Old School

By David Porter
Photos by Susan Guadagnino

Chief, cook, bottle washer and owner of atvscene.com John Pellen suggested I bust out a story about something a little more behind the scenes this time. So I figured why not something about some of my weekend issues as a factory Polaris mechanic.

The Minnesota round of the ATVA motocross series was the worst weekend of racing I can remember. I’ll start with getting lost trying to get there. The roads that a certain ATVweb magazine’s directions sent me on took me to the middle of No-place, No-where. Trust me that’s not a place I want to visit again anytime soon. Anywho, that was only the beginning. The weekend kept going downhill from there.

Practice was canceled on Friday due to rain. On any other weekend no practice on Friday is a day off for a mechanic. Not this weekend, a small job turned into 12 hours of pure hell. The only thing that got me through Friday was a great dinner and lots of ice cold beer back at the hotel.

We hoped the off track bad luck would turn to on track good luck, but that went out the window as well. Saturday was no better. A rock stuck in the front hub Casey Martin’s factory Polaris and that was just the start of the bad luck on the track. Sunday rolled around ans wouldn’t you know it, we needed to swap out a motor. It was worth the work because Casey put in an unbelievable ride on the fresh power plant. With the 17th gate pick in the second Pro-Am Production moto (due to a blown motor) we lined up hoping for anything to change the direction of the downward spiraling weekend. Well. Like I said Casey delivered with an eye-popping third place in that moto. Casey’s second moto ride certainly took some of the sting out of the 18hr drive back home.

Yeah, my buddy Josh Creamer did it again in the pro class. But honestly I didn’t get a chance to see a lap of a Pro class moto. Sorry I don’t have anything else to add. I couldn’t hook up to my trailer fast enough so I could leave the weekend from hell behind me. I’ve said this before though, any bad weekend of racing is better than a day at work.

 

Muddy Creek
First I’d like to drop my opinion in here about having back to back Nationals. Who at the AMA or ATVA had the brainstorm of an idea to have a national in Minnesota and then another the following weekend in Tennessee? With the state of the economy I just don’t understand why anyone would want to do that to us. I guess I don’t get paid to understand all that stuff, my jobs is to make Casey Martin and his factory-backed Polaris go fast. So off to hot and muggy Tennessee I went.

The weekend started with putting a brand new motor in the bike at 7am on Friday. All I needed to do is have things ready to ride by 10am for practice. Easy right? Trust me nothing ever seems to go easy. With help from Cody Anderson and our shared quest to constantly make the quad faster, we came up with a idea to shave about 6lbs from the Polaris and decrees motor temp. We got rid of the 12 volt battery, which just runs the fan once the quad is fired. In its place we installed a lightweight 14.8 volt RC battery. A technician from Polaris assured me the fan would take the extra volts. All it would do is spin the fan faster, thus making the motor temp decrease. A win-win, right? If you’re thinking that we should have tested all this stuff before race weekend, you’re smart boyscout. This will be the last time I ever try to brainstorm on a Friday of a National. Why not try this out at home first you ask? Well to be honest its plain and simple, no time. Anywho, everything went great Friday morning, until I went to charge my little RC car batteries. The charger I ordered and had shipped to my hotel didn’t work. So now I’m in full on scramble mode. Yes I could reinstall the old system and bolt on more weight, but to hell with that, a scavenger hunt is way more fun. My frantic search lead me to Kevin and Glenn at the factory Suzuki rig. Since Kevin is an RC car nut, it was one stop shopping – they had everything I needed. So for Friday I was all set. I even had another charger next day shipped to my hotel. In the end we averted tragedy, shaved a ton of weight off the machine and allowed it to run cooler. Life’s good!

 

Saturday was a fairly good day. With a second and a fourth in Pro-Am Unlimited we finished 4fourth overall, not bad. Fourth is okay, but not what we wanted. After changing our setup from what we learned on Saturday Casey and I felt we had something for them in timed qualifying on Sunday morning for the Pro-Am Production class.

 

In case you didn’t know, Pro-Am Production is the premier Pro-Am class, because it’s the Pro-Am class with the most prestige. With that said Casey and I gear everything towards Sunday’s program. Well Casey was on it for Sunday morning’s timed qualifying. We ended up with the third fastest lap time and the third gate pick for the first Pro-Am moto.

At 12:00 sharp the first gate dropped.  We came out of the first turn in a disappointing 16th. At the end of the first lap Casey flew by in a top five spot. He was hauling butt! With a few laps remaining in the first moto Casey put the Rath Racing Polaris-backed 450 into a comfortable third. I was stoked for my rider!

The first moto ended with us taking well deserved third into moto two. We felt if we could get a great holeshot we’d have a shot at something better then a third in the final moto. When the gate dropped we were in 6th by the end of the second lap Casey put us in second briefly. At the end of the second moto the factory-backed Polaris finished third putting us on the podium for the third time this year. Not too shabby.

 

 

Its crazy how bad luck can change to good within a week. When you’ve got an unbelievable rider, good sponsors and a ton of hard work it’s absolutely possible to put a bad weekend behind you and succeed the very next weekend, even when they have you running back to back weekends.
That’s old school man, old school.

Tags:

Comments

comments