Pat's Race Report from Vegas

4/30/04 - 5/2/04 Las Vegas Classic Course

I drop the bodywork off to the painter on Monday and he says it will be ready on Wednesday. I make sure to tell him it’s this coming Wednesday, he says “no problem”. I pick the bodywork up on Thursday morning and its off to put it on and load up to go to Las Vegas. The 999 has a very small tail section, so putting 3 numbers there was a challenge.

We are all loaded up and heading to Las Vegas at 3PM on Thursday afternoon. Tom is driving and Brian and I are passengers. This will be the first race weekend of the newly formed Ball Sac Racing.

I always look forward going to Las Vegas. I have become quite the blackjack player. Last year I made six trips and am up a total of $6,000 with my biggest win coming in December at Mandalay Bay. I started playing with a $100 and 6 hours later I cashed out with $3,000. Not bad for a nights work. That’s when I bought the Marchesini Magnesium 10 spokes for the 996. We checked in the hotel at 8:30 PM. We stayed at an Amerihost about 5 miles from the track. The hotel was just a regular hotel with no casino. We had one room for the three of us, so the plan was to take turns sleeping on the beds. I took the floor the first night. We headed over to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino for dinner and gambling. We ate at the Pink Taco, very good margaritas and lousy fish tacos (Rubio’s blows them away). After dinner we headed to the casino to play some blackjack. It was hard to find a good game, they had plenty of 6:5 single deck and a lot of CSMs (continuos shuffling machine), both very bad games for the player. Tom and I found a spot on a 6 deck shoe game. The dealer was very rude and tried to deal too fast, resulting in cards all over the table. The dealer had about 10 blackjacks in the first two shoes and I proceeded to lose $300 in about a half an hour. Tom lost at blackjack also, but won about $180 on the dollar slots.

The track schedule on Friday was two rounds of practice and then the GTO race. These races were to be run on a brand new track layout. It actually turned out to be over four rounds of practice and then the race. I was a little worried about Tom. He did a Star School and a lot of track days since I last rode with him. First session we ran around 1:49 to get to know the track. Second session I was down to 1:45 with Tom next and then Brian about a second behind. The last session before the race I was about 1:42 which put me as 9th fastest amateur out of about 35. Not bad, since I’m a real bad practice rider, I’m generally about 2-4 seconds faster in the race.

I’m gridded in the third spot of the second row on the inside. At the green flag, the people in front of me stop and I had nowhere to go. I was into the first corner in 16th or 17th place. After 3 laps they red flag the race and we get to start over in our original grid positions for an eight lap sprint race. My start is the same as the first race, after 3 laps I’m inside the top ten and moving forward. I passed Tom and Brian and set my sights on 8th place. I pass the 8th place rider and 7th is a long way ahead. I have a big problem, If I’m not racing at somebody in front of me, I tend to slow down. I think once I pass someone they will not come back and pass me. Tom and Brian ended up catching me and the last 2 -3 laps were just bike lengths behind me. I had no idea they were even close. I thought I would finish a lonely 8th. Well, with less than a half a lap to go, Tom passed me and I thought I could pass him back going into the last turn before the checkered flag. I came in to turn seven too fast and rode wide for the corner. Normally you can ride off the track and be OK, but not in this area. This area had a lot of small rocks and when I went off the track I went down hard on the right side. The first thing to hit the ground was my right knee. When it made contact with the rocks it just ripped the leathers to shreds and also left me with a 3” diameter hole in my knee. I was able to walk and help load my bike in the crash trailer. My bike has a CycleCat vented clutch cover that was destroyed in the crash. I also broke my frame slider and rear brake lever off and the rearset broke and put a small dent in the exhaust pipe. The bodywork was also severely damaged. I did have the prettiest bike at the track before the crash. When I got to the pits I’d seen how bad my leathers were cut up. I took them off and looked at my knee. It looked pretty bad, you could see the whole knee cap, muscles and tendons. I walked over to the Ambulance and asked if I needed stitches, he responded by saying “ yeah, about 60”. Tom dropped me off at the ER at Lake Mead Hospital and then went back to load up the gear. I was in the waiting room 35 minutes before anybody looked at my cut. I was actually bleeding on the floor in the ER. I was there 2 hours before they gave me a Loritab for the pain. The worst part was the temperature in there. It was about 55 degrees an I was freezing. A PA finally stitched me up after x-rays. I was there a total of 5 hours and received 8 stitches and 2 drains. They gave me a prescription for Ibuprofen for the pain (it didn’t work). We got back to the hotel room at 11:30 PM. Luckily it was my turn to sleep on the bed. I had to sleep on my back, which is very uncomfortable for me. My knee drained a lot of bloody fluid the first night and left the whole bed with bloody sheets and towels. We threw out the towels and headed to the track. On Saturday Tom went to Walgreen's to buy me crutches and replacement bandages. It pretty much sucked at the races Saturday and Sunday. At least Tom and Brian had fun racing their bikes. Both Tom and Brian took real good care of me all weekend. The worst part of this ordeal was when I had the Stitches removed the cut just opened up real bad. I had to have surgery on Monday, May 17th to redo what I had done two weeks earlier. So instead of being healed and ready to race at Firebird, I am still recuperating from a crash a month earlier.

I was credited with 12th place, Brian got 9th and Tom got 8th. My best lap time was 1:39 flat, next was Tom at 1:39.5 and then Brian at 1:39.7. On Friday both Tom and Brian got into the 1:36’s in the SuperTwins races. I need to work on racing as hard as I can for the entire length of the race. We actually need to get somebody on a pit board for us.

Thanks to Tom and Brian for taking real good care of me in Las Vegas. They took such good care of me I didn’t want to come home. My wife Michele calls all my racing injuries self inflicted and she has no sympathy for me.

Pat Bushell

#468

PS : CRASHING SUCKS!!!!!!