|
Best in the Desert 2010 , Race #1 Parker 250
I am racing the entire 2010 BITD season in the expert class with the Big Bang Entertainment Desert Racing Team. For this race it was Joe Ramos, Ken George from Big Bang Entertainment, and me. We were going to race Ken's Raptor but it needed too much stuff in too short of a time frame in order to be "trent and Joe proof" so we raced my honda instead.
There were 8 other teams in our class and we had the #1 starting position. Unfortunately the expert and amateur quads start after ALL of the motorcycles so we waited patiently at the starting line for our turn. I was going to start the race and do the first lap. The first 20 miles go directly into the sun and the race starts at dawn and there is no wind at all. Racing into the sun was brutal especially since I had to get around about 25 motorcycles in the first 20 miles. I also made a really sweet cardboard visor extension which worked pretty well. 4 miles into the race #428 passed me, I tried to keep up but the dust was too much. I made it to the midway pit where Doug and the RSD guys did a great job. Unfortunately I didn't tell them to top me off.
The rest of the lap was uneventful, I passed a lot of bikes and I wished I had about 20 more hp on the high speed dirt roads. With my mild HRC engine and my fatass I could only do 73mph. I was on the asphalt headed down to the scoring gate when the engine sputtered and stopped responding, I though oh great here goes another blown engine. I noticed the fuel level was really low so I twisted the fuel valve hoping that I was not on reserve already. THankfully the engine fired back up but I was only at mile 70 and I had 10 miles to go. I tried to conserve fuel for the next 10 miles which was hard since the sand was deep, like page.
At the end of the python which runs through the pits the engine started sputtering and it died 20 yards from my pit, I coasted it in with an empty gas tank and I made sure to tell Joe to get topped off at the next pit. Nobody else had passed me so we were in 2nd place and the next team was about 10 minutes behind us. The 428 team was 3 minutes ahead of us.
Joe made it midway where they noticed the swing arm pivot bolt was broken. This is a common problem for me unfortunately and this made Ken nervous (he was scheduled to get on) so Joe kept going and did a full lap solo. We were all set to put in a new bolt when Joe arrived but the bolt hadn't moved and I had finished many races on a broken bolt so we decided not to change it. However the chain was stretched and we couldn't tighten it anymore. So we crossed our fingers and I hopped on to take it to midway to hand it off to Ken. I had a good ride to midway passing a few more bikes and almost going over the bars in the whoops in the wash.
Ken got on and took it 50 miles to the finish where we ended up in 2nd place. THe 1st place team beat us by almost 39 minutes, they would have gotten 3rd in the pro class and I guess they do run pro at the bluewater GP race. We finished ahead of 3rd place by about 7 minutes.
I am happy with the way the machine ran plus Ken and Joe rode a great race. I hope we can do this well in all the BITD races this year. Big thanks to the Ken for putting this together, XX Army, RSD Racing, my team of Adam and my dad.
My condolences to the family of the man who died early in the race.
I took some photos here and posted a link to my heart rate, gps log. I guess i forgot to hit record at the start line so I didn't get the first lap on my helmet cam and on the 2nd lap the camera is aimed too low so the footage sucks, I am bummed about that.
http://kendallrace.com/Images/2010/parker/
results:
http://kendallrace.com/Images/2010/parker/parker%20049.jpg
| 
