TD in Deming and the aftermath:
Yippie I finally got some track time, it’s been 6 months since the last time I got to ride the d675. Heck, I’ve only gotten to ride my street bike, 4 or 5 times, it’s been a long winter. The bike got a clean bill of health about two weeks before. I’m still a lil’ paranoid when it comes to this bike, not quite trusting it to not dump me on my head again. It did make it through the whole season without one single issue. Nice improvement over the previous year.
I like Arroyo Seco, it’s a fantastic track with runoff for miles. (Not really, but it’s got lots of room for you to make mistakes and not get hurt). This time of the year weather is always a crap shoot. As luck would have it Sat would have been perfect if there was just a little bit more sun and less breeze. The clouds kept the track temp down, so there was no pushing to see what kinda lap times I could run. It would have been pointless anyway since I forgot the beacon at home… Opps. I have a habit of leaving that thing everywhere. This is why I really want a GPS lap timer.
I dragged Xen along, for awhile until he learned the track, then he just wouldn’t say behind me, dang it. He was on the 1125R and was having some over heating issues, but after cutting back his faring some, it seemed to get better.
I was having issues getting through the Esses, I just couldn’t seem to keep it where I wanted it and this section of track is linked so you blow one piece it all just comes undone. I know I could go through there quicker, just wasn’t able to get the bike to cooperate. Tibo was out there later in the day, he was the first to comment on how the bike kept going wide, and could hear that it wasn’t responding correctly. I had been thinking it was me just not being smooth enough with the throttle, but after having someone else ride it, they confirmed that it wasn’t me. Yippie, I like it when it’s not me causing the issue. I really love it when I hear things like: “you aren’t slow”. It kinda makes my weekend.
I was hoping to play a bit more on Sunday, but the weather had other ideas. It was colder, but not as breezy, so I was good with it. That was until I put on my leathers and stepped out of the trailer to see snow flakes. Nope, not a chance was I going to ride then. Well, I might have just to say I’ve done it, but once the cold ground was wet, I wasn’t about to chance it, not with race rubber on the bike. If I’d my DOT street play tires with me I still might have…but not with race rubber.
So on the way home, I called Aaron to see what we could to about this throttle issue. He decided that he really needed to ride the bike himself to see what it was. This lead us to plan on heading over to Sandia on a Monday with really nice weather to test it and tune on it. He’d bring his laptop and cables we’d see what was really going on. Well that was the plan.
We actually got the perfect day for the test and tune. Meet out at the track in the afternoon, turned out there ended up being 5 of us out there playing… along with two others, (that’s another post, one of them was the kind that give sportbike riders a bad name) We had Ernie with us, it was great to watch him, practicing some of his stunts and drifting.
Aaron and I traded off bikes, so that I could see if his did what mine was doing and he could feel what mine was doing. He found it… it was the 5-15% throttle application the bike would surge and almost stall if you just held it in that range. Which is what I do just as I get off the brakes just before I stand the bike up and am able to get hard on the throttle.
Now, it would have been great and we might have been able to fix it all right there, but someone forgot the cable. So the bike is getting tuned this week and I’ll pick it up on my way down to Deming for the race weekend.