More updates from Daytona FL

Thursday was certainly our roller coaster day, and one where the team pulled together to get things done quickly and correctly in order to end up smiling at the end of the day!

Bobby was sitting waiting at the end of pit row after a red flag in Supersport practice, and he was directed back to the pit by an AMA official with water in the belly pan. The engine temp reflected the boil over, so this bike was out of use for the rest of the weekend. That required us to sit down, see what are options were as per AMA rules and then move forward with good forethought and execution. We could use the remaining bike in both classes as it was suspersport spec, so that created optimism as Supersport was our only class for 08 to focus on.

The prior day the FX bike had a flat sport in the rpms at full throttle. We tried changing the throttle body settings, chasing other ideas but still the problem was not resolved. We then changed to a stock tank, and all was well so the tank was getting too pressurized causing a fuel delivery problem. In pre practice engine warm up today water was found in the belly pan, so now we were really under duress. Mike and Rich removed all the hoses for new ones and put a new radiator and cap on the bike. In conjunction with that we had to go find a dyno to load test the engine to check for any further leaks as we did not want a repeat of Fontana. Dyno jet was for those riders with Power Commanders only, so we managed to find another tuner at the track who had his mobile dyno rig wiith him and who very graciously gave us 10 minutes on the dyno with repeat load tests to make sure we had no leaks. We got through that okay, so now we had a good bike that we could use.

Bobby then decided to test a 180 rear tire to see if he could get better drive off the corners, so we had to make some significant geometry adjustment calculations as the rear tire is a lot smaller than a 190. In conjunction with that we also had front end problem due to the changed geometry so with FX qualifying upon us, so I had to make some educated "guesswork" and used FX qualifying as practice to make all the changes we needed. By the end of qualifying the overall chassis worked fairly well, with the front end problem significantly reduced and the bike performing well mid corner and through corner exit.

Very shortly before the race Owen and Bobby talked about the bike, and they called me in to chat about a few possible changes to the bike immediately prior to the race. Not an uncommon situation, but one that creates a little duress as you are changing the bike again and therefore to some extent rolling the dice as the changes will be untested. As a result of that discussion, the forks were lowered to raise the front end and rear ride height was taken out of the bike to provide better corner exit control.

The net result of the changes were indicated by the race results, with Bobby fighting with Danny Eslick for 10th place all race. All things considered, we had a hell of a roller coaster day but when all was said and done there was a happy ending :)