Salt, Speed and Dust – Chapter 7 – Nearly Over

Run Four

“Happiness lies in a divine unrest; if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it.” – John Buchan

Randall gave me advice – put your butt all the way back.  There was a Speed hump in the rear fender and he wanted me to close the gap between me and it.  His advice was very short, and not framed with any questions or conversation otherwise.  “Ok,” I thought.  “I’ll put my butt back.”

I am a trainer and teacher.  One thing I learned and got very good at, is when you are trying to teach someone, you have to frame information and give it context, and be complete in your explanation.  Randall didn’t do that – at all.

We had the wrong tires to go over 200.  So we were going to take this run up closer to 200 and get the tires changed tonight.  I had qualified to ride the longer track and now had five miles per run to go fast and learn.

I let the clutch of the fire breathing turbo out and rolled off the line with a lot of confidence.  I dutifully shifted at 9000 rpm to the next gear.  The course was about 100 feet wide to the markers, with a blue stripe painted down the middle on the salt.  There were black markers up the sides of the course every quarter mile, and an orange sign with a big number on it for every mile.

The markers were going by with increasing velocity.  Everything felt good.  At mile 2 I was at 181 mph with 3 miles to go.  At 2 ¼ I was at 193.  Smooth sailing.  It always is until it’s not. 

Just before the Mile 3 sign at 194 mph, the bike started wobbling.  The rear of the bike swaps left while the front swaps right, then the opposite.  I held on tighter but that is not the problem or the fix.  It wobbled harder.  I knew not to chop the throttle or the back end would come around the front.  It didn’t stop.  4 seconds, five…I didn’t make any sudden moves, just eased the throttle down a touch.  It continued and adrenaline flooded my blood.  I didn’t know how to stop it.  Six seconds and eight.  Long enough to think about what I should do and what could happen. 

Mercifully, it stopped.  I rolled down.  Mile 3 completed at 191, and mile 4 at a frightful 170, mile 5 at a stunned 133.

All of a sudden my confidence for this entire goal was blown into the wind over the salt.  What happened?  I didn’t know.  I thought I hit ruts or sugary salt.  There are some very high horsepower vehicles that race here.  Around mile three to mile five they are really laying the horsepower down.  We’re talking up to 2500 hp, and when they unleash it at high rpm late in the course, they chew up the salt, forming ruts and loose salt.  Then here I come on two wheels, one of them under power.  I kept thinking it was the salt.

I was freaked out.  When I got back, AJ was freaked out too.  He said he got in a full-on “tank slapper” at 175 mph.  The same thing that happened to me.  We talked about what happened and what the cause could be.  I told him I was 6 feet right of centerline, but he went left of centerline.  What was it?

The world record on a Turbo Hayabusa was 247 mph.  On a stock one, it was 211 mph.  AJ told me the record holder, Jason McVicar, had crashed at 244 mph after he ran over a piece of metal left on the course when a previous vehicle blew its engine, and it gave him a flat tire which caused the crash.  I did not see the video on YouTube of the crash and didn’t want to at that time.  (I have now.  You can look it up yourself.)

Then there were the two crashes that Ron Cook had back in the late 1990s as he tried to break 200.  He started swapping each time.  I didn’t see that video either.

I didn’t want to go out again unless I had an explanation. I applied my logical mind.  Things don’t happen for no reason.  It’s physics.  What was the problem?  AJ and I talked more.  I asked him questions.  I saw other motorcycles in line, and I interviewed them.  I heard lots of unsure answers.  “It depends…”  That wasn’t good enough.  I asked more riders, and I looked for patterns in their answers.  One guy was on a highly modified Hayabusa and had been to Bonneville each year for many years.  He had never been over 200, and he didn’t have a good answer for me.

Then my mechanic Dean and I talked.  He was a retired road racer.  Road racers go 160-180 down the straights at some tracks.  He said keep your weight on the pegs to keep it low and forward.  Aha!  And he said sudden movements at high speed upsets the bike and the wind effect on the bike will change abruptly.

I told him I had my weight on the seat, and once I got up to sixth gear and 190, I did what Randall told me to do and put my butt back 6” to the speed hump – and I did it rather abruptly.  I went back to AJ.   “Do you move around on the bike at speed?” I asked.  “Yeah, a lot,” he said.  “Do you have your weight on the seat?”  “Yeah”. 

I had my answer.

I know when you load a trailer or a truck with all the weight to the back, it will sway at speed.  I looked at the bike.  Where my butt was on the seat was behind the pegs and obviously higher.  Dean told me to put my butt back, yes, but keep my butt off the seat like a jockey, so the weight is low and on the pegs.  It made sense, and now I was willing to go out and try again.

When we fail, we have to try again differently.  If we do things the same way, we will usually get the same result.  This goes for anything we are doing.  Practicing the wrong way doesn’t help, it just locks in bad habits that keep yielding less than desirable results.

Let’s try this again…