Celebrity Sightings and Another DNF

So before we get to the bad, let’s talk about the good:

• Krystyna Kubran is ever closer to sub two minute lap times on her R1
• Shandra Crawford did an awesome job announcing the play-by-play action in today’s solo 20 races
• I ran into Tori Spelling, who was at the track to support her husband Dean McDermott’s first ever motorcycle race. She was beautiful and thin and soooooo Hollywood! Look for her and Dean’s trackside antics on her Oxygen channel reality show, Home Sweet Hollywood
• Lost without my lap timer and strolling around the track during practice like I was picking daisies, I came back to find that I’d done several fast lap times including a 2:03, faster than last month’s race times
• And even though I was looking at my tachometer and not the flagger when the green flag dropped, I still got a good launch from the fifth row and ended up in fifth position by turn 3 in the Solo 20 lap race

And, the bad…

There are only FOUR chicks here this weekend. Boo! Where are my ladies at? So far it’s just myself, K.K., Shandra and young Marisol Lacour. Oh, and that cute little girl in pink who went screaming over to the go kart track on her supermoto. Krystyna can’t race Women’s Superstock because it’s a race limited to 600cc machines and smaller, and Marisol hasn’t raced it before, even though she’s been to the WERA races, so I’m guessing it’s not her thing. So it will probably be myself and Shandra representing in race number two tomorrow, Women’s Superstock, unless Joy Higa decides to show up. Angie Loy was planning on coming but wasn’t able to make it.

I am sad.

And, after my kickass first lap in the Solo 20, my bike blew a fuse – again – as I was driving onto the front straight, ready to tuck me and my double d’s under the bubble and chase down Stephen “Neil” Foreman. I’ve been having this problem for a month and a half; it’s happened three or four times now. James and I kept meaning to go through my bike head to toe and locate the source of the problem; it’s been the fuse for the fuel injection system that keeps blowing. Zoran told me there was “probably wire touching some-vhere” (Zoran typically doesn’t use the words “the”, ‘a”, and so on, and speaks with an awesome Balkan accent). So I’m a girl who, maybe four years ago, barely knew how to check the tire pressures in my car, so for me to look through my bike and try and find something like this would have been like trying to find a contact lens in the Mandalay Bay wave pool.

So I got hauled back to my pit by the crash truck, changed, and started to strip my bike down. Seat, tail section, replace fuse, lowers, uppers, GPR steering dampener, tank, airbox. And then wait for the real bike “surgeons” to come in and work magic after the nurse has prepped the patient. James put a resistor in somewhere but then it started blowing the fuse immediately upon switching on the kill switch (which also activates the fuel pump). Zoran came over to help, and James took my tank back off again and turned it upside down, which brought our attention to the sound of something clanging around inside my tank.

Turns out there was some device inside the tank that had broken off – a device only on California motorcycles used to help bikes comply with environmentalism stuff. Anyway, it’s a metal piece, and it was I guess bumping into some wires or something on the fuel pump inside the tank.

Keeping my fingers crossed that the mystery problem has been solved and I can go have some fun tomorrow and finish some races. I really feel like I had a shot at Neil Foreman today; at least now I haven’t depleted my energy like everyone else did in that grueling 45 minute race.

Hungry, dirty and sweaty, we went back to our Hilton Garden Inn in Bakersfield (a rare splurge), cleaned up quickly, ate a tasty meal at Macaroni Grill, then went driving around the east hills of Bakersfield. We ended up on a beautiful bluff, on a road called Panorama Drive, with a liquid red sun sinking behind the picturesque oil fields. And yes, they were actually quite lovely at that time of the evening.