Tag: psm (Page 6 of 9)

PSM – LAS VEGAS 2018

October 30, 2018 / Todd Veney

Pressed into service when Joey Gladstone’s jet-ski romp on the Colorado River days before the Toyota Nationals ended in a 70-mph tumble and a bruised tailbone, Cory Reed entered his first NHRA event since he climbed off the bike at Indy to grant his much lighter teammate the opportunity of a lifetime. In the end, it might have been better had Gladstone been healthy enough to ride.

Fit as a fiddle and skinny as a rail, Reed is still at a distinct competitive disadvantage, too tall and too heavy for his Buell-powered Team Liberty XBR. The former NHRA Rookie of the Year opened qualifying with an off-pace 7.17 at 190 mph, followed with a similar 7.13 at 190 mph Friday afternoon, and picked up about a tenth of a second Saturday but still found himself a few hundredths short of the all-6-second field after back-to-back 7.0s at 190.

Reed wound up 19th on the final qualifying sheet, a couple of ticks behind Katie Sullivan and many-time national event winner Karen Stoffer and ahead of veteran Freddie Camarena, former Division 7 bike champ Anthony Vanetti, and newcomer Maurice Allen. When the tour wraps up at the NHRA Finals in Pomona, Calif., in two weeks, Gladstone will be back on the seat, and when the 2019 season opens in Gainesville next March, Reed will be riding a lighter, faster, more competitive bike.

PSM – CHARLOTTE 2018

October 15, 2018 / Todd Veney

In his fifth start astride Cory Reed’s Team Liberty Buell, Yellow Corn rider Joey Gladstone got faster and faster in almost every qualifying session and entered Carolina Nationals eliminations primed to give Vance & Hines test rider Chip Ellis all he could handle. Gladstone got off the line within thousandths of a second of the 2008 championship runner-up, but that was the last time he was in the race.

Ellis pulled away with an outstanding 6.77 – low e.t. of the entire event – while Gladstone could only watch him increase his lead with every shift after bogging hard off the line. Qualified 15th and down exactly a tenth of a second heading into their first-round heat, Gladstone wasn’t exactly the favorite against the No. 2 seed, but Ellis doubled the distance between them in qualifying (6.80 to 6.90) to an insurmountable two-tenths of a second, 6.77 to 6.97.

But despite entering eliminations in the second-to-last spot, Gladstone wasn’t out of contention. He’d already outpaced five non-qualifiers to make the Sunday field and stepped it up in virtually every session of qualifying with times of 7.01/193, 6.99/193, 6.90/192, and 6.92/194. For a No. 15 qualifier, he wasn’t far from the top – less than a tenth of a second, actually, with a 6.903 to No. 1 Eddie Krawiec’s 6.806 – but against low E.T. of the meet, no one would’ve had a chance.

PSM – DALLAS 2018

October 8, 2018 / Todd Veney

YNot Racing’s newest driver, Joey Gladstone, qualified solidly in the middle of the pack at the NHRA Fallnationals in Dallas but bowed out early with a tough first-round loss at the hands of 2016 NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle champion Jerry Savoie. Negotiating the notoriously narrow groove at the all-concrete Texas Motorplex in the first pair of the first round, Gladstone slipped to a 7.02 at 191.13 mph – 2 mph and about a tenth of a second slower than he ran in qualifying, where he was just a tick behind Savoie.

“There’s not one thing we could point a finger at on that run,” Gladstone said. “I short-shifted 2nd gear a little – that probably knocked a couple hundredths off of it – but it just fell off from qualifying. I think the motor was hurt little when we got up there. The air/fuel ratio was good, the EGTs [exhaust-gas temperatures] were good; it just wasn’t pulling as hard as it had been earlier in the weekend.”

The numbers bear that out: after opening with a strong 6.94 at 193 mph Friday afternoon, the Buell-powered YNot machine’s performance steadily but gradually diminished, from a 7.04/192 Friday evening to a 7.05/191 Saturday afternoon to a 7.03/192 in the fourth and final qualifying session. “Something internally is wrong with the engine – we don’t know what it is,” said Gladstone, who eventually finished in the No. 10 qualifying slot with a 6.94, just a hundredth of a second behind Savoie’s seventh-best 6.93. “Whatever it is, it’ll be right by the time we get to Charlotte.”

PSM – ST. LOUIS 2018

September 24, 2018 / Todd Veney

Seemingly outgunned against the top-ranked rider in Pro Stock Motorcycle all year, reigning NHRA world champ Eddie Krawiec, Joey Gladstone upset his heavily favored opponent, who handed over a first-round win with the most aggravating red-light of all, a -.001. “I was squatting behind the beams,” said Gladstone’s boss, Team Liberty leader Cory Reed. “They left, and I never even noticed the red-light in Eddie’s lane. I watched them go down the track and thought, ‘Dammit, we lost,’ and then somebody yelled, ‘Wait, he red-lighted!’ ”

Gladstone was outqualified by his much more accomplished foe by a full nine spots – No. 4 to No. 13 – but those numbers are somewhat misleading. Gladstone actually was right there alongside Krawiec in the 6.80s, 6.82 to 6.89, and the same numbers flashed on the scoreboards when they raced – 6.82 for Krawiec and 6.89 for Gladstone – but the win-light shone on Gladstone’s side of the track. “The bike is running better now than it would be if I was on it because of Joey’s weight – 135 pounds,” Reed said. “I weigh 150. In this class, that makes me a fat guy. It’s funny, the different emotions you feel watching someone else riding your bike, but it doesn’t bother me that much. It’s all about taking the next step, ’cause I’m tired of getting my ass kicked.

“Joey keeps making good passes,” Reed said, “and we keep learning more than we ever would if I was on there – the way the clutch works, way the tire hits, the way the wheelie bar works … when Joey’s on there, the weight transfer is what it’s supposed to be. When I’m on there, everything’s all wrong – it works right one time and doesn’t the next, and we never know why. When we get the new bike, it’ll be like 40 pounds lighter and we’ll be able to move weight around and have everything exactly the way we want it.”

PSM – READING 2018

September 17, 2018 / Todd Veney

Riding for Team Liberty, as he will all next year, Joey Gladstone drove Cory Reed’s bike into the middle rounds of eliminations at the Dodge Nationals in one of his first races as Reed’s replacement. He ripped the Tree down for a near-perfect .003 reaction time to put away Scotty Pollacheck, 6.90/192 to 6.93/192, but despite Pollacheck’s exalted status as a title contender, this was no upset – it was Gladstone who came from the top half of the field.

“I knew I couldn’t cut that Underdahl team any slack,” said Gladstone, who ran Underdahl power until his recent move to Team Liberty and knows as well as anyone how competitive those motorcycles can be. “That light felt almost too good. When I dropped the clutch, I actually looked up to see if his win light was on because I knew it had to be close.”

It was three-thousandths of a second from perfection and four-thousandths from a disastrous red-light, but Gladstone was right back in the .00s again in the quarterfinals, carding a nearly identical .008 reaction time opposite Hector Arana Jr. for another holeshot lead. But Arana was right there with a .018 and drove around him in the middle of the course for a come-from-behind 6.88/197 to 6.94/192 win and then went on to win the race and move to within three points of incoming leader Eddie Krawiec for the number one spot.

“Second round … that’s not really what we wanted, but you really can’t complain,” Gladstone said. “We did pretty good this weekend, and the bike’s running good. We’ll just see what happens over the next few races.”

PSM – BRAINERD 2018

August 20, 2018 / Todd Veney

There’s no getting around it – the Lucas Oil Nationals was a major disappointment for Cory Reed, probably the low point of the former NHRA Rookie of the Year’s young career. Seventeenth is nowhere to be in a 16-bike field – especially when only 18 teams show up.

“I think our motors were hurt when we got here,” Reed said. “Every run, it felt like the bike wasn’t going anywhere.” It wasn’t. Reed, who has run well down into the 6.80s and was getting used to going rounds in eliminations against even the biggest stars of Pro Stock Motorcycle, fell flat with a 7.14 at just 185 mph Friday afternoon, skipped the Friday night session, and missed the all-6-second field Saturday afternoon with back-to-back 7.0s at 191 mph.

With an aggregate best of 7.040/191.35, Team Liberty fell short of the 6.99 bump spot by a half-tenth. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Reed insisted. “We’ve made progress. We’ve learned things. Ever since Charlotte or Atlanta, it’s looked like we’ve been moving backwards and I guess to a lot of people we have, but a lot of the moves we’ve made have taught us what not to do. And they won’t happen again. I’m OK with everything. It’s not showing up on the race track, I know, but we’re making progress.”

PSM – DENVER 2018

July 23, 2018 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed got quicker and faster every time down the track at the Mile-High Nationals and entered the first round solidly in the top half of the field, primed for a long run in eliminations. Then his bike bogged right off the line and Steve Johnson, who’d never beaten him, disappeared into the distance for an easy 7.29-7.41 win.

“I left, and the bike didn’t go anywhere, just kind of went ‘buhhhhh…’ ” Reed lamented. “It took off to the right, really hard. I wasn’t even looking through the windshield anymore to see where I was going. I got on the limiter – the shift light was on for a while as I tried to keep from running into the wall – and I had to double-hit the button to get into 4th gear. No way you’re going to win with a run like that.”

Reed’s disappointment was compounded when every rider he would have faced in the ensuring rounds ran slower than what he’d been running. Qualifying No. 8, as Reed did at this event, almost inevitably leads to a second-round loss to the No. 1 qualifier, but this time No. 1 Eddie Krawiec was upset by the slowest rider in the field, No. 16 Karen Stoffer, and never made it to the second round. “I wouldn’t have had to run 7-teens to win here,” Reed said. “7.20s like we ran Saturday would have been enough. Karen only ran another a 7.34 in the second round [when he would have raced her] and Jerry Savoie only went a 7.28 against her in the semi’s – another ‘gimme’ race. Both guys red-lighted in the final, so no matter what I ran, I would’ve won.”

Until the first-round letdown, Reed’s Team Liberty Buell was improving every time he rolled out from under the tower, from a 7.53/180 to a 7.41/182 to a 7.25/184 to a 7.23/184 in last-shot qualifying that carried him into the top half of the program. “We kinda screwed ourselves on the first two runs, then put in a clutch on Saturday like we ran with Star Racing [in his 2016 Rookie of the Year campaign] and it showed a lot of promise,” Reed said. “Our 60-foot time was better than anyone’s. That’s where we belong – that’s Ken [Johnson’s] specialty – but for some reason, the damn thing bogged again Sunday morning. No idea why it would fall on its face like that, but the more the rounds went on, the more frustrated I got.”

PSM – NORWALK 2018

June 25, 2018 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed pulled out of Norwalk, Ohio in a better place than when he arrived, a first-round casualty but one wiser and better positioned for the future than when he left Richmond and especially Chicago. The former NHRA Rookie of the Year entered in eliminations for this race 11th on the grid, a spot that typically holds the promise of a fair chance at beating the fast-half qualifier, who’s only five spots ahead in sixth place.

But in this instance, the No. 6 qualifier was reigning and many-time world champ Eddie Krawiec, who went on to win the whole race. “We learned a lot this weekend,” said Reed, who had gone rounds at consecutive races to open the season but hasn’t since. “We burned up the clutch trying to pull a gear we thought we could run. I didn’t really think it was going to work, and it didn’t. With that longer gear, the bike is dragging when you shift gears – not ‘snapping.’ It’s just not going anywhere, and you can feel it – it’s obvious.

Reed was consistent in qualifying, and at it’s a good thing he was – inclement weather limited the two-wheel contingent to just two qualifying attempts instead of the usual four. Team Liberty reeled off similar runs of 6.95/193 and 6.97/193 – one on Friday and one on Saturday. In completely different circumstances in the first round of eliminations Sunday, Reed remained in that range with a competitive 6.95/192, but the Harley rider pulled away with a 6.90/193 and went on to the event title.

“We’ll test before the next race [Denver], and we’ll be ready when we get there,” Reed said. “We’re making changes around here, and I know they’re going to help. We’re starting to see the big picture. With these things, you need to get the momentum going early in the run – if you don’t, you’re done.”

PSM – RICHMOND 2018

June 11, 2018 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed staggered into Richmond determined to shake off the most discouraging outing of his career and officially hit rock bottom in the opening qualifying session with an even more disappointing 7.28. From the depths of the Pro Stock Motorcycle qualifying order, Reed’s Team Liberty Buell then picked up dramatically to a 6.96 Friday night, skyrocketing 10 spots in the order. “There’s no magic to this,” he said, “just hard work. We wasted time testing a tire that really killed the bike, really set us back, but I think that’s all behind us now.”

Reed stepped up even further Saturday afternoon with a 6.93 and woke up Sunday back in the race, with a legitimate shot to go rounds and a positive attitude about both his team and Pro Stock Motorcycle racing in general. “The bike class is still growing, and there are big gains to be made for all of us,” he said. “We can find a tenth out here – I’m not kidding. It’s there. We can go 205 mph. The whole field can be in the 200s. The front half of the class is really tight, really competitive, compared to the last couple of years.”

Facing a driver from that top half in the opening round of eliminations, No. 3 qualifier Matt Smith, Reed got the jump off the line, as he typically does, but Smith ran him down for a 6.87 to 6.98 win. “I don’t even care,” he insisted. “We’re better off now than we were when we got here. Larry [Morgan] and Jim [Yates] came up through the hard times of Pro Stock – they know what it takes to win out here. It doesn’t matter if it’s Pro Stock or Pro Stock Motorcycle – motors are motors, clutches are clutches, and transmissions are transmissions. Get it all right, and you’ll win.”

PSM – CHICAGO 2018

June 2, 2018 / Todd Veney

Motivated by back-to-back top-half qualifying performances at Charlotte and Atlanta, Cory Reed and his Liberty Racing crew pulled into Chicago thinking big. “We were all pumped up, like, ‘Hey, we’re going to win this race,’ but, uh, no,” said the 2016 NHRA Rookie of the Year, clearly disappointed. He opened with an off-pace 7.15 and it only went downhill from there.

Well aware that he wasn’t going anywhere in the second session, Reed shut off early and actually went into Saturday not qualified. He then picked up to a 7.03 at just short of 190 mph that squeaked into the field in the 15th spot, and after a similar 7.04 in last-shot qualifying found himself qualified, though barely so in the 16th and final spot. He was pitted against many-time world champ and No. 1 qualifier Andrew Hines in round one, but as it turned out, it didn’t matter who Reed lined up against when eliminations commenced Sunday afternoon – his engine refused to fire, and he was peeling off his gloves as his bike was pushed away from the starting apron when the light turned green for that first-round match.

“We had a different injector for this race, different manifold, shorter pipes, and moved the power curve up,” Reed said. “It all looked good on the dyno, but that’s not how it turned out. You make a small change to the clutch, and nothing happens. Even a big change, nothing happens. Out of nowhere, it does something it’s never done before. When we fried the clutch, we thought, ‘OK, no problem, that wasn’t the right way. We’ll just work back in the other direction,’ but that didn’t work either. It’s been a mess. Right now, the clutch just is not repeatable, but believe me, we’ll get this figured out before the next one.”