Who's is that gazebo?

Pictures are courtesy of Sam, who is in the process of updating her Photobucket page with lots of shots of all the bike classes from last weekend.

Fridays test and tune got off to a bad start when we discovered one of the starter cart batteries was completely duff and the starter could hardly turn itself over never mind the bike. An odd scenario really as the batteries are always cycled on a maintenance charge and the charger detects if a battery is duff ..... well at least it's supposed to.
Anyway, a remedy was formulated using the good battery and the battery from the van. Because that battery is so big it won't fit in the cart so we had to ratchet strap the whole lot on top of it. It saved the day however and got us 2 runs down the track before the rain came in the middle of the afternoon.
Both runs netted some reasonable times with an 8.5 then an 8.7, both were messy runs with poor 60ft times and early shutoffs. It looked like a promising start but Saturdays qualifying would see the times going backward. The bike was still bogging slightly off the line despite some fuelling changes, plus we had a variety of electrical gremlins, one of which saw the bikes whole electrics flickering on and off all the way down the strip. In the end we qualified 6th with an 8.8 second pass.
After the last qualifier on Saturday, we returned to the pits to be greeted by the sight of someones gazebo completely upside down and looking rather broken in the middle of the pit lane. It quickly dawned on me that it was ours! some passers by were holding on to it to stop it going any further. Thankfully it hadn't hit anyone or damaged anything, and we were able to recover it and get it straightened out fairly easily. There was hardly any wind at all so it had come as a bit of a surprise. We made sure it was tied down more severely after that anyway.

In the first round of eliminations then, i was thoroughly beaten by Bob Brooks who ran a great personal best time of 7.2 vs my pitiful 9.2, once again the electrical fault spoiled the run, the bike cutting out and misfiring down the track till i just gave up. Chances are either the lanyard kill is faulty or corroded or the main power relay is stuffed or suffering from vibration and loosing contact.

No racing now till the end of august so plenty of time to hopefully eliminate the problem and there are a few other changes on the agenda too. It may even get painted before to long!