![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.diomederacing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/2011\/10\/MoM_11_7_4225-300x213.jpg\" "\\"MoM_11_7_4225\\"")
<\/p>\nUtah SBA Master\u2019s of the Mountains Round 7 2011<\/p>\n
I just had to go back to Miller for this round; I mean really who can pass up the FULL track at Miller?\u00a0 4.5 miles 23 turns, what\u2019s not to love?\u00a0 I went out a day early this time so I could attend the track day on Friday, which just happened to also be my birthday.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t imagine a better way to spend my weekend.\u00a0 I needed Friday to get my act together,\u00a0 I spent most of the day working with Shorty, on drills.\u00a0 Some of which went well and others, let\u2019s just say it made it very clear where I needed to focus.<\/p>\n
Saturday with UTSBA is mostly practice with 1.5 hour endurance race at the end of the day.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I got some help with dialing in the suspension on the A bike, after the major changes we\u2019d made at Inde, I was feeling pretty comfortable on it, but just couldn\u2019t pinpoint a couple of the things that were buggin\u2019 me.\u00a0 So I had one of the guys who\u2019s really good at dialing bikes in take it out.\u00a0 After a certain amount of ribbing about my gearing being way too short, I pulled out a different rear sprocket for it.\u00a0 Really I could have gone down about 4 more teeth, for that straight.\u00a0 The other thing he came up with was raising the rear about 3mm, to help get more heat into the front tire.\u00a0 Since he didn\u2019t think that it was really biting enough.\u00a0 I took it out for the last two sessions like that; wow, what a difference.\u00a0 I was able to drop 4 more seconds off my times, that put me closer to where I wanted to be, but I really think I should have been faster then even that.<\/p>\n
I had decided to not do the endurance race solo this year, actually I wasn\u2019t going to do it at all, but I got talked into riding an SV for the LW GTU endurance race.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t get any practice time on it before heading out there.\u00a0 Needless, to say it was a blast, even though I had to think too much about my shifting.\u00a0 Even though my street bike is still std shift, I really don\u2019t like it when I race bikes that have a regular shift pattern; I\u2019m way too comfortable with GP shift, it just makes sense for me on the track.\u00a0 After I got lapped by the only other NM racer there and missed shifted in the attitudes, I decided to call it a day.\u00a0 SVs really are hoot to ride and of course I was just as quick on it at the end as I had been on my own bike.\u00a0 Little did I know at that time\u2026 I was going to get credit for being on their championship team.\u00a0 How great, to get credit for that little bit, I rode.<\/p>\n
Sunday brought on the sprint races and a whole bunch of new issues and problems for me.\u00a0 I let myself get talked into racing the B bike instead of the A bike.\u00a0 Which meant swapping wheels and sprockets between bikes, normally it\u2019s not too big a deal, but I was having issues with my asthma that morning so things just didn\u2019t go quickly or smoothly.\u00a0 Turns out that it also meant pulling the front fender off the B bike since it was rubbing on the tire.\u00a0 All of that was smoothest part of my morning.\u00a0 The bike really does handle well and aside from subtle differences, it rides like the A bike.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t quite as quick on it as I had been on the A bike, but I wasn\u2019t far off.\u00a0 Since it\u2019s been almost a year since I\u2019d ridden it, I was quite pleased, however, that was short lived.\u00a0 When I got back in from practice one of the guys noticed that the right fork was leaking at the foot, of all places, right next to the brake pads\u2026.\u00a0 So that meant swapping everything back to the A bike so that I could make my first race, which was in 30 minutes.\u00a0 It\u2019s this kinda stress I could really do without on race days.\u00a0 Thanks to some great friends, it all happened and I made it out to girds for my first race of the day.<\/p>\n
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Being a visitor, riding a bike I hadn\u2019t ridden yet that day, after swapping parts all around,\u00a0 and not having had time to check grids, meant I just gridded up at the very back for the first race and I continued to do that for the rest of the day, since the people I was there to race against where in the back too.\u00a0 Turns out that was likely one of the smartest things I did that day.\u00a0 The girds where a decent size, I was actually surprised that everyone made it through turn 1 in a controlled manner for the first race, that however only lasted until the 6th<\/sup> turn.\u00a0 When I got watch my dear friend get flung and then slide across the track.\u00a0 Since I was in the back part of the group, I didn\u2019t have to do anything drastic to avoid him.\u00a0 It really did mess with my head though.\u00a0 I fell farther back until I saw that they\u2019d removed him from the track and didn\u2019t red flag the race.\u00a0 It\u2019s really hard to race with people that you care a great deal about,\u00a0 not that I\u2019m ever okay with watching people go down, but there is just something about it when, they are good friends.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n As it turned out this day I had a front row seat for each of the wrecks and I\u2019d venture to say just about all the guys who ran off the track in my races.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For the Novice GTU race I got to see the two wrecks that stopped the race and resulted in the ambulance having to roll.\u00a0\u00a0 Not really things that I enjoy watching. \u00a0\u00a0All things considered the day went really well and I continued to get quicker through out the day, so I\u2019m pleased with the weekend.\u00a0 I would have love the weekend if I\u2019d managed to be a great deal quicker and I know it\u2019s there.\u00a0 I just haven\u2019t been able to tap into it so much for the last part of this season.\u00a0 Life really needs to stop getting in the way of my fun.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Utah SBA Master\u2019s of the Mountains Round 7 2011 I just had to go back to Miller for this round; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":729,"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions\/729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diomederacing.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.diomederacing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/\/2011\/10\/MoM_11_7_3380-300x200.jpg\" "\\"MoM_11_7_3380\\"")
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