I attended the Friday practice day for Round 4 to get used to the new track layout, and all went well. I chose not to do qualifying for the sprints on Saturday because it was raining, but the Prairie Dogs did have a successful endurance race in the wet. My weekend ended during Sunday morning practice when a lowside crash involving another rider resulted in a pretty serious injury...
Getting There
What do they say..."Just showing up is half the battle"? For the first time this season, Steve and I arranged things so that we could attend the Friday practice day. Instead of renting a trailer to transport Humpty Dumpty the endurance bike, Steve decided to borrow Allen's decrepit trailer that hadn't turned a wheel in a few years. He got to my place with the trailer at about 10 pm on Thursday, and we loaded the bike. In the process of checking the tire pressures, we discovered that air would leak out of the base of one of the valve stems if you pressed it to the side. Not good.
So here we have a quandary. It is too late to get parts to fix the wheel tonight and if we wait for the stores to open tomorrow we will be very late getting to the track. We could just try and see if it makes it...if it breaks on the way there we are no worse off - we will still have to wait for the stores to open to get what we need to fix it.
Predictable result. Shredded tire beside Hwy 8 at 7 am. Friday morning.
Fortunately TSC in Kitchener opened at 7:30 am so we were able to get two new wheels quickly and get back on our way. We arrived at the track at around 10 am and asked the organizers what we had missed at the riders' meeting.
Reverse Technical Layout
Round 4 of the SOAR series took place on the "Reverse Technical" track at Grand Bend (see previous blog post). No one had run this configuration before so it was a mystery to all of us going into Friday practice. My verdict: I love this layout! I was worried about the sharp corner at the end of the back straight, but it turned out not to be very difficult at all since it is very increasing-radius. At first of course we were all braking too early but I eventually moved my braking point up to about the third marker and that worked well with just a bit of squirm on the brakes and not much coasting before turning it in. The two corners after that are beautiful quick things where you can really be on the throttle as soon as you dive-bomb the apex, much like the dogleg on the start-finish straight but not as fast. Great fun! With my gearing I only needed two upshifts and two downshifts per lap, with most of the track being taken in third.
I ended up doing consistent 1:17s without much effort but 1:16s were possible when I got everything right. I even managed a 1:15.8 at some point. Here are a few laps:
Saturday Practice and Qualifying
Everyone was nervous about the weather on Saturday - the forecast called for heavy precipitation to arrive at some point in the afternoon. Morning practice was beautiful even if it took me a few sessions to get back up to pace. Unfortunately my two qualifying races were the final two on the schedule, and by the time they were approaching the rain had started. Some riders switched immediately to rain tires, but I decided to not bother. If the rain stopped and the track dried then good for me; if not I just wouldn't qualify and would start nearer the back - no big deal since both classes were pretty small anyway. As it turned out the rain kept coming...and coming and coming....
Prairie Dogs Endurance Race
Humpty the endurance GSXR 600 was looking less than resplendent in full Bondo Beast livery for Round 3. Allen decided to rectify this for Round 4...but of course even though there were five weeks between rounds nothing ever gets done until the last minute. I think the clear coat was still drying when Steve picked up the bodywork from Allen on Thursday night. That said, you have to admit that it turned out pretty well for a home garage spray-bomb kind of effort. Definitely passes the 20-20 test (looks acceptable from 20 feet away at 20 mph).
The only problem was, we had no rain tires and it was pouring. So, we decided to take it easy and just run on the Q3s. When the other teams came up to us to ask what tires we were running and we told them, their eyes got as big as saucers. We figured that if we could go three hours without crashing then we could claim a victory. I am happy to say that we pulled it off, basically by tiptoeing around the track like we had training wheels on. At one point young Tyler Waugh on his 80 cc Kawasaki enduro came by me and then gapped me. I'm not kidding.
In the end we beat all but one of the GTL teams (including Tyler) and even one of the GTO teams, but finished at the bottom of GTU again.
Really, the most shocking development is that over the course of the race, Allen put in the single best lap time. Imagine that. Allen. Personally I put it down to a recording error. Also, a visiting relative of Steve's wife, Dave from England, was recording our laps and Allen may have slipped him some cash. But let him have his tiny ray of glory...
Sunday - Definitely not Funday
Steve and Allen went home Saturday night after dinner and I awoke to a very very wet track and heavy fog. For safety reasons no one could go on track until the fog lifted, so morning practice didn't start until after 10 am. We were only going to get through two rotations of practice before the sprint races started, so I went out for the first session even though there were still some pretty damp patches. No problem - I took it easy and all was well.
Here's where things got pretty unpleasant. During the second practice session I was doing nicely by my standards but as I rounded the long right-hander near the end of the lap, another rider came around me on the outside. I don't know if he cut across my line or if I got startled and changed my line, but I found myself on a sure trajectory for his rear tire. In a bit of a panic I grabbed the brake lever while still leaned over, and the result was predictable - the bike slammed down hard. It actually wasn't a terribly violent crash, but unfortunately the brake lever guard got torn off when it hit the ground and the exposed handle bar end dragged itself across the end of my middle finger, shredding the glove and all of the flesh underneath it.
When I stopped sliding I jumped up, shook my smarting right hand hard, yelled a few choice obscenities, then collected myself enough to walk over to the bike and hit the kill switch. Then I looked down and saw the shredded glove and the bleeding finger, and my first thought was "oh no, I don't have another set of gloves for this afternoon". Presently, I noticed that the finger was actually looking a bit gory, and thought I had best take a knee and signal for the medics.
The EMS guys put me in the bus and drove me back to the pits, where they cut off the glove and cleaned the wound a bit then dressed it. They asked me if anyone could drive me to the hospital and I said that Shah or Brody probably could but could it wait? I didn't want them to miss their races. They let me know that it was a pretty serious injury and that I should really have it attended to immediately.
I was actually feeling not too bad so I changed out of my leathers and drove myself to the hospital in Exeter (right hand injury, manual transmission....). They x-rayed my hand pretty quickly but then I had to wait there for several more hours before I finally saw the doctor. He froze my finger and examined the injury, then instructed me to get to the Hand and Upper Limb Clinic in London as fast as possible. So back in the Jeep and rush down to London with the referral papers (during which time the freezing wore off). It took the specialist there almost no time to determine that she needed to amputate about half the finger, so she did exactly that while I looked in the other direction. The surgery itself was not painful in the least, but the sound effects were a bit off-putting.
Of course during all of this I was calling my wife (who was out of town) and texting my brother to keep them up to date. Since the surgery was done by 5:30 or so I decided to go back to the track to collect my stuff. Not too many people were left there but my friend Kyle (who had won the rookie race that day) and his sister Karen helped me hook up the trailer, load the bike and pack all my gear into the Jeep. Then I had a 2-hour drive back to Guelph, frankly feeling a bit spent. Stopped at the all-night pharmacy and got my antibiotics and pain meds.
The End?
As of this writing my accident only happened two days ago, and I am still getting my head around what it means for me and my racing. My wife up to this point has only just barely tolerated the whole thing, and now that I have actually come home missing body parts I suspect she will have reached the end of her patience. And who could blame her?
Myself I am not yet in a mental state where I even know what I want to do. Go back to racing, become just a track day rider again, or give up motorcycling altogether, in consideration of the strain it puts on my family.
The bike itself is not badly damaged, needing only a new handlebar, brake lever, brake lever guard and some general straightening up to be operational again. Plus clean the blood splatter from the inside of the fairing. But it will be weeks before I can even hold a wrench so I have plenty of time to think about it.
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