One year on

The extreme bike weekend was undoubtedly the drag race meeting of the year. The weather was pretty much perfect, and at times it was too hot to be sat around in leathers.
Luckily we were never kept hanging around and were out on the track every couple of hours. Saturday there were 4 qualifying rounds and another was added on Sunday morning before eliminations started.
Normally at a busy race meeting you have lots of time between rounds to make changes but because you have so few runs there's a part of you doesn't want to change too much in case the run is a mess and you've waited so long for nothing. At this event it was fine to try stuff and at times i barely had enough time between rounds to make the changes required.
Round 1 i got no further than the burnout box as one of the engine mounting nuts fell off during the burnout so i shut off.
Round 2 then was the first chance to run with the softer clutch settings i'd put in before leaving home. The result was the bike barely moved when i dumped the clutch. It was at least half track before the lockup provided enough pressure to actually use full throttle so the run was a rather rubbish 11.3
Round 3 Back on the old clutch settings and i removed the lambda sensor and logger as the data is useless anyway. I put the nitrous on a soft setting, It ran a reasonable 8.5 but the 60ft was still awful and it felt like it was still spinning the tyre.
Round 4 And i decided to throw more nitrous at it off the line but still no different 60ft, but a best ET yet for this bike an 8.332 narrowly missing my PB time on last years bike.
Round 5 Last chance to try something to sort out the 60ft's so i put more base pressure in and more power. The result was hard to decipher as the bike went right and i spent most of the run off the throttle. It still went 8.8 however which was interesting.
First round of eliminations and it was against Stu Crane who had just run a PB time of 7.3. My hopes weren't high but both of us had rubbish runs and i made it across the line first with a 9 something.
Into the next round and this time another mountain to climb as it was Ivan Birch in the opposite lane and he too had been running very fast times. I'd made changes the the weights on the clutch lockup arms, and turned the power up to 80% nitrous off the line.
It still didn't leave well but i had 2 tenths on Ivan at the start and at half track i still couldn't see him. Now that's a first. The inevitable happened and he came flying past somewhere in the second half. So that's where the weekend ended.
The time for that run was very interesting, a new best of 8.137 and still with a poor 1.32 60ft. That would indicate that with a 1.20 or better 60ft time the bike would probably be running in the 7's
Not bad for a bike that this time last year it was just a sawn up rusty GSX frame.

Sam will be updating her Photobucket page in the next day or so, but for now here is a selection of her comp bike pics from the weekend.

Congratulations to all the riders who ran Personal bests, including Stuart Crane, Bob Brooks, Steve French and many more.