fell alarmingly hard for the speed I was going, and got a completely
unnecessary and stupid injury to boot: I had carelessly left my
leathers partly unzipped, so when I fell, the flap caught on the
asphalt and exposed my shoulder. My t-shirt got shredded and my
shoulder got some unsightly rash. My other main injury is a bruised
left hand. I don't know how or why the back of my left hand hit the
pavement so hard, but it did.

After the session was over, I rode my bike back to the pits, and
started to worry about what I would need to do to get it back out on
the track. The other option was to prepare my spare bike, which was
present but missing some parts because Jack had only been able to find
most of a Ninja 250 in Stan's garage when he went to borrow Stan's
bike.

Before I could actually turn a wrench, though, I would have to take
off at least my gloves and probably my leathers. This was a problem
because I knew there were injured body parts underneath, and if I see
my injuries I have a lot more trouble ignoring them. "If I'm hurt, I'm
hurt," I told myself, and pulled off my left glove. The hand didn't
look too bad for the first 5 seconds, but then it became clear that
compression from the glove had been holding back a lot of swelling. I
got ice on the hand ASAP, and it continued to swell, until finally it
was big enough that I went to seek the opinion of a person trained in
swollen hands.

I interrupted a couple of National Motorcycle Patrol members (the NMP
is a volunteer first-aid organization of mostly EMT's who come and
help us out at the races when we need them most) just before they
started their lunch. "Yeah, dude, your hand is swollen!" I guess
that's the diagnosis I expected. They coached me on how long and how
cold to ice it, and wrapped it up in a bandage that would keep gloves
and other stuff from catching on it. And then the inevitable happened:
They started to ask me about other injuries, so I said, "Well, my
shoulder hurts just a little." At this point I hadn't removed my
leathers yet, but I had noticed earlier that they were mysteriously
unzipped part-way. I knew the unzipping could mean my shoulder was
worse off than I expected, but I had maintained my denial up to this
point by just leaving the leathers on. :-) So I have road rash on my
shoulder in spite of my leathers' best efforts. Lesson of the day:
Give your leathers a chance to do their job. Zip them up.

After some time spent resting in the pits, I felt like figuring out
what I was going to ride if I went back out again. After some hemming
and hawing and hoping the forks and clamps just twisted instead of
being bent and loosening everything to check (they weren't just
twisted -- the clamps are bent), I decided to ride the slightly bent
bike anyway. The bend isn't too much, and I didn't feel like even a
little wrenching on the spare to get the borrowed parts back onto
it. I figured if I had energy, I'd rather use it riding.

I took some ibuprofen and got two more sessions on Saturday afternoon
wearing gloves I borrowed from Stan since I think this crash was the
last straw for my pair. The rest of practice went well, and my riding
felt good; I didn't seem to lose much confidence from the crash,
probably becuase I knew exactly what I did wrong. By the end of the
day, traction was excellent and I felt like I had some idea which way
the track went.

Saturday night I was most grateful that I had a bed to sleep in.

Sunday:
The weather looked better Sunday than it had Saturday. It was cold
Sunday morning, but things warmed up fast. There was no cloud cover at
all. Morning practice went fine, but I had just begun to feel like
pushing a little when they called us off the track. The first race of
the day was 250 superbike, and a bunch of us production racers decided
to go out in it. I got a better start than usual, which is to say that
I sucked only moderately instead of a whole bunch. And of course
Darren Slawecki and lots of others motored ahead of me on the
start. So I started passing people as best I could, and ended up
behind Darren. He was going quite a bit slower than I wanted to go,
but it was hard to pass him because I don't know the track confidently
enough to out-brake in lots of places where I should, and he puts his
finely-honed blocking skills to excellent use. I managed to get by him
by dropping back and setting up for better drive out of the last
corner onto the front straight. I expected him to turn his pace up and
give chase, but I looked back after one lap and he had dropped back a
good ways. When I looked back on the next lap, I didn't see him.

So I knew that once again I was in that same old situation: I didn't
have the passing skills to match my cornering skills. Oh well...

My next race was 500 twins, and it came after lunch. I had forgotten
to take any aspirin before I went out for the race, and it was
definitely time for my dose. Every time I went over a bump my ribcage
on the right side would remind me to take aspirin as soon as I got off
the bike. At the beginning of the race I gave perfunctory chase to Jon
Forman, whom I might have stood a chance of beating, but I grew weary
and Jon walked away. My lap times were two seconds slower than Darren's
had been in the superbike race.

For the 250 production race, I made damn sure to remember my
drugs. Better living through chemistry, indeed! :-) The deciding
factor for me in the production race turned out to be that
passing/cornering skill mismatch I mentioned before, because the story
of the race was that I got stuck behind Darren for the whole thing. He
was going a tad faster than he had in superbike, so I couldn't pass
him even though our pace still seemed quite slow to me. I just rode
around behind him, pulling alongside here and there but never feeling
like I knew a corner well enough to fly by him, get hard on the
brakes, and pitch it in. The extra notch of speed he'd picked up kept
me from getting past him on drive out of the corners, so I just stayed
there, happy to be upright and finishing the race. On the last lap he
put a vintage backmarker between us at a crucial instant, so he took
fifth over me by several bike lengths.

Steve Chan took third over Frank Mazur, and this time he didn't even
perform any illegal on-track modifications to pull it off!
Congratulations, Steve! Darren and I were closing on Frank at the end
of the race. Steve said he thought Frank must have given up and slowed
considerably after Steve passed him. Tom Dorsey beat Brian Bartlow
with a pass late in the race to take the win. Well done, Tom!

... and that's it.

The current status of the injuries is that I'm healing, gradually. The
hand is swollen and stiff still, but it's a general spread-out sort of
edema instead of the localized lump I had on Saturday. The shoulder
is... well, you all probably know how road rash is...

Zip up those leathers all the way!

	-- Robert