Tag: joey (Page 3 of 4)

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 – GAINESVILLE 2022

March 14, 2022 / Todd Veney

Joey Gladstone left Gainesville a career-high third in the standings after the finest season-opener of his young career – one of the few races ever run without any qualifying. Drying out from nearly six inches of rain in two days, the Pro Stock Motorcycles never hit the lanes till the sun was going down Saturday evening, and when they finally did, only four actually made a run. None of them counted.

One, by seven-time national event winner Michael Phillips, oiled the lengthy Gainesville Raceway strip from end to end, and by the time the cleanup was complete, conditions were unsafe – at least according to some. Others, including Gladstone, felt quite the opposite. “This is crazy,” he said of the decision to halt qualifying and seed the field based on final 2021 points standings. “There’s nothing wrong with this track. If you want to run, run. I do. If you don’t, roll up there and take the Tree. There’s only 16 bikes here – you’re in.”

Gladstone, who made his NHRA debut exactly 10 years ago this weekend, was slotted into the No. 7 position on the ladder based on his career-best eighth-place finish in the 2021 standings. But instead of a brutal first-round matchup with six-time world champ Andrew Hines, who’s just tuning for Vance & Hines racers this year and not riding, Gladstone got a much more favorable matchup with Kelly Clontz. He trounced her by half a tenth on the Tree, .066 to .113, and that was the difference in a much closer than anticipated race, 6.86/198 to 6.87/193.

In the quarterfinals, Gladstone drew not 2021 championship runner-up Angelle Sampey, as expected, but rather Marc Ingwersen, who’d upset her in the first round for the first round-win of his career. The Reed Motorsports Suzuki Hayabusa posted a fine 6.78, which was within six-hundredths off the incoming national record of 6.72 until eventual winner Karen Stoffer doubled it three pair later with a record-shattering 6.66. “Looks like we got our scooter back,” said Gladstone, who maintained his earlier 198-mph pace in the semifinals but slipped to a 6.88 and fell to Angie Smith’s 6.73/201. “Good weekend,” assessed team leader Cory Reed, hobbling around in a walking boot and thrilled to be back in action after his harrowing Charlotte crash Sept. 19. “I feel great. I’m getting around pretty good, and I feel a lot better than I did. But what really feels good is seeing those win-lights come on.”

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 – DALLAS 2020

October 19, 2020 / Todd Veney

Fresh off a quarterfinal finish at the U.S. Nationals in his first start in exactly a year, Cory Reed kept going rounds at the Fall Nationals in Dallas, and that didn’t end up being the high point of the weekend for Team Liberty – far from it, actually. Teammate Joey Gladstone, racing for the first time all year, went all the way to the final for the first time in his career.

Reed came off the trailer Saturday morning with a competitive 6.92 at 194 mph and backed it up with an almost identical 6.92/195 in the only other qualifying session, eventually settling into the No. 11 spot on the eliminator ladder. Gladstone was even better, anchoring the fast half of the 16-bike field with a 6.89/195 on his only attempt.

Both drivers sailed through the first round of eliminations against heavily favored opponents, Gladstone with a winning 6.98/190 when Hector Arana Jr. red-lighted by eight-thousandths of a second and Reed with a 6.96/193 over U.S. Nationals winner and national championship contender Scotty Pollacheck’s bogging 7.00/197 in a race decided by 1/500th of a second.

In the quarterfinals, Gladstone stopped cagey veteran Michael Phillips, who had upset incoming points leader Matt Smith in the first round, with a steady 6.97/191 opposite Phillips’ slowing 9.77. One pair later, Reed, who long ago established himself as one of the better leavers in Pro Stock Motorcycle, lost on a holeshot to eventual winner Jerry Savoie, 6.97/189 to his slightly quicker 6.96/193. After a semifinal upset of 2000-01-02 world champ Angelle Sampey, who threw away what would have been a winning 6.89/195 on a red-light start, Gladstone, with nothing to lose, lined up against former world champ Jerry Savoie in the final.

The Team Liberty bike made its worst run all weekend, a 7-flat at 192 mph, and Savoie, in a Dallas final for the sixth straight year, scored with a 6.91/191, bringing to an end the finest day of Gladstone’s career. “This is pretty unbelievable,” the young rider said of his first final-round appearance in NHRA competition. “[Engine builder/crew chief] Cecil [Towner] did a great job tuning. Everybody on the team did a good job, and we’re all having a good time. I really think that’s what’s led to this success. I’m still in disbelief – we weren’t even sure we were going to come here – but in drag racing, I guess when it’s your day, it’s your day.”

PSM – NORWALK 2019

June 24, 2019 / Todd Veney

Venturing into the shark-infested waters of in-house engine building for the first time, Cory Reed and Team Liberty pulled off a debut that could only be termed a success at the Summit Racing Equipment Nationals at “America’s Race Track,” Summit Raceway Park in Norwalk, Ohio. Reed and teammate Joey Gladstone, who made the painful decision to skip Chicago to focus entirely on to the unimaginable leap to being their own engine builders, exceeded their stated goal of coming back at Denver by making it to Norwalk.

“I definitely didn’t expect to be here,” Reed said. “This is all of us together – [crew chief/tuner] Cecil [Towner], Joey, me, everybody under this awning. We all contribute. We never thought we’d make it back before Denver, but everything looked good when we dynoed our stuff, so we thought, ‘What the hell? Let’s go to Norwalk.’ We used to make peak power at 7,000 [rpm]. We leave at almost 7,000. Now, we’re making peak power at about 10,000, and these things spend a lot more time up around 10,000 than they do at 7,000, so we figured we’d run better than we were and we are.”

Opposite Angie Smith, wife of reigning NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle world champion Matt Smith, for the first time in his career, Reed was off like a shot with a .028 reaction time in the first round and a 1.06-second 60-foot time, his best all weekend. “That told me the clutch tune-up was back where it should be,” he said. “At the 330-foot mark, I could tell I was in front of her. At 660 feet [half-track], she was driving up on me. She was definitely moving on me at 1,000 feet and probably had a good bike on me at the finish line. I thought I could win with a .020-something light and I had one, but I guess we still need to run better. I don’t even care. We’re leaving here with the motors we came with. We didn’t tear anything up all weekend, and that was our whole goal: stop hurting parts.”

PSM – RICHMOND 2019

May 21, 2019 / Todd Veney

YNot/PSE teammates Cory Reed and Joey Gladstone just missed a highly anticipated head-to-head second-round showdown at the Virginia Nationals when Reed was unceremoniously dumped by Hector Arana Jr. in the first round of eliminations. Gladstone put away 2009 NHRA champion Hector Arana Sr. in another first-round match, so another Arana-Arana matchup in the quarterfinals never materialized, either.

Reed assumed the early qualifying lead with a straight-down-the-groove 6.969 at 192 mph off the trailer. He slowed to a 7.13/188 Friday evening, improved incrementally to a 6.962 at just short of 194 mph Saturday in Q3 that left him smack in the middle of the pack, and entered eliminations mired in the No. 14 position after a dispiriting 7.02/191 Saturday afternoon.

Pitted against Las Vegas winner Arana Jr., who now stands third in the 2019 NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle standings, Reed managed just a 7.10 187 mph – two-tenths of a second and 10 mph off what he’s capable of, in a discouraging loss to the perennial title contender’s 6.90-flat at 197 mph minutes after Gladstone had dispatched Arana Sr. with what surprisingly was technically the first holeshot win of his NHRA career. “I’ve left on a lot of people and have this reputation for being really good on the lights,” said Gladstone, who whipped the senior Arana’s 6.97/194 with a slower won 7.00/191, “but that’s the first time I’ve ever actually won on a holeshot.”

PSM – ATLANTA 2019

May 5, 2019 / Todd Veney

Right off the trailer at Atlanta Dragway, which has hosted major events since the IHRA glory days of the 1970s, Cory Reed sped to a 6.98 at more than 192 mph that qualified him No. 3 at the time. Following an aborted 14-second time in the second session opposite veteran Karen Stoffer, he rolled silently across the finish line in the never-good upright position at 49 silent mph in Q3 and entered last-shot qualifying an uncustomarily low 12th on the provisional grid, eyeing something in the low 6.90s or high 6.80s on his final attempt.

Instead, Reed’s bike registered an unfulfilling 7.01 at 191 mph and he entered eliminations in the No. 12 qualifying spot. PSE/YNot teammate Joey Gladstone finished a couple spots ahead of him, 10th in the final order with an aggregate best of 6.94/193.99. Between them was 2009 NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle champion Hector Arana Sr., who clocked in at 6.95/194.55.

Reed, who has never had any luck against 2016 world champion Jerry Savoie, his first-round foe, blasted off the line with a clutch .026 light, but for once he didn’t get the best of even that battle. Savoie, never known for his reaction times, outdid him with an even better .013 bulb and pulled away for a 6.91/192 to 7.01/191 round-win, his fifth in five head-to head-matchups with the former motocross racer. To compound the YNot’s team’s frustration, Gladstone came out on the wrong end of a hard-fought first-round encounter with Ryan Oehler in which both drivers cut killer .015 lights, 6.92/195 to 6.95/192, despite holding the lead to half-track.

PSM – GAINESVILLE 2019

March 17, 2019 / Todd Veney

In their first appearance of the 2019 NHRA season and everyone’s first on Gainesville Raceway’s all-new million-dollar track surface, Cory Reed led early Pro Stock Motorcycle qualifying and teammate Joey Gladstone lasted all the way to the semifinals, tying the best finish of his young career.

Reed picked up from his opening 6.93 to a 6.91 at more than 195 mph that miraculously wound up good for only the bump, 16th in a 16-bike field, and paired him up against Andrew Hines, who took the pole with the quickest run in NHRA history, 6.72. Under first-round pressure and lined up opposite the toughest possible opponent, Reed improved still more, dipping into the 6.80s with a 6.87, but Hines was out of reach with another 6.7-second blast, a 6.78.

Two pair ahead of him, Gladstone, matched up with former YNot/PSE team rider Angelle Sampey, shot off the line with a telepathic .002 reaction time for an insurmountable lead on Sampey’s late .120 light on her first official leave with Vance & Hines’ world-famous Harley-Davidson team. Both covered the quarter-mile with nearly identical E.T.s, and Gladstone got the best of a 6.87-6.88 decision not nearly as close as the elapsed times alone would indicate.

“Joey did great,” Reed said of his teammate, who catapulted from the No. 11 qualifying position (6.855), to a spot in the final four. Said Gladstone, “Before I saw the E.T. slip, when I first heard that it was 6.87 to 6.88, I was thinking, ‘Man, I hope I ran the .88 and she ran the .87 so I beat her on a holeshot’. I led the class in reaction-time average with something in the low .020s my first year and have a reputation as the best leaver out here but I’ve never actually won a round on a holeshot.”

After leaving on Sampey and then outrunning her, Gladstone trailered an even bigger name in the quarterfinals – reigning world champ Matt Smith, who knew he was in trouble before he staged and never made it to the finish line. “He was trying to mess with me on the line, but I knew what he was doing, so it didn’t affect me,” said Gladstone, who easily advanced to the semifinals with by far his best run of the weekend, a 6.81. It gave him lane choice over former series champion Eddie Krawiec, who bogged off the line in a lucky 6.92 win over Jimmy Underdahl, who had him beat until his engine blew in high gear.

In the semi’s, Gladstone left on Krawiec and would have made his first final had he not dropped a couple hundredths of a second from his earlier performance in a close but disappointing 6.81-6.85 loss. “That time, I actually felt like I had a good chance to beat Eddie,” Gladstone said. “It gets a little easier as the rounds go on, believe it or not. The pressure actually goes down – at least until you get to the final.”