FIRST PERSON/OPINION

By Sam Fleming

We ran two teams yesterday.

Brand X with Ben Walters and Brett Champagne. They took third overall and third in class.

We ran Army of X as a B team. That was me, Brandon Parrish and David Weber. We took sixth overall and fourth in Heavyweight Superbike.

The excitement of the day was provided when an inexperienced pit crew member for Team Velocity dumped gasoline all over their YZF-R6 causing it to burst into flames. We were pitting (and fueling) at the same time. Their refueler then ran away from his team’s fire extinguishers and through our pits, trailing a stream of flaming gasoline and then dropping the quick-fill can, leaving a conflagration about three feet behind our stationary motorcycle.

We finished the pit stop by pushing our bike away from the flames. Melissa Berkoff was one of the heroes of the day. She and Reuben Frankenfield (seen working fire extinguisher in photos) smothered the flames with fast action. Reuben didn’t panic when his pants leg caught on fire, pausing only briefly to extinguish himself before going back to work on the rest of the inferno

Chuck Ivey, team captain for Team Velocity, said later that he had seen black smoke billowing in the pits from the track (he was riding Team Velocity’s other bike) and said he knew right away that his crew had set the pits on fire. “I just knew it,” he said.