Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2003 - 10:22 am:   
   
Well, the trailer is unloaded, the salt is washed off of everything (man what a mess!), and SteveP is on his way to Knoxville. Today I tear down the bikes and evaluate the possibility of a return trip to the salt next month.

Y'know, a year and a half ago when we made the decision to broaden the Team Elves effort, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would come out this good. It was amazing to see a 200 foot long Team Elves camp with numerous race bikes and 130/150 club bikes of all brands. And it was absolutely priceless to see the faces of people like the German family after setting two records, FMJ after he got his arms around the issues and start knocking off records, Snail having the time of his life reaching for 175 and then 180, Peter making the 150 club, PaulinOz making the 150 club, several folks making the 130 club or having the time of their lives trying, etc etc. Very, very satisfying to me to see this transformation of the team actually happen and happen tremendously successfully.

Common comment heard in the camp: "this stuff is harder than it looks!"

Comment from a USFRA official: "You're with Team Elves? You guys are our best customer!"
Actually I heard a number of positive comments about us from officials. They seemed genuinely appreciative that we were there in force, and they seemed to be enjoying having us as much as we enjoyed being there.

We really ought to make up an appreciation plaque for those folks, they put on a hell of a great event. They understand what it's all about. Not that I dislike the other sanctioning body, mind you, but the USFRA folks just approach it from a whole different perspective, one that makes the event much more fun and makes us WANT to do right by them.

As far as my own personal effort at this year's event, we certainly have some good things we can point to (the M2 and S1), as well as some disappointments (the RR). The disappointments though seem so insignificant that they just don't bother me in the slightest. Besides, even though we didn't achieve the goals we set out for the RR, we did get some tremendous success from it, as Peter and I got our "B" licenses on it, Paul made the 150 club with it, and all three of us had big smiles after running it. And I think I had an epiphany of sorts: Record tallies are not the only measure of success! In fact, many other things are much more important. I have a whole new perspective on this stuff.

What happened with the RR? Well, we went with some unproven things, including some one-off prototype stuff. It looked GREAT on the dyno. But when we got it out there in the real world, some of it gave us some trouble. That's how you learn I guess. In any event, I'll be tearing it down today and evaluating what I can do in a month's time. If the damage isn't too bad, I may be backing out some of the new stuff and going back to proven things and drag it out there again.

The M2 by comparison was flawless. I put a 1250 kit and a set of XB heads on this bike last spring. I've never split the cases on this bike, hell, I've never even had the engine out of the frame. I've ridden it all summer, it's a hoot to ride around on with 120+hp on tap. Preparation for Bonneville consisted of taking off the mirrors and putting numbers on the side. Peter and Paul flogged it on the salt and after a slight gearing changed ran as fast as 153mph! I'll put the mirrors back on it today and it's back to being a street bike. The heads on this bike are what we're digitizing for the CNC machine, anyone can buy an exact duplicate of this set of heads from us.
Susan's S1 proved that it has the right stuff, too. The goal was the 166.590 mph 1350cc M-PG record. It takes a SERIOUS race motor to go that fast at 1350cc with no fairing, and we built one. We decided to run it in the M-PF class first to get the tuning dialed in while running against a softer record. Well, the bike ran 167, and we set the M-PF record at 166.9, so we knew the M-PG record was within reach. But the performance of the bike started degrading and we were getting oil out the breathers. Something was going wrong. In hindsight, we should've gone straight for the M-PG record. But it's always easy to talk about what you should've done. We'll be back.

Aaron