.
All suited up, and dripping sweat with the effort (it was still cold, but I was most of the way to overheated from rushing), I pushed the bike off its fancy new stand, turned the petcock on, and... time slowed. I watched with terrified fascination as a film of gasoline oozed over the bottom of the petcock, and formed a slow-motion drop, which fell slowly to the engine case. There, it splashed, and I could see the little tendrils of gasoline reaching out to coat the case in flamable liquid.
Hah! No riding for you!
Time sped up again. I watched drop after drop form and fall onto the engine, each one sealing my doom further. There would be no morning practice for me. Taking that bike out on the track in that condition would be begging for a fire. No riding was worth finding myself atop a couple of gallons of flaming gasoline. A drop of sweat fell off my head, as if in sympathy with the falling gas. With unuttered curses flying across my consciousness, I switched the gas off, and put the bike back on its stand.
Tamra joined me. Her bike was down with a busted camshaft, so she was done for the weekend. I took off my helmet, shrugged out of the upper half of my suit, and gently steamed. We discussed what was going on. Given that I would be riding later in the day, and she definitely wouldn't, she was very philosophical about the whole thing. Eventually, I changed back into my normal clothes, and got up to look at the problem.
I drained out the gas (since if you take the petcock apart, it all comes out anyway, except it heads straight for your face), which took the better part of 15 minutes, sitting crouched next to the bike, balancing the gas can and the funnel in the cramped space under the petcock. I took it apart. Looked fine to me.
Fortunately, by this time, everyone was back from their practice, and Ian (of Twinline) had set up next to us. I asked him what he knew about leaking petcocks, and he explained the problem: the petcock surface is supposed to be flat to seal against the internal washer, and mine was well-grooved with the wear of 35 years. So, I pulled out my trusty multitool, which includes a fine file, and set about carefully flattening the thing.
That plus some green scrubby pad someone had were enough to produce a sealing surface on the valve/handle, and when I reassembled it, there was nary a weep of gasoline to be seen. Huzzah! Gotta love track-side fixes. I believe vintage racing is full of them.
So then, it was just a matter of waiting. And waiting. Our first race wasn't until 12:50, the first race after lunch. But everything seemed to be in order, and I was ready in plenty of time. Too much time, in fact -- I was sitting there with my helmet on, Ready to Go, for 10 minutes, before I pulled it off again, feeling foolish. Finally, the horn blew, and I got myself back together, and onto the bike.
I'd set up this fancy new camera I got on the forward mount, so it would record everyone disappearing ahead of me. Jesse had suction-cupped the camera to his bike on Saturday, but the videos were zero-length for some reason. I was going to give it another try, figuring maybe the different mounting method would eliminate the vibration we figured had caused the problem before.
Tire warm-up lap. I basically kept up with people, but I was riding fairly hard, and I knew they weren't really trying. We gridded up, me actually in my assigned grid position for the first time. This time, it was a wave start, which was made obvious by the guy standing in front of us, holding his hand up in the air with two fingers raised -- second wave. The first wave went, and Mr. 2 bolted for the side of the track, vaulting it as if we were on the verge of running him down. Perhaps we were.
The starting board went sideways, then the light went out -- we were off! Only.. I kind of wasn't! I nearly stalled the bike, but got it moving a second later, only a little bit behind everyone else. Everything was going as well as I could have hoped, until I became gradually aware that my right foot wasn't finding the brake pedal. Finally, on the second lap (everyone was well out of sight at this point, so there was little urging me to keep up), between turns 3 and 4, I glanced down and saw the brake pedal dangling jauntily off the bottom of the bike.
I went through turn 4, thoroughly distracted, unable to decide if I should pull off, or keep going. I decided finally to keep going: it hadn't hit anything so far, and I'd been around a couple curves where it should have. A rear brake isn't all that necessary, is it? I made it through 6, which was another curve that should have touched the brake down if it was going to be a problem, but there was nothing.
Coming around turn 9, I reluctantly decided that it probably wasn't the cleverest thing to be riding around the track with bits hanging off, and pulled off toward the pits to see what was going on. I leaned off, and there was the pedal, dangling from its actuator rod. It probably wasn't in any danger of falling any further off, but it seemed to epitomize "bad idea" to keep racing, so I headed back to the pits (causing the hot-tech guys to scramble up; they thought they had 5 more minutes to hang out before bikes started rolling past). One of them pointed at the brake pedal, and I said, "Yeah, that's why I'm here!" He slapped my back, and I was back to the pits.
Indeed, the pivot bolt for the pedal was long gone. I had looked at it when I installed it, weeks earlier, and thought to myself, "I need to safety wire that bolt, or it's going to be gone in a heartbeat." Then I never did. Le sigh. I grabbed a bolt out of Jesse's spare-bolt jar, applied a liberal dose of red Loctite (which is sufficiently like safety wire that I figured it'd see me through the second race, at least), and put it all back together.
By this time, my frustration with the bike was rising. It was, of course, aided by the fact that I had failed to do the right thing, so I couldn't even rail against the vintage gods for their trials.  Great, a DNF (Did Not Finish) for my first heat of the day.
On top of that, when I got back to the pits, I checked the camera. I was curious to see how the recording had turned out, but it had the little camera equivalent of a rigor-mortis smile plastered on its little digital face: it was frozen, just as had happened to Jesse the day before. I reluctantly prodded buttons and finally pulled the batteries, which we'd determined the day before definitely results in a zero-length file. Feh.
This was roughly the point at which I became aware that I wasn't really having any fun, at all. The day had been rushed, then dull, then aggravating in turns. I'd barely gotten out on the track, which was the whole point. Everything seemed to be going wrong.
Ok, I thought, I've still got the second heat. So I made sure everything was right. I set up the camera on the back mount, and got it all leveled out and pointed straight, as best I could. I filled the tank with fuel. I checked the timing, and shimmed the sparkplugs, which were hitting the pistons. Not ideal, but the immediate problem was solved.
Somewhere in here, my friend Jeniffer showed up with her friend Allison. I called her over, and we chatted for a few minutes. She was excited to be there, and had brought her camera with her, to take pictures of all the racing. They didn't stay long, since they were there to spectate, not hang about chatting. Still, it was a breath of fresh air for me to focus on being social rather than how frustrating the day was so far.
All too soon, it was time, and I was pulling on my gear for the final heat of the day. Finally, everything seemed to be going right. The bike was running fine, I wasn't rushed, maybe I'd get a decent race in. Of course, the little camera had carefully gotten itself frozen before I even started the bike. I tried to revive it as I was rolling out, and realized that exactly the last thing I should be doing was messing around with a device practically guaranteed to make my mood worse. I left it grinning its frozen grin.
The second heat went well, in the sense that I finished it, and the bike seemed to basically work. Unfortunately, I also discovered what I had only been partially aware of before: the bike seems underpowered. At least coming out of turn 4, which is slightly uphill, everyone else just left me in the dust. I'm willing to believe it's my skill level causing that, but it really seemed like my bike was down on power compared to everyone else. This only led to further frustration.
Probably the most exciting moment of the race was in turn 6. I had already been passed by several of the faster 500cc bikes in the straight, and was passed again in turn 6. Only this time, instead of