Crosstrails - September 8, 2013

1/2 of Team Disaster decided that instead of going racing, it would be easier to fly to Washington and walk around Mt Rainier.

And by "walk around" I mean all the way around. 93 miles, with about 3,000 feet of vertical every day.


I'm not that smart, so I went racing.





  
As you may recall, in my last race, I went down hard on the left side and pushed the bark buster out of the way so that I could break the clutch lever. What I then discovered is that there aren't any clutch levers for the 07 KLX 250. And by "aren't" I mean that there are 6 levers in the country. I ordered an aftermarket replacement from a stealer, which arrived in a week. I figured for $5, how can I go wrong?

Feeling smug, I waited until 2 days before the race to discover that they'd ordered the wrong lever.

In my calls around the tri-state area, one guy suggested a universal lever and perch.
With nothing to lose, I bought it on the way to the track, figuring that it would inevitably be One-size-fits-none.

Shockingly, it worked fine!

But let's back up to the lever breaking crash...

When the bark buster rotated out of the way, it made sense to me to tighten it up. really tight. the right side had been moving in my crashes also, so I cranked that bar end down *hard*.

It wasn't until I got to the starting line that I discovered that I couldn't rotate the throttle. I mean, I could get about 1/8 turn, and after that, it was really stiff. (TWSS)
I theorized that I'd cranked the bar end down so hard that I'd expanded the handlebar, and the throttle was binding.

But there was no time, so I figured I'd just deal with it.

There was a bit of a MX track that we ran. On the first lap, I went over a table top, and then in to a *big* berm, which I railed pretty well (for me).
Coming out of that turn, I discovered, was a double jump.

I had enough speed to make it about halfway.

Looking at the video, it doesn't appear that I hit anything, but it sure felt like I whacked my chest and face.

Somehow, in that 'incident' I bent my shifter and only had first gear for the rest of the race, so it turned out that not being able to twist the throttle wasn't as big of a deal.


I finished 3 of the 5 laps, and only *crashed* 2 or 3 times...


looking forward to the next race.