Pleasures And Pains Of Racing

One evening this past week I was finishing up in the shop and decided I could fit in just one more task—scraping the old gasket off my TD1 engine’s gearbox sump plate. I went out into balmy air and sat on my wife’s mounting block, sump plate in one hand, 50-year-old gasket scraper (just sharpened) in the other. The gasket came off easily, despite having been in place since 1967, and I remembered the pleasure of such tasks, performed at the races.

Drive all night Friday to arrive at a racetrack 500 miles away in time for morning sign-up. Have the abundant energy of youth all day, ending with having to go through the clutch to be ready for next morning, and then dinner and bed. The TD1 racers and the DS2/DS3 streetbikes all carried a small clutch on a crankshaft extension, the original reasoning being that a smaller, lighter clutch could be used if engine torque were not multiplied by the 3.273 primary ratio. But the operant word was lighter. As a bike makes a standing start, initially 100 percent of engine power goes into heating the clutch. As the rear wheel begins to turn and accelerates, the rate of clutch slippage is reduced until, at some point, slippage ceases and nearly 100 percent of engine power is going to the rear wheel through the fully engaged clutch. But during those seconds, engine power is being turned into heat in that little clutch, sometimes driving the temperature of its steel plates high enough to blue and warp some of them.

Hence the frequent trackside job of clutch service—to replace warped or cracked discs. That was all done for the day and now all that remained was to clean this gasket surface, apply a new gasket, slap the clutch cover in place, and do up its eight 6mm screws. Into the van with the bike, and off to food and rest.

All that made the quiet sitting, scraping away the damaged gasket, very pleasant. The pleasure of anticipation, the pleasure of having the work under control.

Sometimes events force us to work through the night. Students do it. Ambitious, rising account execs do it. And racers do it, because time ran out, or parts arrived late. Or because of just plain poor management—there I am at 4 a.m., only now setting the lower crankcase half in place, meaning that with the various checks necessary I should have the engine in the frame in an hour. I hate the birds at 4 a.m. because that’s when they start their day, twittering. I am not cheerful. I am inefficient and late in finishing. As longtime member of the Kenny Roberts team Bud Aksland once said, “I don’t mind doing an all-nighter now and then—that’s part of racing. But I don’t want to live in a crisis either.”

Tweet, chirp. I try to ignore the feathery little beings outside, so packed with cheer. Yes, the gearbox shafts turn with clutch and sprocket nuts torqued, and yes, it shifts six speeds. Time to close.

There is the crank and the crank trueing stand, with its hinged dial gage support, ready to report how far out of concentricity (machinists used to call it “truth”) it is, immediately after assembly using the force of a hydraulic press. There is the copper hammer, ready to do its job of ever-so-slightly twisting or tilting the outer flywheels on their crankpins, to align all four main bearings on the same axis. Optimists shoot for 0.0005 inch—”half a thou”—and all who work in this way rejoice if they achieve it. But sometimes there’s a deformed inner flywheel that won’t true, and you have to start over with another part. There goes an hour or two. And sometimes it proves almost impossible to move the off-center flywheel the just-right amount. So back and forth it jumps at each of the hammer’s urgings—out by plus 0.003 inch, then out by the same amount minus, back and forth it jumps. Frustration is close, rising like stomach acid.

For me, the best feeling when about to true a crank is patient confidence. I sometimes look at this screen, with its blinking (some might say reproachful) cursor, and I know that in a couple of hours pages will be filled with readable text. Same with the crank, except that some of them come good in 20 minutes’ work and some take much longer—you never know which it will be. So patience is good, and continuing to devise new strategies for alignment. A confidence grows out of all that. I will finish this crank and I will put it behind me.

Best of all is the gift of a crank that comes off the press on the money. I set it into the checking fixture (for Yamaha horizontal-split twins it supports the crank by its two center main bearings) and bring the dial gage down to bear on one projecting shaft. I turn the crank, but the dial gage hand doesn’t move. Okay, maybe it just looks like the gage is touching, but it isn’t, quite. I readjust and turn the crank. Again, the pointer is stationary. This is the free gift of chance: no adjustment necessary. The pleasure is usually momentary.

Worst is hurrying to mount a new fairing (the old one was swept off some racetrack in pieces by the brooms of corner workers). Contouring and drilling a new windscreen (fine-toothed band saw, plus a flatted bit that doesn’t crack the plexi) and getting everything aligned deserve time that often doesn’t exist. These are tasks it’s tempting to postpone. So in the rush to load the van, something is a little crooked. Half an hour into the journey west, I notice the crookedness in the van’s rearview mirror. I’m offended. Asymmetry is ugly. And it’s unworkmanlike. I try to look only in the side mirrors.

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I have often taken good-natured heat from others over the presence of a large adjustable wrench in my toolbox. The universal “right way” is to have in the box only those tools necessary for the fasteners actually present on the bike. There are no 15mm or 11mm bolts or nuts anywhere on it, so the corresponding wrenches and sockets are absent, just as are wood planes or discarded home appliance parts.

After last practice at Laguna, we pulled the cylinders for routine inspection and discovered a strange wear pattern on the No. 2 piston. Clunk, my mind realized—that connecting rod is bent. There isn’t time to change the cranks, which were new (TZ750s had two, end to end, each with a narrow drive gear at its inner end, both meshing with a jackshaft gear). Therefore I must straighten that rod where it sits. Crude, yes. But we’re here to race, not to score style points. Out came the scorned large adjustable, with which it proved possible to adjust both bend and twist. When I decided it was good, I reassembled. The engine ran. The bike and rider (Ron Pierce) went to the grid. Ron was fourth that day, first privateer. I’d got away with it.

But I should have spotted that rod during assembly. My good and bad feelings made a pickle-and-jelly sandwich.