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In my humble opinion the Ron Cookhandling problem was mainly due to the fact that in lowering the bike he moved the fork-legs up in the triple-clamps thus changing the front-end geometry.....not the right way to "lower" a land speed racing bike. On "tank slappers"...my ride on a Vincent in the early 1980's, (at a mere 125mph, I was looking for a soft spot to land on the salt) ......by givng more throttle, and dragging the rear brake, saved my cookies.
This might sound stupid but I`ll throw it out there anyway.The open dragboat drivers use a chutepack strapped on to slowthere bodys down when the boat gets out of shape and tosses themout. Has anybody ever tryed this on a lsr bike. I know this paints some funny pictures and no, I don`t want an ejectionseat in the roadster. Just thinking (maybe to much).
just got into the best western an hour west of SA for some rest before heading home in the morning. +/- 16 hours...Russ went through the traps at 204.xxx and the wind was coming at a slight right angle to him as he started to brake. He sat up at the same time. the best we can piece together is he was pushed harder by the wind backwards than his previous passes. (5 of 202mph+!) as he sat up, the wind pushed him back further than he had planned causing him to grab the throttle and inadvertantly the brake hard. he washed the front out, came off the bike to its left, the bike went into a slight spin and then cartwheeled at least twice coming to rest on the opposite side of the track. Russ was Life Flighted to Brakenridge Hospital in Austin where he will be for a day or two:Broken non-displaced clavicle fracture.Displaced multi position scapula fracture.Massive right flank hematoma of unknown origin.Essentially no rash. Dianese deserves massive credit.We loaded up his bike onto my trailer and brought it back to the pits. Huge crowd of gawkers of course, but the winds continued to increase and 1/2 the bikers packed it in. A few more braved the conditions. Amber had essentially just finished with our shakedowns/tire pressures/boost settings when this happened. She never got the chance to really get after it. Even if Rus had not gone down, there was no way I was going to allow her to run. We had fun and it ended in near tragedy. Lesson learned.We loaded everything up, drove his truck with his gear, my truck with our gear and trailered both bikes to Austin. His local buddies Steve and Adrian helped us transfer the bike which had a flat front and a tranny stuck in gear to another truck, Russ' dad came up from Houston and took over sitting with the gimp. Russ is stoned but in good spirits and looking forward to a good chew and assessing the damage to the scooter. Thanks to Racetrack14, 9secondjen and neon14 for help getting us loaded. Thanks to TrickTom, CD107 and the cast of characters who lent a hand. RUss extends his appreciation to everyone who helped. He will be back online in the next few days. I will post some pics in a day or two as well.One last thing; the Texas Mile crash crew did an outstanding job of his emergent care, crash scene management, clean up and communication during a very unexpected incident. Kudos to them.