Tag: pro stock motorcycle (Page 2 of 2)

PSM – INDY 2017

September 5, 2017 / Todd Veney

Forced to sit out qualifying sessions at the biggest race of the year for fear of destroying the only engine he had left, second-year pro Cory Reed hung on to make the U.S. Nationals Pro Stock Motorcycle field and just missed going rounds for the second race in a row.

After a tire-rattling 7.01 under the lights Friday night, Reed laid down a 6.94 early Saturday afternoon, then sat out the next three sessions at the only race on the NHRA tour with five qualifying sessions. “It was weird not running, but we saved parts and it got us to race day,” he said. “If we’d run every session we probably could have gone a .90-flat, but it wasn’t worth trying to blow it up.”

When everybody else got three more shots at the track, Reed eventually slid down to the No. 14 position, setting up a first-round match with No. 3 qualifier Hector Arana Jr., who had reached the Indy final last year. Reed, who broke through for his first round-win of the season two weeks earlier in Brainerd, got a huge jump on Arana with a clutch .018 reaction time, held it until well past half-track, but eventually was overtaken on the big end for a 6.89/194 to 6.97/190 loss.

“I knew I was ahead of him,” said Reed, who maintained the lead to the 1,000-foot mark. “It wasn’t like when I raced Scotty Pollacheck at Brainerd, where I was so far ahead I actually had to turn around to see where he was. I heard him – it’s not hard when there’s a V-twin in the other lane – and I knew he was coming.”

Well aware that Team Liberty might be forced to sit out more qualifying sessions as the season winds down, Reed and crew made the difficult decision to skip the next four races – Charlotte, Maple Grove, St. Louis, and Dallas – and come back with a vengeance at Las Vegas and Pomona. “We’re not in the Countdown and we don’t need to blow up any more motors,” he said. “It’s better to spend more time in the shop, show up at the last two races, maybe shake up the points standings a little, and remind everyone what we can really do when we have all our power.”

PSM – BRAINERD 2017

August 20, 2017 / Todd Veney

With their backs to the wall after blowing up an engine on the first qualifying run and skipping the second one, Cory Reed and Team Liberty rebounded Saturday morning with a 6.97 to move into the Lucas Oil Nationals Pro Stock Motorcycle field for good.

At Brainerd International Raceway, where the quickest runs in Top Fuel and Funny Car history were recorded Friday night, Reed wheeled his Team Liberty machine to a decent 6.97 at 187 mph Saturday morning and a consistent 6.98 at 186 that afternoon to solidify his position in the final lineup.

Pitted against Top 10 rider and No. 4 qualifier Scotty Pollacheck in the first round, Reed left Pollacheck at the line and sped away for his first round-win of the season and the first ever for Team Liberty, 6.94 to 6.96. “I looked over somewhere in high gear and nobody was there,” he said. “I had to look behind me to find him. That was the best feeling ever: we’re going to win. Actually, I felt that way even before I ran him, when I woke up Sunday morning. That’s the first time I can say I honestly felt that way all year.”

Reed fell in the next round to year-long nemesis and eventual runner-up L.E. Tonglet, the runaway points leader, who has won as many races this year as all other riders combined – but not before getting another holeshot head start. Reed opened up a huge early advantage, but Tonglet drove around him with, naturally, his strongest run of the weekend, a 6.85. Reed trailed with a 6.96, but at that point, it almost didn’t matter.

“I felt like I won the whole race when we won the first round,” Reed said. “I didn’t even need to make another run after that. It’s tough, starting a new team like this. We knew it was going to be, and it has been. But after a weekend like this, I can finally see what’s ahead of us down the road.”

PSM – POMONA 2016

November 14, 2016 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed may have been knocked out early in his final race for the PSE/Star Racing team, but it did little to detract from a wildly successful rookie season that ended with him as a prohibitive favorite to capture the prestigious 2016 Road to the Future NHRA Rookie of the Year award.

At the NHRA Finals at the Los Angeles County Fairplex in Pomona, Reed, the only rookie to make the Top 10 in any professional category this year, came out on the wrong end of a first-round matchup with the toughest possible opponent, reigning Pro Stock Motorcycle world champ and two-time Finals winner Andrew Hines.

After beating his first-round opponent exactly two-thirds of the time in 2016 – an almost unprecedented feat for a first-year rider – Reed slipped to a 7.15 at 188.10 mph, well short of his qualifying time and far short of the unbeatable 6.88/194.52 put up by Hines, who had to defeat Reed to stay in contention for another championship.

Reed’s first qualifying run turned out to be his best all weekend, a 6.911/192.80 that had him way up in the No. 5 qualifying spot at the time. Subsequent runs of 7.017/191.43, 7.212/188.94, and 6.987/192.03 didn’t improve his position, and he settled in the No. 13 spot for eliminations, his third-worst starting position all year.

Teammate Angelle Sampey, who will join Reed’s all-new Team Liberty Racing operation as team manager and a fellow rider for 2017, still had a mathematical shot late in the season at what would have been her fourth career NHRA championship. She reached the final in her last ride for Star Racing, falling to Matt Smith, who scored for the first time in more than three years.

PSM – LAS VEGAS 2016

November 1, 2016 / Todd Veney

As he has at eight of past 11 races in his amazing rookie season, Cory Reed drove deep into eliminations at the NHRA Toyota Nationals, defeating, of all people, PSE/Star Racing/YNot teammate Angelle Sampey on a first-round holeshot – his specialty all year.

Reed, who reached the Pro Stock Motorcycle semifinals at Indy and St. Louis and was runner-up at Maple Grove, charged off The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway starting line with a telepathic reaction time (.009, just nine-thousandths of a second from a perfect light) to upend Sampey’s quicker 6.97 with a 6.99. She was going faster at the finish line, 191.59 mph to 190.32, but he got there first by exactly 1/30th of a second, which, at more than 190 mph, is about a bike length.

Sampey, who will join Reed on the newly formed Team Liberty Racing operation as a team manager and fellow rider in 2017, qualified higher than her young teammate with a 6.96 at 191.81 mph, good for the No. 5 spot on the 16-bike ladder. Reed was No. 12 with a 7-flat at 188 after unerringly consistent qualifying runs of 7.07/187.26, 7.00/188.86, 7.06/184.57, and 7.07/188.15.

With just a single event left in the 16-race season and six-race Countdown to the Championship playoff, Reed is holding steady in the seventh spot in the national standings and has to be considered the frontrunner for the 2016 NHRA Rookie of the Year award.

PSM – NORWALK 2016

June 28, 2016 / Todd Veney

Norwalk represented a weekend of firsts for Pro Stock Motorcycle rookie Cory Reed – first official 6.80, first start from the top half of the field, and, most important, first career round-win in NHRA professional competition.

“I wanted to do better – and we could’ve done better, and we will – but this was a great weekend,” Reed said at the conclusion of the Summit Raceway Equipment Nationals. Reed, son of champion racers Jim and Annie Whiteley, has impressed in his short time as a professional drag racer, but never more so than at the supertrack in the middle of nowhere in tiny Norwalk, Ohio.

“I think people already knew what we could do, but now they really know,” said Reed, who cut a .009 reaction time in his first-round win over veteran Scotty Pollacheck, a former national event finalist. “I kinda wanted to sneak up on them, but I think they know we’re coming now.”

Reed drove away from Pollacheck for a 6.95 to 7.73 win and was poised for another round-win over a name driver and a first career semifinal appearance but, again, he was too quick for his own good. By the smallest possible margin, one-thousandth of a second, Reed disqualified himself in the second round with a -.001 red-light start, just a blink of an eye from a perfect .000 reaction time.

“I saw it when I went by the Tree and knew it was over and just hit the [shift] button, or that run would’ve been a lot better than that,” Reed said of his short-shifting 6.94 against many-time world champion and eventual runner-up Andrew Hines. “I’m still mad about that – it was so close – but I feel good about where we are right now, probably better than I’ve ever felt. We’re halfway through the year, but we’re nowhere near halfway through the schedule.”

Norwalk marks the halfway point of the 24-race NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series tour, but for motorcycle teams, which run 16 of the 24 NHRA national events, Norwalk is less than a third of the way through the season. “There’s a long way to go,” Reed said, “and we’re just getting started.”

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2016

April 25, 2016 / Todd Veney

With one 6-second blast after another, Cory Reed went quicker every time he left the starting line at the always unpredictable Four-Wide Nationals at zMax Dragway but just missed making his first NHRA start.

One of four qualifying sessions at the palatial Charlotte, N.C., facility was rained out, but the Pro Stock Motorcycle bump still ended up a brutal 6.91 – just a couple hundredths of a second quicker than Reed’s weekend best of 6.94 on his final attempt. “We definitely could have used that session that got rained out,” he said. “If we’d gotten that last run, it would have been in the .80s for sure.”

It’s a legitimate claim – in testing the day after the race, Reed laid down back-to-back .80s in much less favorable atmospheric conditions than were present for Friday’s and Saturday’s qualifying. “We kept moving in the same direction on Monday that we’d been headed in qualifying,” he said. “We just ran out of runs one run too soon.”

It was Reed’s first experience in the controversial four-wide format, which pits riders side-by-side-by-side-by side for one weekend a year and typically accounts for more starting-line screw-ups than the other 15 NHRA races combined. “It’s crazy,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard to know which part of the Tree you’re supposed to be looking at. They had to tell me ‘Lane 3’ one time before I pulled up there. Another time, I was trying to figure out where I was on the Tree, and when I found my lane, I realized that I was fully staged and barely got backed out of there in time.”

On his first run ever with three other bikes on the track, Reed finished second of the four riders with a respectable 6.99 at 190 mph. He followed with a better 6.97 at 198 Saturday morning and a 6.94 at 189 Saturday afternoon that left him 29-thousandths of a second short of the bump.

“I wish we could’ve run those .80s we ran Monday during the weekend, when it counted, but it’s all good,” Reed said. “I got to experience the four-wide thing, and it was cool, especially in the shutdown area, when you’re looking across the track and there are all these other guys out there coasting along with you. After what we ran Monday, we know we’re right in there with everybody else, and as long as we can keep the power management like it was then, I think we’re in a good spot going into Atlanta.”