Army Of Darkness Digs Out Of A Mud Hole to Overall And Heavyweight Class Wins at the WERA/N2 National Endurance Race by Dunlop at Roebling Road Raceway
Josh Hayes and Hunter Dunham piloted the AOD Yamaha YZF-R1 to a win with a four-lap lead over second place on July 15th. The race was won on the track, but the war was waged in the pits.
Ben Walters shared, “I am a certified industrial safety consultant and one of the things we always stress is you can have the systems and procedures in place on paper, but you can’t replace real live drills to help your people succeed.”
With that selfless commitment to team improvement, Walters lowsided the A Bike in practice on Friday in Turn Four. Both he and the bike ultimately exhausted their potential energy in a shallow muddy pond with a rock wedging the dry brake on the gas tank open. The bike had to be recovered with tow straps looped around the wheels inverted and it was unceremoniously deposited on the recovery trailer on its side.
Flood damage is the most insidious of mechanical projects and yet, in the 107o F real feel heat, the team set to tearing the bike down to try to clean as much sand and water out of it; cognizant that a single grain of sand in an injector or switch could spell the difference between victory, or losing the overall razor-thin points lead.
Saturday saw Hayes qualify on pole but the bike lost power shortly thereafter.
Another two hours of cleaning and preparation finally saw the start of the race. While the crew chewed their nails down to the quick, Hayes took the lead from the start and AOD never relinquished it for the duration of the four hours.
Tim Gooding, AOD Crew Chief, “It was really selfless of Ben to sacrifice the well being of his leathers and his [possibly fractured] tibia to help us do a drill of what we would have to do to recover from dropping the bike into a mud pond with the dry brakes on the tank open. That sort of commitment to the long term strength of the team is hard to find in today’s younger riders.”
Dunlop’s Tony Romo judged “Today was a legit race story.”
