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2006 WERA – Nelson Ledges 5/6-7 Sunday

As you saw in the previous two posts here, Friday and Saturday at Nelson Ledges went well. I had a good practice on Friday, with a solid 20 lap race on Saturday (7th place finish) and was working to continue the trend on Sunday. Friday and Saturday's posts are here and here in case you missed them.

Sunday morning practice was basically about trying to find some settings on the bike that I was comfortable with. We had 4 practice sessions, each about 10-15 minutes long. After finding a more planted and stable feel from the front end of the bike on Saturday, the rear end of the bike then became an issue. It wanted to hop around over the character Nelson bumps, and didn't want to finish the turn. So we made adjustments in each session and ended up finding improvements with the changes James made after the third practice session.

Of the 4 sprint races, my last two went the best. I had good starts in all of them (unlike at BeaveRun), and the last two races went the best. After lagging in the 1:12 range longer than I would have liked, I got into the 11's in the last two races, with a best time of 1:11.712. C Superbike was probably the best race as I ran consistently faster laps than I'd ever done around Nelson, and made several good passes in some tricky places I would have been tentative to attempt a pass earlier in the weekend.

In terms of where I can go faster, I was losing a bunch of time through Nelson's fast turn 1, along with exiting the long left-handed turn 4. Other guys were able to finish the corner and get on the gas harder, sooner, where I was thinking more about the bike moving over all the bumps instead of pinning the throttle. Turn 4 leads into a long downhill, right-handed carousel, which then heads to the back straight away. My drive exiting the carousel needs to be better as well in order to get a good drive onto the straight.

So we visit Nelson Ledges two more times this year. This past weekend was a good start. More comfortable on the bike and faster lap times, as I went a good 2 seconds faster here than I ever did on the SV650. Saturday morning when James and I were talking about getting faster, he offered up that we should try and get 3 seconds as a starting goal. If I got us 2 of them, he'd get the other 1. We started in the 13's and ended up in the 11's, so James' quote after Sunday's races was, "Well, looks like I need to get us that 1 second." I'm hoping we can get that in suspension setup, and save the horsepower improvements for later. :-)

I'm still about 3 seconds off the winning pace at both Nelson and BeaveRun. That's better than I thought I'd be at this point, but I know there's a lot more time to find on the bike – I just need to continue getting more comfortable on it with more laps . I think with some better riding and additional tweaks to the chassis of the bike, we can get down into the 9's at the next Nelson round. At least that's the goal at this point.

I'd like to thank Marsha and Joe (mom and dad) for coming out to watch my races on both Saturday and Sunday. They were spending their anniversary weekend in this fancy place not too far from Nelson, and took the time to drive out on both days just to watch and help out. The pictures you'll see in the photo gallery are from her, and the help in the pits you didn't see was from him. James of course was a big help as usual. We had a good time hanging out with Jeff (Caco), along with the Bennett's and Dan for the weekend.

I'll have some new pictures in the photo gallery later tonight.

Cheers,

- eddie

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 | POSTED AT: 6:02 AM
FILED UNDER: Race Reports