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Mosport 2004

We're Back..................

With Chris' win at Calgary in the 600 class and a solid 9th place in AMA supersport at Laguna, we were maybe, expecting a little to much at Mosport.

I started my journey on Sunday night at 10:00 pm, thinking I'd get a jump on the road trip. When I first planned the trip, I decided it would be to much to get Chris, to race at Laguna and then drive for 3 days and then race for 4 days and then turn around and drive to Lexington, Ohio.( Mid - Ohio) and race the Horizon Cup for 2 days and then the AMA for 4 days. These dates are all back to back.
Racers pray for this much track time, until they get it, then it doesn't feel so good.

I drove my 40 ft trailer and dually all the way from Calgary, (2200 miles) down through the states and back up to Canada. In case I'm reading this in my old age, I should remind myself, when I got about 20 miles from Fargo, the radio signal went dead and this crackling sound comes on and says, "this is the emergency radio signal, please pay attention." OK, you've got my attention. "travelers on the I 75 traveling south, there is a tornado warning and severe weather conditions, the tornado is about 16 miles from Fargo, if you are in the area, please leave your car, or if you are in a mobile home, please evacuate your home." Well, I'm 20 miles from Fargo traveling south...... Yeah, I'm getting real scared.

You could see all the clouds and lightning by now and I was getting very nervous, I was thinking, Dorothy from the Wizard of OZ would have all of Chris' bikes up there on the yellow brick road. Then I realized, who cares about the bikes. I may be visiting Dorothy. As luck would have it, I found myself under a huge bridge and parked there for about 45 minutes. I started seeing trucks on the road again and assumed the road must be OK to drive. So, off I went to Fargo.....

The tornado had never touched down in Fargo, but did, a few miles away. After driving for about 15 hours, Fargo looked pretty good. I got a room and crashed for about ten hours and started to drive again, to Chicago. As I'm driving into Chicago, that big black cloud is hovering over Chicago and the highway. This time I didn't hear any radio messages, so off I went, next stop, Toronto/Oshawa.

Yup, tornado touch down just outside Toronto, go figure, all these storms keep following me. The night before Chris' Calgary race, our house got struck by lighting, Chris runs upstairs and says because we didn't die, we all have super powers, Chris did win his race the next day. I didn't win anything yet. I did keep his trophy. I figure, I deserve it as much as he does.

This time, Chris, Jim Sibthrope, Willy and wife, Nadine came to Mosport.

I'll go over the days quickly........ Thursday sucked, Rain, and because they called for nice weather Saturday and Sunday, we decided to stay low and work on the bikes a bit.

Friday, .... rain, sunshine, mild showers, lighting storms, torrential rain and wind, grap your tents before they fly away, wind.
In practice, Chris was in the top five and riding well in the changing conditions.

Qualifing,... for 600 everything was going well, we were 4th for most of the session and as high as 2nd. Then we made some softer tires attempts and were plagued with red flags on every outing. In the end we were 9th, at the last red flag we didn't have anymore tires to try out and factory guys put on there Q tires and got ahead of Chris.

Superbike was a mishmash of weather and with his 750, we put the bike on the 3rd row at 12th, that's about as fast as we can go against the 1000's.

The 600 race, Chris went from 12th to 4th on the first lap and was running well, until a rider hit him and put him in the grass, the bike's tip over mechanism would not allow him to restart his bike and when he finally figured out, you have to turn the bike off and on again to cycle the system, he went down a lap. To Bad.

The superbike race he did as well as you can do with a 750, he finished 11th.

The next 600 race, was a crap shoot, rain tires, intermediate tires or D.O.T.s, we went with rain tires, this was a good idea till the rain stopped and the track dried. In hindsight, the intermediate tires would have been the right choice. Chris rode as well as he could and was smart enough to take it easy when the track dried and finished in 11th place. The tire so shagged, Clint Mcbain came over and while looking at Chris' tire said, "I'm glad your still with us."

The weather was messed up again and we choose to miss the Superbike race, as Chris had to go to Mid-Ohio for the AMA races.

Of course, a lot of thanks to Willy Vass (Vass Performance) who worked his butt off and Nadine Vass, Jim Sibthorpe, the Michelin man, AKA. Sensei, Rick Lacombe, everyone worked very hard and due to the uncertainty of racing, we had another great experience.

That's it in a nutshell.