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Aussie Trip Part 2
Day Five 3/05
We were up at the crack of dawn,
heading for the course and hoping for dry salt. The reports we heard varied
from” the salt is drying” to” the meet is cancelled”. We take the bikes to the
salt to set up our pits and get the bikes cleaned from the horrendous amount of
dust. Quite the task. Every vehicle entering the salt
from the dusty road is required to use a leaf blower to get the dust off so as
not to leave an enormous red swath onto the salt. We brought our own to hasten
our entry.
The salt seems to
be improving steadily and we are keeping our hopes up for a good course.
Day Six 3/06
Today is the actual first day we are
supposed to be racing. The course is still improving; but remains wet at the
start area and for the first mile.
There has been an additional snag in that the large roll of
wire that is strung to run the timing lights was rolled incorrectly last year
and looks like a fishing reel with tangles everywhere. They have a bunch of
volunteers working on it all day long.
I finally get my bike through tech and am officially ready
to race, but there will be no runs today. Temps are about 95-100 degrees and
did I tell you about the flies?? We all learned something new—it’s called the
Aussie Wave—and it looks like you are being friendly in all the pictures when actually
you are trying to keep from going mad from the tormenting flies. Truly a treat!
The day ended with
the timing lights still not done and no runs.
Day Seven 3/07
The days starts with a drivers meeting
where they advise us the track will start out shortened until it can dry some
more. Does not really affect me, only the vehicles like the streamliners
that need a lot of runoff room. I spend the time checking out the other
really nice machines that have shown up inclusing a
pair of older GS’s, one is turboed,
one supercharged. Also, a factory blown Vincent (one of only 2 ever built), a very
well done twin turboed Honda CBX six cylinder, plus
everything from a CBR-250 4 cylinder to a 850cc Suzuki
2 stroke triple.
I managed to
finally put faces to some of the folks I have been corresponding with on
various motorcycle forums, Gary Petersen and Wayne MacDonald from the T-595
Triumph board—Wayne
is the inventor of the Tuneboy, a set-up similar to a
Power Commander for Triumphs and he has a turboed
Triumph I am interested in finding out more about. He supplies his units to The
Turbo Connection for their turbo installs.
Finally in the
afternoon we get word they are going to start running!! So it’s into the
leathers and head for the line. They have a unique method of assigning starting
line positions—you must show up with bike and gear and put your name and bike
number and class on a blackboard. They start at the top and move down as runs
are made, until your name comes up. A bit time consuming.
I am finally at the
starting line and the bike is running and ready. It seems like I have to wait
forever and it is ferociously hot in my leathers sitting in the sun. I get the
signal and head off up the course. The bike is running really well but I run
out of gears too soon - I left the gearing from last year as a starting point but
it apparently too low. But this is really only a test run for the nitrous so I
thumb the button and feel the bike surge forward strongly pulling right to
redline. I let off as we still have
about a mile to go. I thumb the button 2 more times with the same strong surge,
but as I approach the last timing lights I feel the bike falter, so I roll off
the throttle and head for the exit lanes and back to the pits. I can hear an
exhaust noise and get a spitback through the carb. The bike feels
like its running on one cylinder and it sounded like I had blown a head gasket.
I limped it back to the pit area and stripped off my
gear, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.
The bike had run 172.811 which was faster than last year at Bonneville
(and a DLRA record) but nowhere near what I felt
it could do, especially considering how well it was pulling on the button.
Ross and I started to tear into it to diagnose what had been
hurt and after stripping off the bodywork I noticed a fuel line feeding the
nitrous fuel pump had been pinched, causing the nitrous to run lean. It was well hidden under the fire sleeve
mandated by the SCTA so we never saw the problem and in all the dyno runs we
never had a problem so I can only guess it happened in transit.
I then pulled the
plugs and while the front was fine the rear plug was missing the electrode.
Looking down the plug hole we could see the piston was undamaged so we did a
compression test. The rear cylinder had 0 compression,
so we pulled the rear head. The exhaust valve looked like I had taken a
blowtorch to it and had a nice notch cut out of it. The seat was possible
damaged and we could see a crack going to the spark plug hole. Not what I was
hoping for, but a lesson learned nonetheless. Note to self—use the Aeroquip
fuel line that has a jacket that cannot kink, and get the fuel pressure cut-off
switch someone mentioned to you before (I had no idea what was needed, being a
complete novice to nitrous.)
The logistics of
trying to get parts to where we were was just too difficult so I accepted the
fact that I was done racing. We buttoned the bike back up for the dusty trip
home. But even if I could not race I could certainly help all of my friends
with their efforts.
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