Rick Cramer
AFM# 778

My race story doesn't involve much racing. :(

Last weekend was only the second time the I'd ever taken out the little ninja 
and I was hoping for a substantial improvement on my lap times from December 
where the Jeff's and I spent the day skidding through some heavy rain. A pretty 
reasonable expectation I had thought but to my dismay, my lap times were 
exactly the same on a dry beautiful track as they were last time.

It seemed that no matter how many people I got by in the first half of the 
course they'd just blow by my in the fast half. I got so frustrated the I went 
and had it dyno'ed to help me find the absolute optimum shift points. The dyno 
indicated the my ninja was running about 30% down on horsepower from stock and 
that it was running so lean that made the dyno-guy cry. Which also explained 
why it was so hard to start.

So, with this new information I went back out again but, I left the choke on 
and found three more seconds. Nothing to be proud of but it did start to seed 
some anger at <NAME> from <COMPANY> for selling me such a poorly running bike.

Saturday I took the new racer school. The classroom part was easy and pretty 
fun! Joe told a bunch of stories, insulted us and, incidentally, covered some 
stuff about flags, tech rules, starting procedures and gave us a 20 question 
multiple choice quiz. I never heard anything about results but, I'd be 
surprised if I missed any. Oh, it was raining pretty hard.

We then broke for a couple of hours waiting for the rain to let up for our 
first follow the leader session. Which finally happened and Jeff and I managed 
to get the ninja started again so, that I could participate. We did four laps 
and came in because it was raining again.

Apparently the board had a long debate about calling it and bumping all of us 
to the sears point school and all the sears point people to the thunderhill 
school, etc. But, the rain let up enough to do another follow the leader 
session. I had my lap timer on that time and we did a very lazy 3:16

Then it was time for the one on one's. I volunteered to go first but my bike 
stalled and it took us awhile to get it running again so, I ended up going last 
(one of the 250p guys thought that my valves were probably outta speck as 
well). I went out and did my lap (first time I ever got my knee down while 
riding through a puddle) and when I pulled off the instructor gave me a thumbs 
up and I pulled to a stop but, he just drove by me and yelled that I did great. 
This wasn't quite what I was expecting so I chased him down and asked for some 
criticism/advice/etc. and he just said to keep doing what I was already doing. 
Grumble. He seemed like he spent ten minutes w/ other riders afterward. Oh well.

Sunday morning finally arrived! We got there nice and early and spent the next 
four hours trying to get me bike to start before we gave up and I played 
spectator. :(

-Rick