Tag: cory (Page 4 of 10)

PSM – RICHMOND 2022

May 16, 2022 / Todd Veney

Everybody gets beat in the first round, but for Joey Gladstone that hasn’t been a problem – until Richmond. Competing at his adopted home track, Virginia Motorsports Park, Gladstone was gone early for the first time all season after just missing a perfect reaction time with a -.010 foul.

“I was pushing it, sure,” he admitted. “That’s Eddie [Krawiec, the four-time Pro Stock Motorcycle world champion] over there in the other lane. You know it’s gonna be a tough round. You know he’s gonna run good. You’d damn sure better be ready, and I guess I was a little too ready that time.”

Gladstone, who began the season with a semifinal finish in Gainesville, was looking good until the Tree flashed in the first pair of the first round. Still a solid sixth in the standings despite this untimely setback, he unloaded an all-time best 6.77 at 199.29 mph in testing here April 12 and entered the race in fourth place, ahead of past champions Matt Smith, Angelle Savoie, and Jerry Savoie.

Friday evening in the first of three scheduled Virginia Nationals qualifying sessions, Gladstone, fighting the weather like everyone in every category, came through with a 6.87/195 to move well into the field, followed Saturday afternoon by a more than respectable 6.89/196. Any shot at improving was eliminated by persistent showers that evening that had some riders willing to wait out the rain for one last run and others not.

“The dew point was falling,” said Gladstone, who ended up ninth on the final qualifying grid, stuck with an unenviable first-round meeting with number 8 Krawiec. “The guys who didn’t want us to get one more run were making their case with NHRA officials – I stood right there and watched the whole thing go down. We really could have used one more run. If we’d have gotten it, things would have turned out a lot differently on Sunday, I guarantee you.”

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2022

May 2, 2022 / Todd Veney

Joey Gladstone returned to the site of the most unforgettable race of his career – the out-and-out worst one ever and at the same time the absolute best: the 2021 Carolina Nationals, where his best friend, team owner Cory Reed, crashed right in front of him in round two and then a freak mechanical glitch in the final ripped away an in-the-bag first major victory.

Riding the crest of a season-long wave of success, Gladstone landed in a second consecutive Charlotte final – sort of. He was there for the last round, the third Pro Stock Motorcycle quad of the day, but at the Four-Wide Nationals the third- and fourth-place finishers are considered semifinalists. Still, it was a fantastic weekend, yet another late-round finish that catapulted him to fourth in the NHRA standings, the highest he’s ever been this deep into a season.

“I’m living my dream,” said Gladstone, who reached the semi’s at the season-opening Gatornationals and the quarterfinals in Houston. “I can’t express how proud I am of my team.” Led by Reed and longtime crew chief Cecil Towner, Gladstone made his best qualifying run all weekend right off the bat, a 6.80/198, followed by a 6.86/197 under better conditions Friday night and a 6.88/199 and 6.82/197 on Saturday.

Sunday in the first round, Gladstone edged reigning NHRA world champ Matt Smith, 6.84/200 to 6.86/198, to finish second behind Angelle Sampey’s outstanding 6.76/199. (Under the four-wide format, the top two in each “quad” of four bikes advance.) With a 13.43 at 45 mph, Kelly Clontz finished a distant fourth.

In the semi’s, in one of the more memorable moments of his entire career, Gladstone lined up against three former world champions and whipped all three – Eddie Krawiec, Sampey, and Jerry Savoie – with a 6.81/198. He outran Krawiec, beat Sampey on a holeshot, and Savoie, who was quicker than any of them with 6.78/199, red-lighted.

“That’s three gangsters in the other three lanes,” Gladstone said. “Last year, I really got my heart ripped out in the final, and this year I’m going to ride my heart out.” He did, drilling winner Krawiec and winner Steve Johnson with a .037 reaction time, but slipped to his worst run of the long weekend, a 6.90/199 that left him well short of Johnson’s winning 6.74/200.

“A four-wide isn’t like a regular final,” he said. “You know in the back of your mind the whole time what your odds are. Instead of having to beat one guy, you’ve got to beat three, so the pressure’s not the same. We may have slowed down and finished fourth, but I’ll take it. That first win is coming.”

PSM – HOUSTON 2022

April 25, 2022 / Todd Veney

Rolling into the Lone Star State for the last NHRA national event ever at Houston Raceway Park, Cory Reed, rider Joey Gladstone, and their nascent Reed Motorsports team stood a career-high third in the NHRA standings. The race didn’t end in a second consecutive semifinal showing, but a quarterfinal finish kept the young team in early title contention and solidified its status as next the next breakthrough first-time winner on the Pro Stock Motorcycle tour.

“We’re learning how to go rounds,” Reed said. “It takes time. Running good in qualifying is one thing; it’s another thing to do it on Sunday. We’re gonna get there and we’re not gonna quit until we do.”

Gladstone, who reached the semifinals at the rain-plagued Gainesville season opener despite (like everyone) never getting a qualifying run, made the most of the three Spring Nationals sessions. Each was a full pull at nearly 200 mph, starting Friday evening with the best one, an off-the-trailer 6.83 at 198 mph, good for No. 2 at the time and No. 4 by the end of the session.

Back-to-back strong runs Saturday set Gladstone up perfectly for Sunday’s eliminations. He wheeled the team’s Suzuki Hayabusa to a pair of respectable runs that weren’t reflected in the final qualifying order but boded well for Sunday – 6.91/199 and 6.84/198. At that point, he was still fifth on the grid, but reigning world champion Matt Smith knocked him back one pair later with a 6.81/199.

As at the only previous NHRA bike race this season, the Gatornationals, Gladstone met Marc Ingwersen in the first round of eliminations, and again he had it from start to finish. Ingwersen threw away any chance he had of winning with an untimely -.147 foul start, but the Reed Motorsports rider was untouchable anyway with a near-perfect .006 reaction time and his quickest run all weekend, 6.82/198.

Opposite career-long nemesis Eddie Krawiec in the quarterfinals, Gladstone was out first again with another great reaction time (.020), but the four-time world champ ran him down before half-track and advanced with one of the quickest runs of the entire round, 6.77/199 to 6.91/197. “It spun,” Gladstone said. “Just obliterated the tire. It was all over right there, but I stayed in it in case something happened to him.”

“It’s not that we tuned it up too much,” Reed said. “It’s that we didn’t tune it down enough [for the conditions]. That’s something you have to learn. And we are.”

PSM – LAS VEGAS 2021

November 1, 2021 / Todd Veney

Back on the line just an hour after teammate Cory Reed’s devastating crash, Joey Gladstone upset championship contender Steve Johnson in the Charlotte semi’s to reach the brink of his first major title. An hour or so later he had Angelle Sampey covered until a disastrous, once-in-a-lifetime mechanical glitch muzzled his bike and denied him his first NHRA victory.

Since then … nothing. It’s been one early exit after another. Dallas: out first round. Bristol: out first round. And, now, Las Vegas: out first round. None was more disheartening than this latest setback, at the Dodge Nationals in Vegas. This time Gladstone didn’t have a chance – he took himself out with a red-light start, and right when Reed was there to watch.

Confined to a wheelchair since September and probably into the first month or so of next year, minimum, Reed, bored to tears watching from the sidelines at home, found his way back to a racetrack for the first time since his catastrophic crash. “It sucks not being out here,” he said. “You’re stuck at home, you get all excited about finally having something to look forward to – watching the livestream of the race – and then it starts, and it’s not the same at all. You’re there, but you’re not racing. Your team is. Not you – you’re just watching.”

With his team leader and best bud looking on intently, Gladstone opened Dodge Nationals qualifying with a 7.09/193 that positioned him sixth at the time, followed with a much better 6.95/191 that got him right back up to sixth, and entered eliminations in the ninth spot after rolling through the beams on his third and final qualifying attempt.

In the first round, opposite returning veteran Chris Bostick, who qualified just ahead of him in the No. 8 spot, Gladstone narrowly fouled. It was a crusher – his best run of the entire event, a 6.939 that tied Bostick’s qualifying time right to the thousandth of a second, and right when Bostick stumbled to a 6.98 but won anyway.

“The bike’s not really running we think it should right now,” said Reed, bound to a wheelchair with pins sticking out of him but equally bound and determined to get back on the quarter-mile by early next year. “This was never going to be easy – I never expected it to be. We want to do better, and we will, but nothing really looks completely out of whack right now. Nothing’s screaming ‘fix me,’ so I don’t know why it’s not running better. If we find something in testing, we’ll be at Pomona for the Finals. If we don’t, we won’t.”

PSM – BRISTOL 2021

October 18, 2021 / Todd Veney

This year, for the first time since Cory Reed and Joey Gladstone were elementary school kids, the premier Pro Stock Motorcycle teams in the country descended upon Bristol Dragway in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. Until now, the two-wheel set had never been part of an NHRA national event here, so no one really had any idea what to expect from the legendary but, to them, completely unfamiliar track.

They just knew it was going to be bumpy. Really bumpy. Knock-your-hands-right-off-the-handlebars bumpy. Everyone was anxious about exactly what was going to happen when they let the clutch handle fly, unleashing their 200-mph missiles on Bristol’s notoriously uneven surface, but Gladstone, more than most, seemed unfazed. “You just have to be ready for it,” he said. “At a place like this, you just need to make sure you’re ahead of the bike the whole time.”

He was. After rolling off the trailer with a 6.98 at 193 mph Friday evening, Gladstone hung within hundredths of a second of that time all weekend, with a 6.96/190 Saturday afternoon and a 7.01/192 later that evening that positioned him ninth in the final lineup, locked into theoretically the closest race of the first round. It couldn’t have been closer than No. 8 vs. No. 9 anyway, but this one figured to be even tighter than ever because both Gladstone and Eddie Krawiec qualified with the same E.T., right down to the thousandth of a second – not just matching 6.96s, but identical 6.966s.

Krawiec, the 2008, 2011, 2012, and 2017 Pro Stock Motorcycle champ, had his choice of lanes because of his faster qualifying speed (196.36 mph to 190.75) and appeared to have the upper hand, but it was Gladstone who actually had the better head-to-head record coming in. “All we have to do is get down the back half of the track as good as we’ve been getting down the front half,” he said, “and this thing should run in the mid-.80s.”

It didn’t. With Reed convalescing and watching the nhra.tv livestream from home, Gladstone got the drop on Krawiec at the Tree, .030 to .040, but it was the last time he’d hold the lead. Instead of them both running the same e.t. they had in qualifying and Gladstone winning on a slight holeshot, he slowed from 6.96 to a 6.99 while Krawiec capitalized on the cool air and tight, tacky track to advance with by far his best run all weekend, a 6.89.

PSM – DALLAS 2021

October 11, 2021 / Todd Veney

It’s all up to Joey Gladstone now. With team leader Cory Reed sidelined indefinitely by the incapacitating injuries from his horrifying Charlotte crash, Gladstone will have to be the one to do it if Reed Motorsports is to lock down its first-ever Top 5 finish in the final NHRA standings.

Robbed of what would’ve been his first career Pro Stock Motorcycle victory in the Charlotte final when the kill switch somehow became unplugged (“I can’t stop thinking about it – I still think about it every day,” he said), Gladstone now leads the charge with three races to go and the Top 5 just outside their collective grasp. Sixth in the standings coming into this race, he set the tone with an off-the-trailer 6.90 – the same number that would flash on the Texas Motorplex scoreboards after every run he made all weekend but one.

Following that pass, a forgettable 6.99/194 under the lights Friday night amid the track’s tacky Spectacle of Speed fiasco, Gladstone pounded out identical 6.90s Saturday afternoon – a 6.908 at 194 mph in the left lane and a subsequent 6.905 at 195 in the right, his quickest lap of the race. Another 6.90 in the first round of eliminations and he’d have been right back in the middle rounds because he absolutely drilled longtime nemesis Jerry Savoie on the starting line.

But at Dallas, Savoie is the last rider anyone wants to face – especially Gladstone, now 0-7 lifetime against the 2016 world champ. Savoie, who’s appeared in the final round here six years in a row and won the past two, was way, way behind Gladstone coming off the line with a .104 reaction time, but even a .023 light wasn’t enough to hold him off.

Gladstone’s Vance & Hines-powered Hayabusa had him at half-track, but at the finish line the 6.90 on the scoreboard was not in his lane but rather in Savoie’s. “I’m still a little banged up [from a crash earlier this year at a non-NHRA event in Darlington, S.C.], my friend’s all banged up, and we’re just out here doing the best we can out here,” said Gladstone, who slipped to a 7.01 in the dispiriting loss. “Cory’s a warrior. His leg’s still beat up pretty bad and it’s gonna be a long road to recovery for him, but he’ll be back out here, trust me. And after Charlotte I know I can win one of these things.”

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2021

September 20, 2021 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed, who’s shrugged off who knows how many motocross injuries but until now had had never been hurt on a drag strip, was lucky to survive a harrowing top-end crash in round two. Immediately after crossing the finish line at 190+ mph in a thrilling side-by-side match with teammate Joey Gladstone, Reed’s bike veered toward the opposite lane and just kept going.

Hanging further and further off to the left until he almost wasn’t even on the bike anymore, Reed never did get it to come back, finally tangling with Gladstone and going down hard. The bike catapulted high into the air and smashed into the wall while he tumbled down the unforgiving zMax Dragway pavement in a frightening scene.

Gladstone managed to avoid becoming entangled with Reed’s errant mount, came to a safe stop, and, when he whipped around to look back uptrack, was horrified to see Reed laid out on the asphalt, immobilized by multiple injuries. Gladstone sprinted toward his fallen comrade, arrived almost simultaneously with safety personnel, and, when the ambulance pulled out of the track, was right in there with Reed, who would undergo the first of multiple surgeries that night.

Gladstone made it back to the track in time to defeat incoming points leader Steve Johnson in the semi’s only to watch an in-the-bag first career NHRA victory dissolve before his eyes in a heartbreaking final against Angelle Sampey. The kill switch somehow became disengaged, cutting the power and bringing a sad end to an emotional day for the young racer, who’d strapped a bike-length holeshot on Sampey and was seconds away from the victory of a lifetime.

“It’s drag racing – it happens – but I don’t know what I ever did to deserve this bad luck,” said Gladstone, almost despondent. “It stings, it really does.”

Reed, runner-up here earlier this year at the Four-Wide Nationals and tied with Gladstone in the standings coming into this event, qualified solidly with a 6.99 at 191 mph. He knocked off Sonoma winner Karen Stoffer in the first round before narrowly losing to Gladstone, 6.94-6.93, an outcome rendered meaningless by what happened after they crossed the finish line.

It was exactly the kind of matchup Reed was looking for when qualifying wrapped up. “I like running guys close to me in the points head-to-head,” he said. “Let’s just get to it, right? I don’t need anybody else deciding anything for me. I want to settle it myself.” Now, unfortunately, he won’t get that chance.

PSM – READING 2021

September 13, 2021 / Todd Veney

He may not have gone the distance, but at the Mopar Express Lane NHRA Nationals, the first race of the seven-race 2021 Countdown to the Championship playoffs, underrated Pro Stock Motorcycle racer Cory Reed met his stated pre-race goal: go rounds. Running hard in not just the first qualifying session but in all three at legendary Maple Grove Raceway, Reed opened with a strong 6.86 Friday evening and followed with an even better 6.84 the next afternoon.

With a near-perfect .005 reaction time and another 6.86 Saturday evening, Reed nailed down the No. 6 spot in the final lineup, his best qualifying performance all year. “I think we’re finally starting to make a little progress here,” he said, justifiably pleased. “Both bikes [his and PSE/Reed Motorsports teammate Joey Gladstone’s] are set up the same, and now we’ve got them both running the same.”

Pitted against pal Ryan Oehler in the final pair of the first round, Reed got off the mark first and overcame a series of obstacles downtrack to win a crucial points battle by just 16-thousandths of a second, 6.97/193 to 6.98/194. “He definitely could’ve beat me right there,” said Reed, who pulled to within four points of Oehler in the NHRA standings. “It spun bad, and I had to just ride it out. The front end was trying to wash out and the bike was all over the place, but it was race day and I had to stay with it or I’d have lost for sure. If that was a test run, I’d have said, ‘Screw it,’ and shut it off.”

The wheels came off in the next round against superstar Andrew Hines, 6.85/199 to 6.98/191 – not that Reed didn’t have him covered for a good while. “The clutch didn’t lock up enough,” he explained. “We were trying to slip it down low – I mean, you really can’t get too conservative against somebody like him, can you? You’ve got to try to go a .79, right? I thought I was doing all right for a while there, but he caught me around half-track and just took off from there. I’ve never seen anybody go by me like that.”

PSM – INDY 2021

September 6, 2021 / Todd Veney

This year, the U.S. Nationals, the longest race of every NHRA season, turned out to be the shortest. For the first time in the 67-year history of the sport’s oldest and most prestigious event, qualifying for all pro classes consisted of exactly one run.

Instead of one attempt Friday, two Saturday, another two Sunday, and eliminations on Monday, it was one shot Friday and straight into eliminations on Sunday – if you qualified. Saturday was a complete washout, and, as a concession to the pandemic, eliminations this year were contested Sunday and not on Labor Day Monday as they have been since the ’60s.

“Not getting all five sessions really changed things up,” Cory Reed said Saturday afternoon, bored to tears in the gloomy Indy pits but secure in the knowledge that at least if the rain never let up he’d already locked himself into the Pro Stock Motorcycle field with a six-second run under the lights Friday night. “I think having just the one session really stressed out some people. Not me. It actually might just play into our favor.”

Paired against Kelly Clontz Friday night in the first of what should have been at least three qualifying sessions, Reed guided his sleek Suzuki Hayabusa to a respectable 6.99 at 187 mph that put him third at the time and ultimately landed him 10th in the final lineup. Sunday dawned bright and sunny, but the track was still suspect after a relentless 15-hour deluge, which made lane choice critical. The young rider, 10th in the field, didn’t have that advantage – his first-round opponent, former teammate Angelle Sampey, earned it by qualifying in the fast half of the program, No. 7.

Reed, who’d beaten her the last few times they’d raced, drilled the former world champ with a .014 reaction time and made his quickest and fastest run of the rain-shortened weekend, a 6.97/192, but she powered around him downtrack with a winning 6.83/194. It was a disappointing end to a strange race that marked the end of the regular season, but not one without promise. When the Countdown to the Championship playoffs begin next weekend at Maple Grove Raceway, both Reed and teammate Joey Gladstone will be in title contention, and, thanks to the points reset, closer to the lead than they’ve been all year.

PSM – POMONA 2021

August 2, 2021 / Todd Veney

After a soaring semifinal finish last weekend at the Sonoma Nationals, easily one of the finest outings of his six-year Pro Stock Motorcycle career, Cory Reed plummeted back to earth at the world-famous Los Angeles County Fairplex.

Competing at Pomona for the first time since his 2016 Rookie of the Year campaign and just the second time ever, Reed struggled all weekend with the facility’s notoriously uneven surface. “This place is too bumpy,” he said. “I know it’s Pomona and everything, but they only run here once or twice a year, it’s got a bad crown, and there’s just not enough rubber. It sucks.”

Side by side early against teammate and best bud Joey Gladstone in Friday’s lone qualifying session, Reed slowed to an off-pace 7.16 at 182 mph when the track seemed to drag him toward the centerline. He found himself in that same barren portion of the course Saturday afternoon and drifted as close to the line as possible without crossing it on a coasting 7.33/157. Then in Q3, his last chance to improve, Reed’s powerful Suzuki Hayabusa porpoised off the line, spun, finally grabbed hold of the track, and sprinted to a 7.03/193, good for the No. 13 spot, the second-worst he’s qualified all season, ahead of only Charlotte, where he was 14th.

In the first round against No. 4 qualifier Scotty Pollacheck, who he just beat at Denver, Reed was off like a shot with a .012 reaction time, but again he had to lift downtrack when his bike seemed to take on a mind of its own and lost, 6.88/198 to 7.12/178. “When it spins the tire on the leave like that, the bike always wants to go left,” he said. “The shift light’s already on, but you know you can’t hit the button. It’s hard to ignore it – it’s right there in your face – but you’ve got to at least make it 60 feet before you hit 2nd gear. This 4-valve makes a lot of power but no torque, so when the RPM drops, it doesn’t just roll out of it like a Buell does – you really have to pay attention and keep the motor up there.”