The Next Race: Mid-Ohio

Checking my dates, it was July at this point. We were getting better, our bikes were getting better, and we were being viewed less as a circus act and more as just slightly eccentric. Some of the less helpful aspects of our home brewed bikes had gone away and bits more suited to taking abuse were filling their place. Plus, we had camelbacks, so weren't as likely to die during races from heatstroke or dehydration. Vintage Motorcycle Days at Mid-Ohio at that point was an AHRMA event, so we had friends that were road racing and others going just for hard-core drinking. Max was ready for his next race, but I took some convincing, mainly because Ohio was so far away. Since then we've become much more used to the travel involved in racing, but at the time it seemed like a long damned way to go to play in the woods.

Our bikes weren't completely sorted. They both fouled plugs at a truly astonishing rate. The solution would have been to tear down the engines and deal with the heads, but instead we just carried a small fortune worth of plugs with us, starting with a fresh set, changing them after the sighting lap, hoping to not have to stop too many times during the race.

This was our first run-in with a course laid out by "Chicago" Jerry, and it was incredible. Packed into a speck of woods the size of a postage stamp, he had managed to fit in several miles of uphills, downhills, creek crossings, tight tree pong stuff, and fast open bits. At one point the course zig-zagged back and forth four or five times to use up every inch of woods, but you never would have known it during the race. It was the course that all others would be measured against for some time.

Having said all that, I was once again the last one out off the woods on the sighting lap, which I found tremendously embarrassing. It would become my goal for the next race to...ahem...do better on the sighting lap. Perhaps a strange goal, but a goal's a goal. Max had no such problems or strange goals. He was getting faster every time he was on the bike. Even when he had problems with the bike he was still miles (literally) ahead of me. This race he had to do a plug swap, and his clutch center nut backed off allowing all the rollers to place themselves in unholy union with the rest of the clutch, and I still never caught up to him.

This next shot's awesome because it makes me look like I'm going really fast.

My day was not without problems either, however. It came to a tumbling end when my clutch cable parted at a particularly mis-opportune moment, throwing me off and punching a hole in the primary.
Max was rewarded with a third in our class, and I managed 5th. We had the bikes repaired within an hour or so and commenced riding them around to enjoy the rest of VMD 2008, eventually shuffling back home with lists of things to fix and improve.