05/28/2026
Hastings Nebraska was an experience! Long before I got into racing myself, I enjoyed reading Joe W. Koury race weekend write ups, so I’ll make an attempt at doing the same. The week leading up to the race was spent fabricating a sand bent titanium exhaust for the bike which was more mathematically correct for the bike vs the old system (stepped down from 2.25 secondary pipe to 1.625 , shorted the merge point from 34 inches to 29” , changed the 40deg merge angle to 15deg and shaved 5lbs in weight) and spent time building intake manifolds and phenolic spacers to swap in some 26mm mikunis in leu of the 24mm dellorotos. Previously at CMP I had some stuttering around in the high rpms and was getting unequal plug readings (one side looked much richer than the other). I had hopes the fresh carbs would sort this out. Essentially I worked on the bike till it was time to load it, fired it up, ran her around the block and then straight into the truck for the 20 hour drive.
Got to Hastings, was blown all over the road on the way in. Started practice on Friday, and was getting decent pace by the end of the day. The bike was ripping out of the corners but still misfiring up top and I was once again getting unequal plug readings. So the next thing that made sense was to replace the coil, which I did. Friday evening the aluminum rear brake stay that i made 10 years ago for Pops broke. This allowed the backing plate to spin and it shredded the rear brake cable. I trimmed off the end and drilled a new hole and moved on. Friday night became windy, i had the ez up strapped down well and it ended up collapsing on the bike around midnight. The tent was trying to fly off with me hanging onto to it. Kinda felt lik sailing for a moment. “Sh*ts going wrong out there, better tend to it”.
First practice on Saturday and the bike was running clean for the first time with this motor in it. Come second practice, I’m starting to gain pace and three laps in the bike acted like it was loading up which it never did. Getting ready for race one and the bike wouldnt start. I frantically pushed it around the pits and nothing. No spark. Apparently the dying coil I was running put a hurting on the electronic ignition and the fresh coil finished it off. So no racing Saturday. Both Steve Brown and Jp Kainz offered to help but their ignition systems were different than mine. I was at the point of accepting that I was going to make a 40 hour round trip drive and not run a single race, when I found a very rusty points setup on eBay, an hour north. Got the guy on the phone and by 5pm I was back at the track with a condenser from a 74 Chevy 350 pickup and a glimmer of hope.
At Saturday’s awards ceremony they warned that serious weather was approaching in the next two hours so I rolled the bike and my tools into the back of the truck for the points swap/ wiring. It was one of the most absurd situations I found myself in, pea sized hitting the topper as I worked by flashlight into the night trying to unfreeze the mechanical advance mechanism with pb blaster and a mini torch. No success there. We’re running total timing. Got the setup on, fell asleep for 5 hours, woke up, took a shower and continued wiring. First try, I saw a spark at the points wire and popped the fuse. Apparently I had the very small insulator that goes around the points bolt off and it was arcing there. Popped 5 more fuses, removed the condenser to help diagnose and then fried and let the smoke out of my new coil all before daylight. When i pulled the stator cover off for my timing marks i realized there was no flywheel there, so no timing marks. I ended up making a cardboard timing wheel to get me “close”. Sitting there smoking an American Spirit I was once again accepting that I might not race this weekend. I put my old, failing coil back in, pulled the one spare fuse from my truck and got spark through the plugs. Ran back over to Steve Brown, borrowed his coil. Got the bike running very poorly 10 minutes before my first race. The bike wouldn’t rev, and I just started moving the points plate until it would rev and went out on the track.
She was once again running rough up top but pulling out of the corners well. It was enough to win my first Le Mans race. Come GP250 race and I was running fourth, battling with Dave Roper. I could see the inside of his muffler glowing red and I could smell the fiberglass packing burning out. His timing was obviously very off as well. then made it up to Jack Kainz which was struggling with his transmission popping out of gear as my bike was sputtering and surging on the straights. It was the battle of the three messed up bikes! Holly Varey dropped out in the last lap with a shifter issue, which left me with a 2nd place. Not bad for my first run in GP250. Followed up by another 2nd in GP200 which was a little less eventful.
So if this is what yall do for fun, working on these bikes at the track just to get a few laps in, you’re crazy. And I’m happy to be there doing it along side of you. I’ve heard that your fellow AHRMA (American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association)competitors will help ya out, and this was my first time experiencing it. It was heart warming. Once again a big thanks to Steve Brown and Kainz for the offers of help in dire times.
The drive back was uneventful.
