Robert Punts Himself Out of the Points Sears Point, 30 May, 1999 This report is going to be short. I was feeling good about my attitude in practice on Saturday and Sunday morning. I was having less trouble being aggressive than I had last time out, and my times were less horrible than they were last month. 250 production was the first race of the day on Sunday. When the green flag flew, I had either failed to put the bike in gear on the grid, or the bike popped into neutral when I started to let the clutch out for the start. Either way, I was sitting still on the front row while everyone around me whizzed by. Except Steve Chan. Steve Chan whizzed into my left muffler and footpeg bracket. Luckily, neither he nor I fell. In my frenzy to get the bike in gear and take off, I didn't realize I'd been hit until I felt the muffler where part of my foot normally goes, and I had a great deal of trouble downshifting. I knew there was no way I was going to catch back up to the leaders, but I figured I could run the race and at least finish. I took off and started trying to pass people. I noticed that only about 30% of my attempts to downshift actually resulted in a gear change, and when I looked down at my muffler I saw that it would swing out away from the bike every now and then because its rear muffler mount had been broken in the collision. When it swung out, I would reach down and pull it back in. I guess I passed 15 or 20 people, mostly in the wrong gear, before the muffler finally swung down suddenly all the way to the ground as I exited turn 10 on the second or third lap. I could no longer reach the muffler to pull it in, so I decided I'd better pull off. I would unquestionably be meatballed on the next lap anyway, even if I made it that far. So I took the exit to the pits. Oh well. Pretty disappointing. It's going to be hard to get back into the top three in the class points now, and I might have seen all I'm going to see of the front row this year. I'm going to do my best to get back up there, though. I went from second in the class to probably somewhere around tenth. I swapped parts around and put the bike back together and made it out for the third race of the day, which was 500 twins. I didn't finish that race, either, because the muffler on the other side of the bike unplugged from the header, making a raucous noise. Since I didn't know exactly what was wrong and that race didn't matter much to me, I pulled in again. The unplugging resulted from the header getting all moved around while the left side muffler mount was broken in the production race. The fourth race was 250 superbike, and it came after lunch so I had time to plug the exhaust system back together. I managed to finish the race, but was sort of spent and dejected at the end. I slowed from 2:07's at the beginning of the race to 2:09's at the end, which let John Prelock (whom I'd passed early in the race) get back by me. I told John afterwards that my watch showed I hadn't slowed down, but I was reading the lap order from my watch backwards when I thought that. In reality, I did slow down near the end of the race by more than 2 seconds a lap. So that's that. A split-second screw-up costs me most of what I went to do. But there is a big bright side: My motor didn't blow up, and I didn't crash. I'll be out there next time at Thunderhill.