It had to happen eventually. After a streak of thirteen visits without a loss, and seventeen straight podium finishes, Chris Carr finished third at the Peoria TT. The podium streak lives on, but the win streak, one which will probably never be equalled, is over.
Not without a fight, however, as he challenged young hotshoe J.R. Schnabel for the lead mid-race, took over at the front after picking his way up from a fourth-place start, then, just as quickly, he slipped back to second, then third when Nicky Hayden charged through to an eventual win.
The pressure of keeping the win streak alive is off, now it's time to concentrate on the Grand National Championship with just seven races remaining on the schedule.
"We were competitive. We got a good run in our scratch heat, got a decent start, second into the corner, beat Willie McCoy in a drag race to the jump, and easily won the scratch heat, but it turned out to be sixth-fastest. However, we had gone out in the last one, and it was one of those days where I hadn't seen the track at Peoria change as much as it did this last Sunday.
"From my practice session to what I had in my scratch heat was a totally different racetrack. It was drier, rougher, and it actually slowed down about a second-a-lap for me.
"We needed to make a few adjustments, and we might have missed our gearing a little bit, but in the heat race, we were running pretty good, with Atherton - he led about the first five or six laps - and I was able to sneak underneath him in the middle of three and four and get away from him the least half of the race. Lap times ended up being the third fastest heat.
"It kind of felt like we improved a little bit, going from sixth-fastest to third-fastest. We were moving up the latter.
"In the main event, I didn't get a real good start, but it wasn't terrible. We were fourth to the jump, (J.R.) Schnabel was leading, and (Joe) Kopp was second, Johnny Murphree was third, and I was fourth. I actually was fortunate enough to get my Murphree fairly early, got a good run off of turn four, and won the drag race down the front stretch.
"Schnabel and Kopp were going real good. They were in front of me by about ten bike lengths by the first or second lap. I just kept charging away at them, a little bit. I caught Kopp, got by him about lap six or seven, and got into second, and Schnabel still had a ten bike length lead. I hadn't really lost a lot of ground to the lead, but I displaced one guy.
"I chipped away at J.R., and I think I got around him around lap fifteen or lap sixteen. He had made a little bobble coming off of turn four, as Kopp had earlier in the race, and I got a good run down the straightaway, and the Kenny Tolbert horsepower put me into turn one first.
"About the time I got there, I was done. I was pretty tired. The combination of things, the stress of keeping a win streak alive, and the fact that were a lot of guys going pretty good - I pretty much froze up at the front. J.R. hounded me for the next five laps or so, and got by me, I believe, about lap 21. I had made a bobble in the middle of three and four, and he snuck it up underneath me and made a clean pass.
"I proceeded to make two mistakes the next half-a-lap. He got out on me about the ten or fifteen bike lengths that he had on me earlier in the race. I tried putting my head down and running after him, but I didn't have a whole lot of steam left in me. I guess Nicky was coming up behind us. He had found a line in turns one and two and was making it work. He was pretty much even with everybody everywhere else around the track.
"He got by me on lap 23 and I got to watch history be made up in front. He made a real good pass on Schnabel coming off of turn two on the last lap. Those guys beat me by fifteen or twenty bike lengths. The streak was over.
"It's unfortunate, and we're disappointed about that, but, y'know, it was bound to happen, and now we can move on to the next one. Hopefully we can start a new mini-streak, but I'm not gonna promise twelve in a row, but maybe we can start with one in a row next year.
"I'm happy for Nicky Hayden, he deserved it, and so did J.R. Schnabel. I hoped both of those guys could have come across the line in a dead heat, because they both rode equally hard enough to deserve that race. I'm disappointed with third, but we'll move on to winning the Championship now, and concentrating on what we've got to do to get that job done. This won't affect our bid for the Championship one bit. We'll be ready to go on Saturday night."
Kenny Tolbert - Sleep? Don't Need it.
"But he had pulled an all-nighter working on the bikes, trying to make them the best he could, and had done a great job - gave me a motorcycle that was capable of winning - got sick as a dog Saturday morning, and he and Willie McCoy were scheduled to drive up to Peoria together in the truck and trailer. They got going about ten o'clock in the morning. "Then about 2:30 in the afternoon, just outside of Oklahoma City, before the Turnpike, the trailer ate the bearings in the wheels and messed up all kinds of stuff in the rear end of that trailer, and those guys were stranded there for a couple of hours before they finally decided that there was going to be no U-Haul to rent, and there was going to no way to get it fixed. "They unhooked the trailer and high-tailed it back to Decatur, grabbed old 'Beaulah', our old box truck that we had sitting there from last year, put a new battery in it because she had been sitting too long, got back on the road, picked up the truck and trailer, stopped by and unloaded all their stuff out of it and loaded it up in Beaulah, hit the road and fortunately made it to the race track at 7:30 in the morning on Sunday. "He had one heck of a 48 hours prior to the race. I just wish things had gone better to kind of pay him off for his troubles, but hopefully we can go to Sedalia and make up for a rough weekend."
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