The racing gods were frowning on me this weekend.

Saturday
========
In the first session Saturday morning I was scrubbing in some new tires and 
just trying to remember which way around sears point went and familiarizing 
myself with the new turn 11. The AFM switched to the AMA turn 11 in August 
when my bike was still in pieces and, as this was in endurance race weekend, 
I was only going to get a few laps to figure it out before the race on 
Sunday. Still, I was only 0.099 seconds off from having the best lap time of 
the session.

When I came back to the pit I took a little preload off of the rear shock 
hoping that that would reduce some of the front end chatter I was getting in 
some of the bumpier corners and reduce how light the front end was feeling.

In the second session I managed to pull out in front of the pack on the 
first lap and had the track all to myself for the first time in my life. 
But, on the second turn of the third lap I caught up to some of the late 
starters and ended up having one drop anchor right in front of me in 3b. I 
touched the front brake, knowing that I didn't have any traction left for it, 
and the front end washed - I got to slide nearly all the way down to turn 4.

The damage to the bike was pretty light but, I ripped my leathers open and 
that was enough to end my day.

They brought my bike in during lunch break and I spent the rest of the 
afternoon putting it back together again. This was made a little more 
difficult because my right wrist and hand had swollen up so much that I 
could barely use it.

When the bike was back in one piece I drove back home to get my spare 
leathers and some TLC from my girlfriend.

Sunday
======
The swelling had gone down some and my wrist was working well enough that I 
decided to give riding a try.

I didn't have any ambitious goals for the morning practice - just to test 
the bike and myself to make sure we were both running well enough to race. 
On my fourth lap I passed a slow mover on the inside on turn 4 but for some 
reason he came up from behind me and rammed me off the course. When I hit 
the dirt I ran into a hole, the front end kicked up and the bike swung 
around to my left and, in a big tank slapper, I shot back across the track 
where I managed to come to a stop on the other side.

Unfortunately, in all the fun I threw the master link. This turned out to be 
a good excuse to do the 428 conversion from Mike Norman of G-Force (new 
chain and sprockets).

The Race
========
I was really nervous because almost every time I'd gone onto the track 
something bad happened. I felt like the sensible thing would have been to 
pack up and go home before I finally got really hurt, but I didn't.

In the warm up lap the engine died in turn 4 because I forgot to turn the 
fuel on but, I flipped it on and was the last person to get to my grid spot 
(#37) hoping that I just had my dumb mistake for the race.

In the start Jer Stewart #718's bike died right and front of me so I grabbed 
the brakes and everyone blew by us and I ran up the hill in last place. By 
this point I was pretty rattled and I was just hoping to finish.

I made my way lazily around the course when one of the vintage guys passed 
me. Which meant that I was going unbearably slow so, I picked up the pace
a bit and started passing some riders. I was actually approaching my normal 
pace by lap 6 (except my new gearing was annoyingly short), when I threw it 
into a right hander, the motor started to sputter. This happened again and 
again in every right hander - I was running out of gas.

I was expecting to run completely out of gas at any moment so, I took it
really easy and I manged to finish the race. I also smoked the guy that ran 
me off the track in the same spot which felt good.

When I got back to the pits my buddies were giving me a hard time over my 
obvious lack luster performance. The results showed that I finished 24th 
out of 45(?) starters with a best lap time of 2:04.644 - which wasn't 
terrible considering.

...Racing's (still) fun!