Witchkraft Racing: The Search for Speed

Home » General » Trip to (Tripped at) Jennings GP

Trip to (Tripped at) Jennings GP

After enough days of Michigan winter, a drive down to Florida becomes more and more appealing. Although this was my third time at Jennings, it wasn't necessarily the charm I had hoped for once all was said and done.

Garry and I were making the trip ourselves. He came over Thursday and we loaded everything up in his van and were on the road by 5:00pm. A little over an hour into our trip and just south of Detroit, I realized I had forgotten tire warmers. Still sitting in the box from Woodcraft after they sent us a couple sets of them, they wouldn't be warming anything from the confines of the garage. At this point driving back wasn't an option, so my dad had planned to next-day ship them to the track. Another idea came to mind and I called Tom at Honda East to see if he might have a set of warmers I could borrow. Fortunately he did and it was easy enough to swing by HE on our way down. Problem solved. Thanks again Tom.

From there we drove through the night, alternating driving duties. Garry put in an impressive four-hour stint from about 12:00am to 4:00am, while I tried to catch some sleep. I won't comment on his choice of music, but let's just say that it had to be the reason he didn't get tired that late into the night. During my stints, my preferred Sirius channels consisted primarily of Alt Nation, Lithium, Area 38 and BPM. A good chunk of BBC Radio from the UK was included as well as the sun started to rise driving through Atlanta.

After stopping for breakfast, we arrived to the track a little before noon. Hardly anyone was there, so we decided to walk the track. Plenty of good tips from Garry on lines and such, as he has had a fair bit of experience at Jennings. We then sorted out everything we had packed into the van and planned our strategy for Saturday. Off to the hotel for a quick nap and then some sketchy Japanese Hibachi for dinner. Back to the hotel for some Barrett Jackson and a bit of rest before hitting the track the following day.

The first session in the morning didn't start off well. On the out-lap the bike was making some strange noises. On deceleration, rather than the smooth "brrrrrrrrr" the motor would typically make, it was making a "bahrrrbahrrrbahrrrbahrr" (hope I did it justice there) – ragged and loud. Something was definitely wrong so I brought the bike in and we started looking at it.

Just with the bike idling, something sounded off – almost as if it was running on three cylinders, although it didn't seem that bad. We checked electrical connections, checked fuel and a number of other things. We got to the point where we thought something had to be mechanically wrong with the motor. Even the track photographer noticed the sound in the few laps I did. Our initial guess was that maybe it was a valve problem. Off came the bodywork, tank, air box and fuel injectors. After a few calls, we went as far as pulling off the valve/cam cover and checking the valve buckets to make sure they were all moving freely. It was a good thing Garry knew what he was looking at, because I surely didn't.

After inspection, all the buckets were good and moving freely. As the day passed and we became increasingly frustrated, we were running out of ideas that didn't involve fully pulling the motor out of the bike. However as we were mounting the fuel injectors, I noticed one of them was missing a piece. Each injector has an air nozzle off the bottom of it with a cap and clamp on it – and one of the four nozzles was missing its rubber cap and clamp. "There's our problem", Garry said. With a renewed sense of hope, we capped the end with a piece of duct tape, put everything back together, and made it out just before the day was done. The bike ran great. And although it was the last session of the day, I was able to put in a good twenty laps and work on relearning the track.

Ultimately it was good that this had been a simple fix. You would hardly ever notice the nozzles to begin with, let alone assume that one missing a cap could cause the bike to sound like it did. It did make sense though that on entering a turn, all this air would be rushing back into the injectors through that nozzle and causing that ragged noise.

Relieved that we hadn't tossed away the entire weekend, we packed up and headed back into town. Garry and I had a solid dinner at Outback that night, making up for the lack-luster meal the previous night. Over a couple Wallaby Darned's, we went over gearing, lines and our overall plan for Sunday in each session.

Sunday started off well enough. We had a good baseline for gearing and were pretty sure we'd be set there. In terms of the chassis, we had a ton of preload cranked into the forks from last year's BeaveRun event and around Jennings, we weren't getting close to using all the fork travel. In my lone-stint on Saturday, I could tell the front end of the bike felt like it was riding really "high" through the turns. Garry proceeded to back out a bunch of preload which showed noticeable improvement. The first session went well and the second even better, as times were continually dropping. The blue Pirelli rear tire on the back was now fully torched, missing any former signs of tread patterns, as Jennings in very grippy and has several fast and long left-hand turns. The rear tire was sliding and moving around, but it was good to be on the bike for the first time since last year and be comfortable with that happening.

We put on a new green rear and went back to work. We tried a couple things in the next session – primarily aiming to keep the front end down and planted through the several long, sweeping turns. We had some success with this, but were now making changes with a front tire that had a lot of laps on it. Coming into the pits, we started pulling the front and per Garry's recommendation, we were going to try a new yellow tire, which many people this past year have been talking highly about. Taylor (Knapp) had arrived to the track by then and was hanging out, confirming that he too loved the harder front tire once he had gotten used to it. Sammy had been preaching his love for it all year long, so I figured now was probably a good time to give it a fair shake.

We pulled the tire and took it over to Leon at the Pirelli trailer. As we were walking back, our group was again going out on the track, instead of everyone breaking for lunch. Apparently with rain in the forecast for the afternoon, they had decided to push lunch back an hour to get more track time in. A phenomenal idea, although we hadn't heard about it, so we missed the session.

As lunch was underway, we had the front tire on and cooking with Tom's warmers. Halfway through, just as predicted, it started sprinkling on and off. Of course as I put on my leathers to get ready to ride, it started raining a bit more consistently. On the fence about whether to ride or not in the rain, James Dillinger (fellow expert 600 rider who we had been talking to throughout the weekend) rode up and was just heading out. He gave me a line of, "the track's great, come on let's go!" I was half-convinced to go out and follow him. About sixty seconds later he rode back to our pits and said, "Whoa, I almost high sided myself to the moon there." That made the decision easy in calling it a day. Yeah it was crappy to not get more riding in, but scrubbing in and trying to test a new compound front in damp conditions wasn't something I thought worthwhile. I didn't give the yellow front a fair shake at Grattan earlier in the year when we first tried it and this would be just the same. Garry agreed and rather reluctantly, we started packing up for the return trip to Michigan.

On the drive back, I was frustrated on how things went and the lack of track time we had put in for such a long trip. As always though, Garry kept a positive attitude and focused on the good things that we had accomplished. We sorted a significant issue with the bike that could have haunted us at the beginning of the season. We talked at length about suspension and how the bike reacts to certain things – and also when we do make changes, where to focus them and how to keep things simple and easier to quantify. I'm still not sure how we went with stiffer springs last year and that much preload in the front (well I do, we wanted to make the bike more stable in the hard braking areas at BeaveRun), but I don't think we'll be doing that again anytime soon. That much preload helped make some things better, but also made a number of other things worse. In the future, I think it would be better to make small changes in geometry, rather than go for preload.

The drive back wasn't too bad, aside from some snow-storm conditions in Kentucky that slowed us down a bit. We made good time and were back home in below-freezing temperatures in about 16 hours. Woo hoo.

Even with all that had happened, the trip was definitely worthwhile. I had a great time with Garry and all he did to help me throughout the weekend. I'm so appreciative that he offered to drive down just to turn some laps and get the bike further dialed in. Garry was also able to do some networking with some AMA faces who were down at Jennings as well, so I think he found the trip extra beneficial in that regard.

Now we've got another list of to-do items before taking the bike out next. Nothing major, but enough to stay busy this weekend ..

Cheers,

eddie

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 | POSTED AT: 1:49 PM
FILED UNDER: General