Pittsburgh Internationa Race Complex: July 14-16, 2017

Pittsburgh International Race Complex:

July 14-16, 2017,

WERA/N2 Endurance and National Sprints

Pic 1: 3MR crew after the race.

With only a week between Mid-Ohio and PIRC on the WERA National Challenge Series circuit, we decided to take the week between the two events off and relax. It was nice to chill out with family, but with the N2 Steel City Challenge endurance race coming up, I was itching to get to the track. The entire track has been repaved since I was there last year, so I was really excited to see how the track felt, and I was beyond excited to put some of the new quick change/fill equipment to good use on the 3 Marines Racing ZX6R.

During the week between events, the weather looked like there would be rain on at least Friday, and possibly even some on Saturday. However, come Friday morning, the weather man decided to take the rain out completely. After the clouds burned off in the morning on Friday, the track dried nicely and gave us a good amount of time to practice on the 3MR bike. John spent a generous amount of money getting some really trick endurance parts for the bike, but ran out of time to get everything completely sorted out before getting to the track so we spent a little time getting the bike finished up before starting practice. Aside from shaking the bike down with all the new parts, our first objective was to figure out how far a tank of fuel was going to go with the new quick fill set-up. We all took turns riding the bike throughout the day and everything was working out… until it didn’t. At around 3pm, John came off the track and I met him to put the bike on the stand. The first words out of his mouth were “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 3rd gear is toast.” This would change the entire course of the weekend for everyone on the team.

John and I talked about what our plan should be… and then Tim and I, and then John and Tim, and then Will and John, etc. etc. We all tried to think of ideas to get on the grid on Saturday, and as we’d come up with something, we’d go talk to whoever was closest. At some point in the early evening, we decided to tear into the bike to see if we could fix the problem. If nothing else, maybe we could identify the problem so that we can then start looking for parts before our next event at VIR in a few weeks. I went down to my friends at the Apex Manufacturing rig and borrowed a work table from them, which would prove to be a HUGE help throughout the night.

Pic 2: ZX6R surgery.

Will and John started pulling the clutch out of the bike as I stood and watched. The transmission on a ZX6R is pretty easy to pull out, it sits behind the clutch pack, so that would be the first step in getting to it. As the two of them pulled parts off the bike, I decided to take less of an observatory role and more of a hands on role. I felt that my attention to detail and general OCD nature made me the right person to start the dive deeper into the cases, so I stepped in and started pulling the transmission cassette out of the bike. While I was doing that, John and Will started examining the clutch to see if that could be a contributing factor. Tim happened to have a brand new clutch pack for the bike, so we decided to take advantage of that and put the new clutch in once we got to the reassembly of the bike.

Pic 3: Inspecting the transmission.

As I pulled the cassette out of the cases, I heard something drop. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I thought it could have been something in the cassette itself because I was pulling out a big assembly with a lot of moving parts. I pulled it out, set it on the table, and started inspecting all of the gears. Everything looked like it was decent, but I quickly realized that something was missing. A dowel pin that holds the shift forks together was missing and I was searching for it all over the table. That’s when it dawned on me that the noise that I heard during the disassembly must have been that pin, so I went for a dive in the oil pan of the bike. Sure enough, I found the pin. After replacing it, we looked over everything in the cassette, but nothing really stood out as being an obvious problem. The shift forks had some wear on them in places I don’t think there should be wear, and there was a slight nick in a tooth or 2, but by John’s description of the problem and my own issues with shifting the bike, I was expecting much worse. We decided to reassemble everything, put a new clutch in, and hope that the issue was the clutch and not the actual transmission. By about 8pm, we had the clutch cover on and we were ready to test it out. Unfortunately, when I went to the shift lever to go through the gears on the bench, it was obvious that something else was now wrong.

Pic 4: Will lit the thing up like a Christmas tree. Reassembling the clutch.

With no other options, we tore the entire thing back apart to get back to the transmission cassette. When the dowel pin dropped, I evidently didn’t get the shift forks in the correct location, which caused this issue. With the help of Kyle Alexander, we were able to identify the current problem and went back to reassembly mode. Once we were back together, we went through a test on the bench to see if it would go through the gears, but this time it still didn’t work quite right. Once again, we pulled everything apart and re-inspected. This time, we took a really close look at everything, and still couldn’t quite figure out the problem. With the cassette pulled out, the transmission would shift correctly through all of the gears about 1 time out of 5, but would bind the other 4 times. We decided that maybe the bike just needed to be rolling to shift correctly, so we decided to once again reassemble the bike. We put everything together, added a little oil, adjusted the new clutch, and took it for a spin up the paddock. By this time it was well past midnight, so Will would need some light to be able to see. John hopped on his Zuma and led the way for him. They were gone for quite a while so I was optimistic that it was fixed. However, after a few more minutes, they came back and informed the group of people who were huddled around us that it still wasn’t right. It was still shifting intermittently, so we decided to call it a night. Although we never really clearly said this to each other, I think the entire team was thinking that we had no choice but to back out of the endurance race. With that being the case, and it now being nearly 2am, I needed to change my focus from the endurance race to registering and tech’ing my R6 in the morning so that I could go out for the 600 Superbike qualifying session at 10am.

Pic 5: The Eric Telger Racing R6 ready for qualifying.

By about 7:30am on Saturday, I was back up and running around trying to get through registration and tech, and trying to get everything ready for the morning. I only had 1 session on the bike on Saturday, but it was early in the morning so I needed to get through my regular routine. There was endurance practice at 9am, and then I was going out at 10am for my 600 Superbike qualifying session. At about 8:45, Will zoomed up on his little scooter and said “why don’t we just use my bike for the race?” I thought for a bit, trying to come up with an excuse for why we shouldn’t. I was exhausted and looking forward to sleeping after my qualifying session, but there was no way I was going to use that as an excuse. Instead of saying it was a bad idea (because it was), I just said “sure, let’s do it.” John just happened to be a registration talking to WERA about us backing out as Will strolled up to him and said we should use his bike. This decision literally couldn’t have been made any later than it was, but Will made it to John just in time so he also said we should go for it. By this time it couldn’t have been any earlier than 8:50am and practice started at 9am. We all frantically started setting up our pit area and I think each one of us individually ran over to Tim’s rig to tell him he needed to suit up and go out for practice. I’m sure he was thinking “OK GUYS, I GOT IT!” Up to this point, Tim had never even ridden an R6, so it was important for us to get him on it so he could understand the characteristics of the bike prior to the race. Although the bike barely had time to warm up and the tires were ice cold, Tim suited up and took it for a spin. After a handful of laps, he pulled in, and we went to work trying to figure out what needed to be done for us to race.

Pic 6: Will's R6 ready for the endurance race. Ready enough, anyway...

Tim and I then shifted our focus on the 600SBK qualifying session. We had 15 minutes to go out and throw down our best time, and that would determine how we would grid for that race on Sunday. I went out behind Tim and used him to pull me along. I had gotten a number of laps on Friday, but I just wasn’t quite feeling it yet so I was hoping that I could get a tow. Between being exhausted and being stressed out at the thought of the endurance race on a bike that none of us had ever ridden, my head wasn’t quite in the game just yet. I pulled in after about 10 minutes. After a few mistakes on the track, I realized I was having a really hard time focusing, so I decided it was best for me to take what I had and leave it at that. As soon as I pulled in, I looked down to my fork leg and realized I had forgotten my transponder on the bike, which meant that none of my laps had been recorded. This means I would be starting the race from the back of the grid, which isn’t the result I was hoping for. I was angry at myself for making the mistake, but I didn’t have more than a few minutes to think about it since the start of the endurance race was coming up at 11am.

Since Tim was the only one that had practice time on Will’s R6, John and I didn’t have time to even sit on the bike before the race. We had decided that the roster that we used for NJMP worked really well, and that we were going to keep that roster for this race with the endurance bike. This meant that John would be starting the race on a bike that he’d never ridden before.

Pic 7: John getting ready for the start of the race.

John got a pretty good start off the line for his first time launching this bike. John ran some really consistent times throughout his 26 laps on the bike, but we could tell he wasn’t quite comfortable with the bike. His fastest lap came on lap 21 with a 1:56.339 which is way off of John’s pace at this track, but he was undoubtedly the most consistent rider on the team this race.

Pic 8: Start of the race. John is the second from the left.

As John went out to start the race, Tim noticed that the rear tire on the bike was starting to tear. We didn’t have time change tires between practice and the start of the race, so the tire that was on the bike during practice was the tire John started the race on. Unfortunately, since we didn’t have warmers on the bike before Tim went out for practice, the rear tire started to cold tear a little, and by the time John was done with his stint, the tearing had just gotten worse. Luckily, we discussed our options prior to John coming in and we prepared for a tire change earlier than we had originally planned for. Our friend, Rick Lind, took care of the tire change while Tim and Will worked on fueling the bike. We were in 14th place overall when John came in, and we would drop to 19th overall during our pit stop.

I took over on lap 27 and sped off toward pit out on a bike that I had never even touched before this point. My first instinct was to go as fast as I could, but then I quickly remembered that this wasn’t my bike and I needed to feel it out a little before I pushed. I chipped away at the field and tried my best to make up spots. I noticed that the clutch was acting up a little in a few places where the bike was under heavy load, so I had to adjust my riding style to keep the clutch cooler so we could hopefully finish the race. By lap 42 I had put down a 1:52.603, which would be our fastest lap of the race, and by the end of my stint on lap 55, I had gotten our bike back up to 11th overall.

Will took over the 3rd stint, and by this time it was clear that we weren’t going to make it on only 3 pit stops. Will’s R6 apparently likes to guzzle fuel, so we were going to have to make a 4th pit stop with one more rider change. I talked to Will and gave him some info on what the bike was doing, and told him to conserve fuel as best as he can. We had dropped back to 14th overall during our pit stop, but Will was able to ride consistently and get us back up to 10th overall with a best lap time of 1:53.776.

Pic 9: I'm telling Will how the bike handled and to conserve fuel.

Tim took over on lap 84. As Tim looked over the bike before he went out, he leaned over to me and said that it’d be nice to have a new front tire. I looked at the front and saw a badly mangled and torn front tire. I knew what Tim was thinking because I would have been thinking the same, but without a quick change setup, a front tire swap would take way too much time to be worth it. Plus, we didn’t even have a new tire on a warmer, we were totally unprepared for that scenario, so we had to send him out on what was there. We lost 2 places during our pit stop so we were back in 12th place overall, but Tim would push us back up to 10th place by lap 111 putting down his best lap of a 1:53.185 on a badly worn front tire.

Pic 10: Tim getting ready to go out.

Pic 11: Chilling out while Tim is riding.

Pic 12: Cheesin' for the camera.

Since we had to make one last stop for fuel, we lost 1 spot in class, which put us in 6th in class and 11th overall. Will went out and did the last 7 laps of the race at a slower pace because of the front tire. Before he went out we told him to take it easy, and he did exactly what we asked of him, finishing the 119th lap on his own R6.

Pic 13: Tim briefing Will before he complete the final laps.

I don’t even know where to begin explaining my thoughts on this race. After our first 2 races, we had finally started figuring things out as a team. We had gotten some shiny new equipment that would make things easier and faster, and we had started working on logistics and team roles far sooner than we had in the past. Prior to the event, we were far more organized than we had ever been, and then the bike had issues. With the snap of a finger, we went from being well organized and prepared to being the most unorganized, sloppy, and unprepared team on the grid. I don’t operate that way, I have a lot of heartburn over small insignificant stuff, so this level of disorganization and uncertainty was hard for me, and probably everyone else, to cope with. It was probably a crazy thing to do. No, let me rephrase that. It was a crazy thing to do. It wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve ever made. There was a high probability that this was the perfect storm of bad decisions that would end catastrophically. At the end of the day, though, I’m extremely proud of our team and what we were able to accomplish. In the words of Archie Griffin, “In the face of adversity, you find out if you’re a fighter or a quitter.” The amount of heart that the 3 Marines Racing squad showed made it very clear to me that my teammates are not quitters.

Pic 14: 3MR riders. Tim Wilson, Will Posse, John Hvizdak, and Eric Telger.

Pic 15: This front was toast.

We finally got a chance to relax a little on Saturday evening, but just enough to eat a bite, have a couple drinks, and then refocus on the races on Sunday. We used Will’s bike for the endurance race on a last minute decision, which it wasn’t ready for, so Will and I spent some time cleaning it up and changing the oil, chain, and sprocket. After getting him squared away, I focused on getting my bike figured out and ready for morning practice.

With the MotoAmerica round coming up at PIRC in August, I knew I would need to drop a lot of time to be able to qualify. My practice times and my times in the endurance race weren’t going to cut it, so I had a lot of work to do. In my first session out on Sunday morning, I was able to tuck behind some fast riders and put down a 1:51.54, which was my current fastest time. The next practice session, I went out and got hung up in some traffic early, but was able to break away from that pack of riders and dropped 2 more seconds for a 1:49.54. This was a good start, but I was looking for more.

My first race of the day was the 600SS race, race number 3. I started 9th on the grid and got a pretty terrible start. After the first lap, I was 14th crossing the line, but throughout the race, I was able to work my way through traffic and work up to 11th. I was able to get down to a 1:49.68 in traffic, so I was happy about that, but I wasn’t happy with my start or my performance overall. I still had some work to do.

My second race was the 750SS race, race number 6. I started this race 6th on the grid and got a decent start. I was 4th into turn 1 right behind Rick Lind, Anthony Mazziotto, and Sloan West. CJ LaRoche came through on me into T3 which put me back to P5, but I was running with the front group. Entering T6, CJ tucked the front and took out Sloan, leaving me in 3rd place. After a couple of laps, I got around Rick and put my head down to chase Mazz. On the last lap, he made a mistake in T1 which closed the gap and by the back essess, I was up his tail pipe but didn’t have a good way around him yet. I followed him through the back section and tried to stay close enough to get him in T17, but he put a big enough gap between us on the back straight that I wasn’t quite close enough to make a move. I missed my opportunity in the essess, so I’d have to settle for 2nd place. I put down a 1:49.74 in this race, which isn’t where I needed to be, but I was happy with the race overall.

Video 1: Filmed by Rick Lind.

My 3rd race of the day was the 600SBK race which I started on the 6th row because of my failure to put my transponder on in qualifying. I got a decent start and by the end of the first lap, I was running in 9th. I got held up in a little traffic and had a hard time getting by a rider, but by lap 3 I had moved up to 8th. By lap 5 I had moved up to 7th and my next target was my friend and teammate, Tim Wilson. I was pushing pretty hard, but I was also exhausted and couldn’t hardly hold onto the bike any longer. I followed Tim for 2 laps and tried to make my way around him, and finally made a move on lap 7, passing him down the back straight coming out of the kink. Not to be outdone, he came right back at me and block-passed me on the brakes at the end of the straight. I was determined to get back around as soon as I could, though, and made another pass stick coming onto the front straight. For the next 3 laps, I was able to put down 3 laps in the 1:48’s with the fastest being a 1:48.63. I was extremely happy to hear that I was able to get to the 48’s and ride there for more than just 1 lap. This would be my fastest lap of the weekend, but I’m convinced that I can be down in the 47’s when I’m fresh and not exhausted.

My last race of the day was the 750SBK race which I started 5th. I got a decent start, but there were some heavy hitters in this race and I would ultimately end up in 5th place, right behind Tim. I tried hard to reel him in and get him again this race, but my body was telling me I’d had enough. My fastest lap this race was a 1:49.1, which just didn’t let me catch and overtake him this time.

I can’t say enough about the team and all of the people that helped us this weekend. Rick was an invaluable addition to the team, Kyle Alexander helped us more than he needed to on Friday, and Richard from Apex helped us in a big way by loaning us a table, and so on and so on. There were so many people that stepped up this weekend to make it a success, even when none of us thought it would be. Denise had never been so helpful at the track, she was Johnny-on-the-spot with everything all weekend. The in-laws took care of mini-me so that we could focus on the task at hand, and all of the other family members there were exceptional in helping us achieve what needed to be achieved.

Along with awesome family and friends, I have some of the best sponsors in the business. They’re not just sponsors to me, they’re friends that would do anything for all of their customers, not just me. Sportbike Tire Service. does an amazing job helping with bike set-up, tires, and even helping me figure out my way around the track. I wouldn't have been in the 48's without some advice from David Grey. My Michelin tires did everything I asked of them and would have done much more if I was fresh. BD Racing and my Vesrah SS pads are the winning combination for getting slowed down safely and consistently. Mitch goes above and beyond for his customers, much like all of the sponsors that I have surrounded myself with. Add Spiegler brake lines and Motul brake fluid to that, and you can’t be beat on the brakes. My Moto-D Racing tire warmers worked flawlessly. Sharkskinz and PopShadow Decals work together to give me the best looking bike in the paddock, and Dan from Sportbike Leather Service makes sure my suit is looking its best. My Shoei helmet is the best and safest on the market, and no one beats their price or customer service. My Sidi’s are the best fitting and lightest boots on the market, and The Motorcycle Factory Inc. has some of the best deals on bikes and gear on the east coast. As always, Vortex Racing has given me the best rear sets on the market for confidence in your toe grip and their customer service is second to none.