Tag: psm (Page 5 of 9)

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 – INDY 2020

September 7, 2020 / Todd Veney

Last seen exactly a year ago at the 2019 U.S. Nationals, 2016 NHRA Rookie of the Year Cory Reed made his triumphant return to drag racing back at the motorsports capital of the world: Indy. Running all by himself Friday night to open pro qualifying for the one race every rider most wants to win, he skipped the 6.90s entirely and plunged into the .80s with an off-the-trailer 6.897 at 194.58 that kept him atop the entire Pro Stock Motorcycle field well into the opening session.

“It felt so good to know right away that we had a bike that could go rounds,” said Reed, the relief evident in his face. The next afternoon, appearing in the second-to-last pair because he had run so well in Q1, he laid down a quicker, faster 6.894/195.76 to maintain his grip on the fast half of the field, then wrapped up the preliminaries late that afternoon with an even better 6.881/195.51 that eventually slotted him 10th in the final order.

When qualifying was complete and eliminations commenced, Reed drove to an especially satisfying first-round victory over Hector Arana Jr. before narrowly disqualifying himself in the quarterfinals against many-time world champ Eddie Krawiec with a close -.013 red-light that just as easily could have been a holeshot win. “That time, I held nothing back,” Reed said. “I actually didn’t know I could react that quickly. That’s everything I had. I knew ‘everything I have’ is better than a .000 light, but I haven’t thrown it all out there looking for my best possible reaction time in I don’t know how long, basically forever.”

Slightly less than Reed’s best possible reaction time actually would have been better in this case – it would’ve earned him a win, and not just any old win but the best possible kind of win for any driver – a holeshot win – because his bike was right there with Krawiec’s vaunted Harley-Davidson machine in performance, 6.85 to 6.90. Anything .035 or better on the Tree – in other words, his average reaction time – and Reed would’ve been a hero holeshot winner. “It was still a great weekend,” he said. “Haven’t raced in a long time, qualified, ran good all five runs, didn’t hurt a part, went rounds, beat Arana, could’ve beat Krawiec … I’ll take that. We’ll see when we run again. It’ll be whenever it’ll be, but I feel a whole lot better than I did when we got here.”

PSM – SONOMA 2019

July 29, 2019 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed went 1-for-4 in Sonoma Nationals qualifying, but in drag racing a single solid pass in four attempts always counts for infinitely more than four consistent but unspectacular runs. On the shores of San Pablo Bay just north of San Francisco at Sonoma Raceway, under diametrically opposite conditions than what Pro Stock Motorcycle racers encountered days earlier on the edge of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver, Reed’s weekend began with a thud with a 7.17 at 189 mph that ended with oil in his wake.

Q2 Friday afternoon didn’t go much better. Again the Team Liberty machine bogged on the launch, killing the run and limiting him to a 7.26/179 time slip doomed from the start by a sluggish 1.18-second 60-foot time. The team’s hard work paid off the following day when Reed turned in one of his finest performances since Charlotte, a 6.89 at more than 195 mph that propelled him well into the middle of the pack, just one spot shy of the fast half of the field. Despite a disappointing 7.14/188 on his fourth and final attempt, Reed held onto the No. 9 spot and faced Top 10 rider “Flyin’ Ryan” Oehler in theoretically the closest matchup of the first round – No. 8 vs. No. 9.

It lived up to advance billing – almost. Separated by just three-thousandths of a second heading into eliminations, both drivers nearly duplicated their quickest runs all weekend, Reed with a 6.92 and Oehler with a 6.89. Had he let the clutch handle fly 1/200th of a second later, Reed would have won on a holeshot with a perfect .000 reaction time. Instead, he got a -.005 red-light and Oehler was the one who moved on. “You have to go for it when you’re running that close,” he said. “It felt good when I left – I knew it had to be close.”

PSM – DENVER 2019

July 22, 2019 / Todd Veney

High on the mountain at scenic Bandimere Speedway, Cory Reed and teammate Joey Gladstone fought the conditions with everyone else at the Mile-High Nationals, the only race of its kind on the 18-race NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series Pro Stock Motorcycle tour. Reed and crew contended with Denver’s notoriously thin air, squeezing out a 7.48 at 181 mph on the first of four scheduled qualifying laps – a full half-second and 15-20 mph short of their Team Liberty bike’s 6-second/200-mph potential at sea level.

When the two-wheeled contingent rolled under the Bandimere tower Friday night for Q2, Reed picked up dramatically to a 7.35 that catapulted him to 11th on the grid, and when seasonal high-country showers washed out the Saturday morning session and reduced qualifying to a three-shot affair, he battled to keep the underpowered machine from bogging off the line as the engine gulped for oxygen that wasn’t there. He picked up yet again to a 7.32/182 and ended up 13th in the final order, stuck with an undesirable first-round match against perhaps the toughest possible foe: many-time world champ Andrew Hines, who has dominated the 2019 season, is a Colorado native, and thus knows the tricky high-altitude conditions as well as anyone.

It didn’t turn out well for the 2016 NHRA Rookie of the Year, who, as usual, got the jump at the Tree. Reed shot off the line with a noticeable lead but by the 150-mark found himself trailing the racer who has dominated Pro Stock Motorcycle competition more than any driver in any professional category all year. Hines, who dominated eliminations with 7-teens in all four rounds, crept further ahead with every push of the air-shift button and advanced with a 7.17, low e.t. of the round, while Reed faded with a 7.38.

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 – CHARLOTTE 2019

April 28, 2019 / Todd Veney

At the Four-Wide Nationals, which racers in every pro category seem to loathe but absolutely fans love, Cory Reed turned in his strongest performance of the 2019 season. The former NHRA Rookie of the Year started off well and got only tougher from there, advancing to the semifinals in easily his finest performance since he landed in his first career final the at the Dodge Nationals at Maple Grove Raceway late in his 2016 Rookie of the Year campaign.

When absurd 40+ mph winds turned two scheduled qualifying attempts Friday at palatial zMax Dragway into a single session, Reed’s YNot/PSE team clocked an off-the-trailer 6.93 at 192 mph that positioned them in the No. 2 spot at the time. Running in the last of five quads with all the top dogs Saturday in Q2/Q3, Reed stepped way up to a 6.84 at 197.28 mph that propelled him into the upper reaches of the Pro Stock Motorcycle stratosphere. Granted one last crack at the track, Reed’s team showed that the 6.84/197 was for real with a consistent 6.89/196 and entered eliminations smack in the middle of the pack.

In the first round, stuck in the middle of theoretically the toughest quad – 1/8/9/16 – Reed advanced, finishing second of the four with a 6.88/195 that trailed No. 1 qualifier Karen Stoffer’s 6.81/197 but was more than enough to top second-generation driver Jim Underdahl’s 6.93 and former YNot teammate Angelle Sampey’s out-of-the-groove 7.13/151. In the semifinals, Reed left with the other three and outran No. 1 qualifier Karen Stoffer’s 6.95 but his right-there 6.91 wasn’t quite enough to deal with eventual runner-up Eddie Krawiec’s 6.85 or upstart Ryan Oehler’s 6.89. “.040 lights – that’s not gonna cut it,” Reed said. “I can do way better than that. I have and I will – to win, I’ll have to.”

PSM – LAS VEGAS 2019

April 8, 2019 / Todd Veney

After dropping valves in the second session of Four-Wide Nationals qualifying and more or less levelling the engine, 2016 Rookie of the Year Cory Reed took a quantum leap forward in last-shot qualifying Saturday afternoon with a 6.95 in the thin desert air of Las Vegas that propelled him all the way to the No. 6 spot – higher than he’s qualified since Chicago last June.

“We’ve been thinking we were underpowered, but we’ve been overpowered this whole time,” Reed said. “We toned it down for that last qualifying session and got it down through there for a good run. Just by adding a little timing, the bike picked up three- or four-hundredths [of a second] in the first 60 feet.”

Free to pick any of three of the four lanes for the first round of eliminations and thinking big after an outstanding qualifying performance, Reed seemed better positioned to go rounds than he’s been all year. Instead, he was gone after a single round of eliminations. It certainly wasn’t the best quad he could have hoped for – two of the other three drivers were past world champions (Jerry Savoie and Eddie Krawiec) – but Reed needed only to outrun one of them and No. 14 qualifier Freddie Camarena to advance. He sped across the finish line well ahead of Camarena, as expected, but trailed both Krawiec (6.90) and Savoie (6.94) with a disappointing 7.12.

“That was my fault,” Reed later admitted. “I over-revved 1st gear and ‘double-buttoned’ 2nd, and bam – there goes your whole run. I pulled on Jerry through the middle but ran out of room before the finish line got there. I staged super, super shallow that time, thinking, ‘If I just go green, I can win with another .95,’ but I was thinking too much up there. I had a .046 light – not terrible, but nowhere near what I’m capable of because I had death grip on it as I staged. ” ‘Relax,’ I told myself. But whenever you do that, it’s always right when the tree comes on. I almost short-shifted another gear, but I caught myself and thought, ‘Noooo, don’t do that,’ and ended up hitting the rev-limiter. I just have to get back to what I already know how to do.”

PSM – POMONA 2018

November 12, 2018 / Todd Veney

Back on the bike after team boss Cory Reed had to substitute for him in Las Vegas, Joey Gladstone reeled off some of his best runs of the season and ranked among the top drivers deep into qualifying. After ripping off a 6.88 in the second of four sessions for the No. 5 spot on the provisional grid, Gladstone settled into the No. 11 spot on the final ladder with that time and backed it up with a nearly as good 6.90-flat.

Heading into eliminations, Gladstone had a nice stack of E.T. slips to build from: 6.96/193, 6.88/196, another 6.963/193, and a 6.90/193. His first-round opponent turned out to be about as tough as it gets – 2016 Pro Stock Motorcycle world champ Jerry Savoie, but Gladstone was only had a few hundredths of a second behind him, 6.83 to 6.88.

Trying to get a jump on Savoie, who has come out on the wrong end of a few holeshot decisions over the years, an overanxious Gladstone jumped the gun by the invisible margin of just 1/50th of a second. His -.023 red-light start invalidated a 7.01 at 192 mph and advanced the always-tough alligator farmer from the bayous of Mississippi, who advanced to the quarterfinals with a run that would have been hard to get around anyway, 6.83. It was a disappointing end to the 2018 season for Gladstone, but with a full-time ride with Team Liberty for the 2019 NHRA Mello Yello campaign, there are bigger and better things ahead.