Tag: psm (Page 8 of 9)

PSM – ST. LOUIS 2016

September 27, 2016 / Todd Veney

Just across the river from downtown St. Louis in Madison, Ill., Rookie of the Year candidate Cory Reed enjoyed his finest outing to date at the AAA Nationals at multipurpose Gateway Motorsports Park.

Reed’s Star Racing/YNot Buell got faster run after run in qualifying kept it up well into eliminations, where he advanced to the semifinals for the second time in his career and the second time in the past three races. At Indy, the last race of the regular season, a clutch semifinal performance catapulted Reed into the Countdown to the Championship playoffs. This time, it helped him climb to a career-high ninth in the NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle standings, just ahead of two-time world champ Matt Smith.

“The bike ran good all weekend, until the semi’s,” said Reed, who fell just short of his first final-round appearance when his machine inexplicably slowed a full tenth of a second opposite eventual winner Jerry Savoie. “Something tightened up somewhere – a bearing or the brakes or something was hung up. I could feel it.”

It was a storybook weekend up to that point, with a quicker E.T. showing up on the Gateway scoreboards five times in a row. Reed got things rolling with a 6.951 and a 6.915 on Friday and improved to a 6.910 and a finally a 6.884 that locked up a spot in the fast half of the field for the third time in the past four races.

Reed, who beat L.E. Tonglet in Chicago and lost to him last week in Chicago, put away the former world champ in the opening round with an even quicker 6.873, the second-quickest official run of his career. The bike finally slowed in the quarterfinals, but not nearly enough to cost Reed the round against two-time world champ Eddie Krawiec, the second-ranked rider in the NHRA standings heading into the playoffs and runner-up for the 2015 championship.

“I figured he’d press the Tree,” said Reed of their first head-to-head meeting ever. “Nothing’s ever been said – it was all cordial, all good – but there’s an unspoken beef between the Harley guys and us and I really wanted to cut a teen light on him.” He did, with a .016 reaction time that gave him a two-hundredths advantage going by the Tree, an edge he maintained all the way to the finish line for a 6.921 to 6.925 win, the biggest of his young career.

The rookie was finally toppled in the semifinals, when his bike slipped to a 7.02 – well short of Savoie’s winning 6.92. “Everything else was good early – our 60-foot time and 330-foot times even better than his,” said Reed, who’s now just two points out of eighth place and one round out of seventh. “I have blinders on my helmet, so I can’t really tell if I’m ahead or behind unless the other guy’s way out there, but somewhere before the finish line, I saw him ahead of me. That’s OK. Getting to the semi’s is great. That’s twice now. Now they know we can do it.”

PSM – INDY 2016

September 6, 2016 / Todd Veney

In the final event of the 10-race regular season, in the best race of his young drag racing career, Pro Stock Motorcycle rookie Cory Reed catapulted over three other riders to move from 13th place into the Top 10 and into championship contention.

Reed qualified in the fast half of the field yet again and drew 10th-ranked Steve Johnson in a titanic head-to-head first-round matchup that meant the end of a potential title run for the loser. Reed was off the line like a shot with a .027 reaction time and drove away from Johnson, 6.93 to 7.06, and just like that, he was on the doorstep of the Countdown.

“I knew what I had to do before we ever got here: go one round further than Michael Ray, Karen Stoffer, and Steve Johnson,” Reed said. “I figured if we got to the semi’s I was in, but it turned out that I just had to get to the second round because everybody else lost first round. I watched Ray lose [to eventual runner-up Hector Arana Jr.] right in front of me, so that was one. I was running Johnson, so if I won he was automatically out. So then I just needed Karen to lose.”

She accommodated him with a loss to perennial championship contender Eddie Krawiec, 6.83 to 6.89 – but first Reed had to get around the wily Johnson, who has more starts than anyone in NHRA bike history. “Steve’s always been nice to me,” Reed said, “but I thought he’d try to play a game on the line – that’s his style – but he didn’t roll it back out of the beams or try anything.”

Reed had the lead from start to finish, and by the time he returned to the PSE/Star Racing pits, he was in the Countdown. “What I didn’t get was why nobody else seemed to know it,” he said. “I won first round, they all lost – I knew I was in.”

To put an exclamation point on the accomplishment, Reed, who had reached the quarterfinals at five of the past six races, took it one step further with a first career semifinal finish, topping teammate Angelle Sampey, who fouled away a 6.92. Reed’s .013 reaction time and quicker 6.88 meant that he actually got to the finish line first anyway.

In the semi’s, Reed fouled by the narrowest possible margin – one-thousandth of a second – against Arana, but by then the war had already been won: he was in the Countdown to the Championship. Now instead of trailing the points leader by an insurmountable 596 rounds, Reed finds himself just 110 points out of the lead because of the controversial Countdown format, which erases the points racers have accumulated all season and separates everyone in the Top 10 by just 10 points per position.

Now, anything can happen. “I really think making the Top 5 is a realistic goal, but I’m a racer – I want to win the championship,” he said. “We’re almost as fast as the Harleys now – maybe the next-fastest ones after them – and I do a little better with pressure, so we’ll see what happens. I definitely want to win at least one race.”

PSM – BRAINERD 2016

August 23, 2016 / Todd Veney

At the NHRA Lucas Oil Nationals in Brainerd, Minn., for the fifth time in the last six races, Cory Reed advanced to the quarterfinals. It has him on the brink of the Top 10 with one more race before the Countdown to the Championship playoffs begin, but Reed was more frustrated at the way he lost than pleased to have advanced that deep in eliminations again.

“I was ahead of him the whole way until the bike didn’t shift,” said Reed of his opponent, reigning Pro Stock Motorcycle national champ Andrew Hines, the most prolific rider in bike history with 45 career event titles. “It made the 1-2 and 2-3 shifts just fine, but it wouldn’t go into 4th gear.”

Reed, who left on Michael Ray in the first round of eliminations with a near-perfect .007 reaction time and pulled away with a career-best 6.83, was out on Hines, too, with a .011. Hines, the eventual winner, got the win with just a 6.89 – almost certainly slower than what Reed would’ve run had his bike just gone into gear.

“This is the first loss all year where I’ve been genuinely pissed off,” Reed said. “I mean, I’m still mad. It sucks that it played out the way it did because I knew I was ahead of him. I knew I got a good light – I could just tell – and it was weird because I could hear him over there and knew he was behind me. I probably hit the button five or six times and just rode it out on the chip for a while, then laid my head down on the tank. The one good thing that came out of all of this is that the bike keeps getting faster and faster.”

Reed opened qualifying with a 6.98 and got only quicker from there, with a 6.92 Friday night in the second qualifying session, a 6.89 Saturday morning, and a 6.88 in last-shot qualifying that slotted him in the No. 7 position on the eliminator ladder, tying the career high he established earlier this season at Norwalk. The 6.83 in the first round was the quickest official run of his career by a full five-hundredths of a second. “We picked up points on some people,” Reed said. “I’m just one round out of the Countdown now, so we have real chance at this with one race left.”

PSM – SONOMA 2016

August 2, 2016 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed’s rocket ride to the top of Pro Stock Bike racing took a slight detour at the event he was looking forward to more than any other this year, the Sonoma Nationals, where instead of racing more than a mile above sea-level as he had one week earlier at Denver, he competed at the much lower – and faster – altitude of just 15 feet.

Reed picked up more than three-tenths of a second from Denver, where, for the third race in a row, he advanced to the quarterfinals, but a 6.93 at nearly 190 mph that at the time had him 10th in the field in the end left him a few hundredths of a second short of the fastest field in NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle history. The bump was 6.90-flat, and 15 of the 16 were in the 6.80s, where Reed was sure his PSE/Star Racing bike would have been had he gotten his final qualifying shot.

“The little clip that holds all the gears in place popped out,” said Reed, who was shut off behind the line and didn’t even get his last shot at cracking the field – right when the conditions were perfect. “That put it into fifth gear on the burnout, and burned out the gear. It got fused up because it was stuck in fifth.”

Unlike in Denver when all appeared to be lost in a similarly stressful behind-the-line situation and he made it to the line in time to whip Shawn Gann in the first round of eliminations, this time Reed could only watch veteran Steve Johnson disappear into the distance while his bike sat silenced behind the line. “The TPS [throttle-position sensor] was bad, and when you take off and the TPS quits, it kills the transmission. It’s too bad. It was a brand-new transmission. We put one in that already had something wrong with it – that was the crappy part. We felt like there was no way we wouldn’t qualify, and then that happened.”

It was a bitter pill to swallow after pretty much doing better every time out this year. “I was starting to get used to it,” Reed said. “We were trying some new stuff Friday because we knew we had two shots Saturday if it didn’t work. We thought we were good.” There’s still time for a charge into the Top 10 and even a shot at the Countdown to the Championship playoffs. Though the NHRA season is two-thirds of the way over, the Pro Stock Motorcycles are barely halfway through, and they’ll be at every race until the end of the season.

PSM – DENVER 2016

July 26, 2016 / Todd Veney

Cory Reed’s Pro Stock Motorcycle career continued its upward spiral at his “home” track, Bandimere Speedway, the one-of-a-kind facility carved into the side of the easternmost ridge of the Rocky Mountains just outside Denver. Qualified 9^th of more than 20 riders, Reed reached the quarterfinals for the third time in a row – somehow.

“I started doing my burnout and thought, ‘Hey that’s a lot of smoke. That’s kinda weird,’ ” Reed said of his first-round matchup with veteran Shawn Gann. “The next thing I know, there’s fire right underneath my handlebars. The main power line shorted out, and I thought ‘I’m done for sure. There’s no way, I know it.’ They tried one last time, and just as the starter was about to turn around and shut me off, it worked.”

Granted the last-second reprieve, Reed made the most of it, getting the jump on Gann by a full three-hundredths of a second and driving away for a 7.23 to 7.27 win. The 7.23 was the fifth-quickest run of the round, the highest Reed has ranked in any elimination round or qualifying session in his brief seven-race career. “I can’t believe Shawn waited that long – that was cool of him,” Reed said. “I thanked him four or five times. I seriously thought it was all over right there.”

It really was over in the quarterfinals when one of the throttle blades broke and closed. Reed had just gotten off the starting line side by side with eventual winner Andrew Hines, who also spent his high school years in Colorado, in Trinidad, but the race was over before the 100-foot mark when his bike started sputtering and slowed. “I just shut it off,” Reed said. “He kinda got lucky. He ran a .23, and I was about to run a .20.”

Still, it was another successful weekend for the PSE/Star Racing team, which maintained its place just outside the Top 10 in the championship standings, ahead of former national event champions Hector Arana Jr., Michael Phillips, and Gann. “I’m don’t want to sound overconfident, but I honestly think it’s feasible to be in the Top 10 by Indy,” Reed said. “Other people are starting to struggle, and we’re moving up. [Star Racing team owner George Bryce] can bounce the tune-ups from my bike and [teammate] Angelle Sampey]’s bike off each other. It helps us both. Her bike keeps going faster and faster, and that means my mine’s going to, too.”

PSM – CHICAGO 2016

July 12, 2016 / Todd Veney

Another race, another career highlight for Pro Stock Motorcycle rookie Cory Reed.

At the Route 66 Nationals in Chicago, the 22-year-old phenom from Grand Junction, Colo., qualified strong, took down 2010 NHRA world champ LE Tonglet in the first round of eliminations, and did it on a holeshot. Tonglet made one of the quickest runs of the entire event, a 6.86, but Reed dipped into the 6.80s too, and drilled him on the Tree by a half-tenth for his biggest round-win to date.

“We both staged at the exact same time, which makes it hard for both of you,” Reed said. “It threw me off, but it threw him off big time. I didn’t think I left on him – thought I was just running better in 60 feet. I have a lot of respect for LE. I figured he’d leave the same as me. Beating somebody like him, who’s good on the lights and has won a championship, was awesome – especially on a holeshot.”

Tied with veteran Scotty Pollacheck for 14th place in the national standings, just two rounds (41 points) out of the prestigious Top 10, Reed faced PSE teammate and eventual runner-up Angelle Sampey in the quarterfinals. He was off like a shot with a near-perfect .006 reaction time, and it was another 6.86-6.88 race, but the three-time world champ cut a great .015 light of her own to advance by just 11-thousandths of a second.

“That was the coolest race ever,” Reed said. “Angelle looked over at me as we were pulling off the track, kinda like, ‘I don’t know,’ and I was thinking the same thing. She said, ‘I thought you had me.’ She has blinders on her helmet, so she doesn’t have much peripheral vision.”

Even if she did, Sampey still might not have known who got there first. Sampey, who broke through earlier this season in Englishtown, N.J., for her first major victory in eight years, crossed the stripe about three feet of ahead of Reed with a slightly faster top-end speed, 193 mph to 192.

“It was still a great race,” Reed said. “It was one step further, and if we keep taking steps every time out like this, I definitely think I can win at least one race by the end of the year.”

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 – ENGLISHTOWN 2016

June 14, 2016 / Todd Veney

Less than an hour from New York City in Englishtown, N.J., in his first appearance at the prestigious Summernationals, one of six “majors” on the NHRA tour, rookie Cory Reed made the cut at a race too fast for many-time national event winner Shawn Gann and former world champ Matt Smith.

Pitted against one of the most accomplished riders in the field, reigning U.S. Nationals champ Jerry Savoie, in the very first pair of the first round, Reed had a holeshot on his mind. “I definitely have to cut a light on him and hope he doesn’t make one of his good runs,” Reed said. “It’s hard to make six or seven of them in a row, and he’s already made a bunch here, so he’s due for a bad one.”

Unfortunately for Reed’s PSE/Star Racing team, Savoie, who qualified No. 2 with a blistering 6.78, laid down a 6.84 that proved immaterial when Reed’s ultra-quick reflexes turned out to be too quick for his own good. The 22-year-old rookie let the clutch fly a fraction of a second too soon for a -.006 reaction time – just six-thousandths of a second from a perfect light but still a red-light start.

“I guess I was too ready,” Reed said. “It’s hard to slow yourself down just a little – you’ll just end up slowing yourself down a lot. I left on yellow – I never saw the red. I didn’t even know I’d red-lighted until they told me at the other end.” Savoie, the third-ranked rider in the 2015 standings, ran him down anyway despite Reed’s fine 6.93, by far his best run of the race.

The weekend ended on a high note when PSE/Star Racing teammate Angelle Sampey claimed an emotional win, the 42nd of her career but her first seven finals over the past nine years.

PSM – ATLANTA 2016

May 16, 2016 / Todd Veney

From a 6.95 in the opening session that gave him the early qualifying lead to a .010 reaction in the first official elimination round of his young drag racing career, the NHRA Southern Nationals was easily Cory Reed’s finest outing to date. “I was ready,” Reed said of his first-round matchup with many-time Pro Stock Motorcycle event winner Chip Ellis, who once came within one round of the NHRA championship. “I said I was going to get him on the Tree, and I did. Everybody told me ‘Don’t jinx it’ but I knew I was going to cut a light on him.”

Reed, who made the field in just his third career start, may have been well on the way to his first round-win … until the bike didn’t shift into 3rd gear. “When I left, I thought, ‘I was on it,’ and I never saw him at all. Then it wouldn’t shift and hit the rev-limiter, and I just kept hitting the button, hoping it would go into the next gear. That was going to be a good run, really good. It picked the tire up when I hit 2nd gear – that’s how you can tell.”

Astride an S&S-powered YNot Racing/Star Racing EBR 1190RX, Reed was in the sixes virtually all weekend at Atlanta Dragway, the home race on the NHRA tour for Americus, Ga.-based Star Racing. For Reed, who’s made countless test runs in Valdosta, Ga., and Gainesville, Fla., this race represented his first trips down the 40-year-old course, home of an NHRA national event for the past 35 years.

Reed’s Precision Service Equipment teammate, Angelle Sampey, qualified No. 1 with a 6.86 and ran a career-best 6.79 in the first round for low e.t. of the meet, so clearly the power is there. “We really got my bike figured out this weekend,” Reed said. “Something was dragging – maybe the back brake needs a new hanger – so we switched motors with her to make sure that was the problem. My bike’s going to run a lot better; it has low .80s in it. I was on a low .80 run in the first round – 6.81, 6.82 – until the transmission didn’t shift. The way it was trying to run that time and the way Angelle was running all weekend, I know I can win.”

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.”