Race Day
As I said at the end of part 4 one of the next rides was going to be a CC race. Well a couple of days after I rode Mammoth Bar, I went to a place called Oasis Race Way which is near Clear Lake, CA. The day before it had rained two and a half inches in the area, but race day was clear and warm. It was a mud fest, the course was only a little over three miles and our race was an hour and a half long, so we made many, many, many laps. The course marshals made lots of changes as the event went on, routing us around sections that had become virtually impossible to negotiate.
So how did the bike work? It got the hole shot in front of about twenty five other riders on my row. (In second gear and a dead engine start, just pulled in the clutch and hit the button) the bike worked amazing. It had all the power I needed when and where I needed it. Suspension wasn’t a big factor today, although it worked very well considering the bike probably gained fifty pounds of mud. I usually struggle big time in deep mud, slop and ruts, but I did extremely well and the bike didn’t tire me out. (Only when I had to pick it up, that was a real struggle)
I didn’t like the front tire the bike came with so I put on a Bridgestone M30 and all I can say was the front end was a non factor so it must have worked. Although after going through some of the deeper sticker mud bogs the tires would pack and it was like being on ice and difficult to get up enough speed to clean the tires off. The course continued to deteriorate each lap and after about three laps nobody had passed me, until the top three vintage bikes did. Dist 36 has a vintage bike class; most of the bikes are from the early eighties because one of the rules is no disk brakes. It’s amazing how fast those old bikes can be ridden. (Their usually ridden by a lot of the top A and AA riders)They started on row one and I was on row six and with thirty seconds between starts and a clear track they caught up to the back rows fairly quickly.
After a few more laps I actually started getting bored with it all, it wasn’t a whole lot of fun anymore and with my great start all my normal competitors were in back of me. Usually I’m in back racing forward. I actually pulled over for a few minutes and thought about going back to the pits, even asked a course worker, but I couldn’t get back there from where I was. Staying on the course was the best way to get back and when I went through the scoring chute again I could see there wasn’t that much time left. So my incentive was to finish and see if I could catch some of the riders who passed me while I was thinking about quitting.
A couple more laps one more tip over and after getting out of one last bog with the help of a course worker I finished and I’m glad I did. When I looked down at my odo and it read eighteen miles, I said are you kidding me an hour and a half and only eighteen miles, it felt like at least double that. That’s almost embarrassing except there were about a hundred other riders out there flopping around as well and all but two were considerably younger. Goes to show you how slow and muddy it was, at least for me anyway. My friend Pete who’s been the District 36 CC champion in the 60+ Master class five out the last six years, raced on Sunday in a down pour and average a little under ten MPH in winning his class. And I thought my sixteen MPH in the sunshine was slow.
The Yamaha looks so open and bare but I found out it just leaves lots and lots of places for mud to pack in. I initially took it to a car wash and spent a lot of money getting it to a point where I could take it home and then tear it down and really clean it. I spent untold hours cleaning everything, I spent more hours cleaning than I did driving to and from the race and the race itself.
Now I’m waiting for the rain to stop and for the ground to dry up a little so I can ride some trails in the woods.
Doug 21J