An AMA 250cc Grand Prix Racer Looks Back At The Fontana National

An AMA 250cc Grand Prix Racer Looks Back At The Fontana National

© 2002, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.

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This just in from Andy Edwards:

This is the text of a letter I have mailed to the AMA and to Roadracing World today:

This is my race report from Fontana. Unbeknownst to me, the AMA decided to do timed qualifying rather than heat races for the 250s. The cutoff is 112%. Historically I am usually at between 107 and 110% of Ricardo de Oliveri’s time in the heat race. (I want to quit work and do this full time, but my wife is not in favor of this plan – in the cold light of day neither am I really). If you look at the 250 times you will find that typically 112% will eliminate quite a few. I am not the only one with access to the laptimes, I think the AMA knows this too. The Pro Thunder class is the same – unfortunately there is a wider variation of equipment and possible equipment set-up than in the supersport classes. In the regulations that the AMA sent out for Fontana it states that the 112% rule does not apply to Pro Thunder. I wonder why it said that, seeing as how there was no Pro Thunder race at Fontana? Does the left hand know what the right is doing? However, I digress.

Clearly the aim of this change is to reduce the field – to the point that the class goes away. I say this because a moment’s thought will reveal that although the 112% limit is touted as a safety enhancement, it is not. Imagine that you are in a tight race on the last lap and you come upon a backmarker. Will he be easier to get past if he is running at 106% of your time or 115% of your time? If he is going only 6% slower, he is plainly going to be more difficult to get past than if he is going 15% slower. Maybe he should not be there at all. This thinking would have left six bikes in the superbike race on Saturday and seven bikes in the shortened superbike race on Sunday. Maybe we should have yellow flags and pace-cars to level the field like they do in NASCAR. I can’t believe that they still do this at Daytona after last year’s debacle. When will they realize that we are not NASCAR?

So I repeat, the unstated desire of the AMA seems to be to do away with all support classes until you are left with 600 and Superbike. (Why is it unstated, aren’t we the members, aren’t we paying the salaries, aren’t we the AMA?)

Anyway back to the race report. As there were about 15 or so that had run the club race the weekend before, or had run at Fontana at some point in the recent past, there were some problems matching their pace. The second session was cut short when Greg Esser crashed. We were allowed to go out for the last six or seven minutes and I got one lap before my engine grenaded on the front straight. I took the engine out in the hope that the crank was OK and I could wash the debris out of the cases. It became rapidly apparent that the crank was also history and there was a good possibility that the cases were too. The cause appeared to be that the wrist pin had exceeded its lifespan. I wanted to change the top end after the race at Daytona and before my flight as I would not see the bike again before Fontana, but I only managed to get the gearbox changed back to standard internal ratios, I wasn’t able to do anything to the top end. I planned to do it after practice on Friday at Fontana. There goes my kit cylinders. The original plan by the AMA was to have timed qualifying on Saturday. I started on the bike but it was dark pretty much immediately and I was dog tired so I resolved to work on it on Saturday pretty much giving up on racing for the weekend. However it rained all day Saturday stopping them from running qualifying so I thought I was in like Flynn. I finished putting the thing back together Saturday night (missing another practice which occurred Saturday afternoon late). Sunday morning the schedule came out which turned out to be 5 laps practice, 20 minutes qualifying and race at about 1.00. I did my best in qualifying but there was no time on the motor and I hadn’t had much practice so my best wasn’t good enough.

There were 32 entrants originally. 19 made the grid. There were approximately 10 who went to the grid to get thrown off. (Actually there was still some question as to what the deal was at that point). I was one of them. In the race there were 14 finishers if you count Thad Halsmer who pushed his bike across the line to be counted. So primarily as a result of the AMA’s actions there was a 13 bike race.

I don’t think that the way the AMA is going is good for bike racing in general. Why are they opposed to promoter practices? I have heard, third hand, that they have conducted market surveys and find that there isn’t any support from the spectators for the support classes specifically the 250s. Well whilst working on my bike I did my own market survey and found the exact opposite. There were people stopping by talking to me and looking at and photographing my broken engine parts all day Saturday. I’m not sure that the factory teams were letting them take pictures of the inside of their engines. I think that the motivation for people to go to the races to spectate needs to be examined. I went to the races when I was a teenager because I didn’t have the necessary wherewithal to get a bike and do it myself. I wanted to go and see what it was all about. That’s why my friends went. We wanted to be there, to vicariously ride with the racers, to identify with some of them. We wouldn’t have done it quite like Dave Croxford (factory Norton rider – seen him crash more times than you’ve had hot dinners) of course but we’d have been there. Now at the average race there are only a finite number of factory riders who have time to shoot the shit with you but there are usually any number of privateers that’ll discuss the weather, or two stroke tuning, or the rate of reproduction of the average wallaby. If you eliminate the support classes will this be the case? Will the average spectator who is usually a motorcyclist and probably even a club racer or at least has done the odd track day, sit still in the fourteen mile long grandstand and watch the show? Will he even show up? No, I think he or she wants to be involved based on my market survey. I looked in the grandstands and, as Mike Baldwin said just after they replaced racebikes with Superbikes at Daytona, there was nobody there.

Andy Edwards

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