6/13/07

Strong on the Mile, Hardship at the TT

Mile

With the Springfield TT rained out and rescheduled for Monday, the Mile was the first chance for Grand National racing to resume after the long spring break, and the track crew did the usual excellent job of dealing with difficult conditions and getting the race completed. No one in the field seemed to be a match for Harley's Kenny Coolbeth on this afternoon, and the race finish was marred by controversy when Coolbeth's machine was deemed to be underweight. After further inspection, the AMA rescinded the ruling, Coolbeth took the win and Chris took second.

"Springfield was a pretty good race for us. Had a good battle with (Jay) Springsteen and (J.R.) Schnabel in the heat race and was able to come out on top of that pretty well. Led it off of turn four and got to the stripe first, so that was good.

"Decent start in the main event up there in the top four or five and I saw (Kenny) Coolbeth make a break early and I tried to go with him, I got into second about the second or third lap - he had put about a 10 bike length gap on us and I tried running him down on my own and nobody really passed me for a while, then eventually Brian Smith came by and I said, 'well I'll just sit behind him and see if he can run him down,' and he wasn't able to either. Kenny was a little bit better than us all the way through and stretched the thing out, and I fell back into a battle basically with Smith and (Jared) Mees for the rest of the race, never saw (Joe) Kopp after that except for maybe one time. Coming down the last lap, I pulled some basic maneuvers down the backstretch and was able to run the thing through three and four and finished second, about as good as I could do for that particular day. "

TT

Heavy rains forced the TT to run on Monday of the Memorial Day weekend, and although the track remained tacky and roguh through the preliminary program, it dried out somewhat for the main event. Chris struggled to a third row start then stalled the KTM on the first lap, forcing him to charge from last. His final position was thirteenth.

"TT was in pretty decent shape considering all the rain they had, it had a couple of soft spots early on. The track was wet and tacky going out there on Monday morning, seemed to be holding up pretty good, it wasn't getting real rough and it just seemed like in the process of getting it ironed out.

"They'd lost the moisture in it by the time we got to the main event. My heat race was a bit of a struggle, I ran basically a lonely fourth the whole race and couldn't make any ground on anybody. In the semi, I got off the line second and I think it was Josh Butler in the semi and I ran second with my old team mate Willie McCoy on my rear wheel the whole time and couldn't make any ground on the leaders and was able to keep Willie behind me, and that put us in the main event with a third row start.

"Got a pretty decent jump off the start going into turn one. It was typical first turn at Springfield TT, lot of stuff going on and I just plain killed the motor going in there and the rest of the field got around me as I got it started. Through attrition and a couple of passes here and there I ended up a lonely thirteenth at the end so that was kind of unfortunate but fortunately the one good thing is that hopefully we got our bad finish out of the way out of the way early in the year and we have got four more races to make up for. "


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