Monday, July 10, 2006

oak hill raceway

This past weekend we went to Oak Hill Raceway near tyler, TX. we normally don't race this track because it's not in the Texas Mini GP series that i run (its part of the big bike series, the CMRA), but its a lot of fun so we do it anyways. the tracks we normally run on average about a half a mile. this track is almost 2 miles long, so you're wide open almost the entire track railing around fast, bumpy turns. at first its a really scary track due to higher speeds and lots of bumps and sealer all over the track, but once you get the hang of it you realise that you can go flat out around many corners without even slowing down... thats a rush.

unfortunatley our weekend didnt' go so well. i won't go over the endless list of things that went wrong, but i'll tell you the 2 big ones.

1. when you go to oak hill, you get the luxury to drive on the hot pit and unload all your stuff from the truck right into your pit. well we unloaded, and then the truck died. dad had to tow me off the track. turns out it was the fuel pump wich is inside the gas tank... and i just filled up. while we raced dad rounded up the parts, drained the tank, took it off, repaced parts and waited for me to finish racing so that we could lift that heavy bitch back up under the truck. this is no easy task. you're laying on your back in the dirt under a truck with about 4 inches of clearance from your face to the truck. then you have to figure out how to lift this heavy tank off the ground from that position.

2. our bike died after 3 and a half hours of non stop racing. we were suppose to do 6. we thought the top end siezed, but turns out it was the bottom end. i felt really bad that everyone didn't get to finish the race, especially since we were in 3rd and not far behind 1st and 2nd. I'm trying to keep my head up with hopes that after i fix this problem the bike will be good for a while... thats what we said last time. these bikes are suppose to be low maintence, cheap racers... i've dumped a lot of money into that bike trying to keep it on the track this year.

besides that, we still had a lot of fun with the time we did get on the track. Mom and dad were there as always, dusty flew in from pheonix and ayden was with us too. overall i was still able to keep a smile on my face.

picts of us from the race can be found here Oak Hill 2006

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