Run Five
Thwarted
“No passion so effectively robs the minds of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” – Edmund Burke
It was 4:15 pm and the line was shorter towards the end of the day when many racers were starting their nighttime modifications to their machines to go faster the next day, or had blown their motors up. Then there were the record breakers. There are so many classes, that each day a dozen records or more are broken. When you break a record, you have to go to “impound”. You have four hours to tune your machine but are not allowed to make major modifications. The next morning, all these vehicles go first out onto the salt and they have to beat the record a second time in order for it to count.
AJ has the red bike in line ahead of me. It’s almost his turn and we notice the header pipe on my bike is missing! It’s just a little stub coming out of the cowling in front of my foot, and it was gone! O guessed that my bike swapped hard enough to knock it off. I’m glad it didn’t take my own rear tire out! But the pipe was out there, and if anyone hit it, like AJ, it could be disastrous like it was for Jason McVicar.
We tell the starter immediately and they shut the track down. Course workers drive the track looking for it. It took ten minutes, but they found it, smashed as if it had been run over. We were not sure if the 2 1/2” x 10” long steel pipe could have been flattened like that just from hitting and tumbling on the salt, but 193 mph was fast!
We pulled the turbo bike to our pit as AJ took a run. He reported a wobble when he returned, but not as bad as his previous run.
It was the end of day two and we had officially reached 193.07 mph (and nearly crashed at that speed). We packed up and headed off the salt. There was much work for the team to do tonight…