In which we enjoy another race weekend…and only lose one body part!
Missed Part 3? The BMW wins its first races back in AHRMA after thirty years away from the track.
Preparation
At Willow, after the racing was over I tried to fire up the BMW so I didn’t have to push the heavy lump up the ramp into the van at the end of the day…but the starter wouldn’t cooperate. Turns out the relay went bad, but I wasn’t going to have time to source a replacement as the next race was the weekend after. It had served its purpose well for quite some time – note the manufacture date of July 1990. You know it’s old when it has to specify W Germany!
Daniel at Iconic worked his magic to wire up an alternative. Post-fix, he made sure to warn me that if I was to hit the starter button while the engine was already running, that bad things would happen. Is that foreshadowing? No, everything went fine.
So with the bike back in running condition, I headed out to Inde Motorsports Ranch with my racing partners, Olly and Ted.
Ted and I carpooled – that’s his R1 in the back along with my BMW and Kramer.
We arrived at the track on Thursday afternoon, raring to get our pit set up.
Nick Ienatsch and Yamaha Champions Riding School use Inde Motorsports Ranch as one of their two home tracks. So Nick was kind enough to lead a track walk for anyone that wanted to pick up some free advice, and it was incredibly helpful!
Practice – Friday
I was very excited to race Inde as it would be just my second time there. The first time was back in 2022, when Cycle News asked me to ride the Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Road Glide piloted by Kyle Wyman in the inaugural MotoAmerica King of the Baggers Championship. It’s a very difficult track to pick up, with 21 turns in 2.75 miles. Bradley Smith, Moto2 winner and MotoGP podium finisher said “Inde is one of the most technical tracks I’ve ever tried to learn.”
Photo from Cycle News
AHRMA offers a Remote Tech option, which I was glad to take advantage of.
The practice day was straightforward – I spent most of the sessions on my Kramer to learn the lines because the heft of the BMW was quite distracting while I was trying to memorize the 21 corners. I only did one morning session and one afternoon session on the BMW, and I could feel my arms getting tired at the end of each one. It took almost all day, but we eventually felt pretty good about our lines…so Ted, Olly, and I continued our tradition of ordering way-too-large margaritas at the end of the practice day.
Race 1 – Saturday
Usually my Kramer gets a bunch of attention due to all the signatures, but at AHRMA I constantly had people coming up to take photos of the BMW and ask questions about it.
As you can see from the photo above, I finally put a camera on my BMW. But for the first race, it’ll be MUCH better for you to see what happened from the perspective of Daniel May – one of my competitors in BEARS (British European American Racing Series) and the Executive Director of AHRMA! Dan has a beautifully prepared R75 that Mark Hoyer of Cycle World raced at Barber last year for a story.
Here’s the video with some annotated thoughts below:
00:23 – Dan gets out to a strong start with Marc Beyer of OCD Custom Cycles, leaving me a bit in the dust. I end up in third place watching Dan in the lead with Marc on his tail to see how they attack the course.
03:12 – Marc makes an inside pass to take the lead in class but he’s not able to get around a slower rider in a faster class so he’s not able to put any significant gap on Dan or myself.
05:08 – throughout the day in all three of my races, I noticed that people were slowing up more than necessary for a long righthander as it’s sort of a blind double apex. I tried to use that as a spot to pass when possible and it worked out here at the start of the third lap (AHRMA uses a different start/finish line than the track normally does for safety reasons). That put me in 2nd place and I just tried to stay with Marc.
05:55 – a group of five of us enters the corner before “wheelie hill” – Craig Chawla got a shot of the group of us and it ended up being the feature image in the Road Racing World recap of the weekend’s events. It’s my first photo in RRW, which I thought was pretty cool!
Photo by Craig Chawla for AHRMA
07:20 – I end up being able to make a pass in the same corner to take the lead in class, and now I’m stuck behind the Triumph that’s been holding up Marc for the last few laps.
08:30 – one other corner I had success with passes in my Kramer races was a double apex left that feeds immediately into a tight hairpin right. If you drive hard out of the lefts with enough speed, you can end up on the inside of someone at the hairpin in a block pass situation, you just have to be brave and heavy on the brakes. I was able to pull it off here and start pulling a gap on the Triumph, which was still blocking Marc.
09:28 – unbeknownst to me, my bike decided to save a little weight as the bellypan decided to leave – my rear wheel ran over it and immediately launched it in the air. I’m so sorry to whoever was behind me, as they probably had quite the shock!
09:40 – with open track in front of me and the lead in my possession, I make a mistake and ruin my race: my muscle memory takes over and I upshift instead of downshifting into a braking zone as my Kramer runs a GP shift and my BMW runs regular shift. I’m unable to brake enough to make the corner and I roll off the track (thankfully onto a paved road). What an idiot.
You won’t see me for the rest of the video, but I was able to get back on track and salvage a third place finish. The racers behind me assumed I pulled off because I realized something was wrong with the bike in terms of the bellypan flew off, but I had no idea and it was just an error on my part. So I finish the race – even noting that there’s some debris on the track near the finish line – and roll up into post-race tech. The inspector looks at me and loudly says “OIL PAN,” but I couldn’t hear him over the bike or with my earplugs in. So I shut the bike off and he repeats himself, and then it hits me that the debris…was from me.
I went to tech before the podium ceremony to claim my “prize.” It turns out that one of the bolts holding my bellpan in had backed itself out, so the front of the pan had been dragging on the ground for at least a lap. I’m surprised that I wasn’t black flagged, but eventually the whole thing gave out.
On Saturday, I ended up winning Sound of Singles 1, placing 3rd in my bump up class of Sound of Thunder 2 (behind Nick Ienatsch himself!), and placing 3rd in BEARS. Here’s the BEARS podium, with Marc up top and Dan in second place:
Race 2 – Sunday
The big thing for me on Sunday morning was sorting out my lack of a bellypan. I spoke with tech inspectors the day before for suggestions and they are very understanding when something like this happens as they’ll let certain things fly for a mid-weekend fix that wouldn’t be allowed at the start of the event. For example, they suggested that I pop into town to snag a foil turkey pan or equivalent to use as my new belly pan…so that’s what we did. Meet my savior, a lasagna pan:
7 zip ties later and…voila!
Here’s the race from Dan’s camera again: I commence with a good start but Dan outpowers me and stays ahead for quite a while.
01:15 – Marc gets the lead, and he’ll stay there for the rest of the race.
At one point while following Dan, I ended up dragging cylinder head in the tight right hairpin I mention above and it spooked me a bit as I almost lifted the rear wheel off the ground and that would have led to an unpleasant lowside. So I backed off a little bit and tried to exaggerate my body position to compensate.
05:13 – I pass Dan on the long right handed sweeper that I’ve come to adore, but Dan stays right with me, even passing me on the main straight at one point.
08:13 – I managed to screw up my shifting YET AGAIN, upshifting when I meant to go down thanks to the GP/regular shift confusion. Dan takes 2nd place from me.
09:35 – Dan overcooks the long right hander at the end of the main straight – when we spoke about it later he mentioned that he was trying to attack it in a similar way to my line to prevent me from making the pass. At this point we have two laps to go, I’m well behind Marc (first in class) and I assume I’ve got plenty of space from Dan (third in class) so I back off a little bit. As I cross the finish line with one lap to go, I take a quick peek at my Luftmeister temperature gauge and I see that it is well in the red. I decide to back off more than a little bit, stupidly thinking that Dan was much further behind me than he actually was. I have no idea why I never looked behind me – I won’t make that mistake ever again!
12:30 – Dan takes advantage of my lax attitude and swipes second place back. I initially see red mist but I know the only place I can really pass Dan is the long fast sweeper and I won’t have that chance before the race ends so I just cruise towards the finish line with another third place.
I was pretty angry at myself but I absolutely learned something for the future. Even after a cooldown lap plus the time it took to get back to the pits/settle in/etc, the oil temp was still in an unhappy place.
Dan later came by to check on me and see why he was able to pass me so easily. For the second week in a row, he wisely recommended that I get some suspension work done. He also said that if I was to get serious about racing the BMW I should raise the engine in the frame to get more ground clearance. While that could be considered “optional,” he said what I definitely have to do is install an external oil cooler. He recommended the Motoren Israel unit, and I was amused to see his screename on one of the first threads that I found about the product on ADVRider.
Looks like my baby is going to need some new upgrades…
My weekend consisted of six races – four on the Kramer and two on the BMW. I ended up with two wins, a 2nd place, and three 3rd places!
Thus ends my racing for a few months – I’ll be doing a few track days (come join me at Laguna Seca next month!) but my next race isn’t until October at Barber Motorsports Park. Maybe I’ll see you there?
