Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

KTM at the head of the 1OO-team field, si de by side with fell o w KTM racer Daryl Folks. The pair spun their rear wheels on the opening 20 feet of pavement when the starting ligh t flashed green for the first time at 8:00 a.m., then powered off into the silty Tonopah dese rt. Ha mel was on line three of the twobikes-every- 30-seconds st arting gri d , but he wasn' t back there for long. He had the KX500 in second overall by the 20-mil e mark and he pas sed Zitterkopf to take the overall lead just 35 miles into the first half of the first figure eight. "It was hard to get past Zitterkopf," said Hamel. "We were pretty even on the roads and itwas very rocky everywhere else. You had to stay right on the ribboned trail. You'd ride into a pile of rocks if you missed a comer." While Hamel went to work building up a comfortable lead, the rest of the pack was starting to settle into stride. Kawa saki KX250 racer s Jason Kawell and Steve Hengeveld were moving up stead ily in the 250cc Pro d ivision and Johnny Alexander and And y Ellis were declaring their intentions to the 12Sec Pro racers . At the end of the first 38-mile loop, Hamel had well and truly made his presence felt. The 22-year-old from Boulder City , Nevada had opened up one and a half minutes on the pack and the KX500 was running strong when he passed it over to Dav is for the second half of the first lap of the figure-eight course. . Zitterkopf handed over to Gray in second and Daryl Folks, who planned to ride 120 miles before he handed over to his partner, was five minutes behind the leaders in third . The Honda CR500 piloted by Orville Northrop and Kevin Steele was fourth in the time-adjusted standings, followed by 250cc Pro hotshots Kawell and Hengeveld and 125cc Pro leaders Alexander and Ellis. One of the first casualties of the race was the Kawasaki shared by Dave Ondas and Craig Smith, which bit the dust with lower-end problems just 20 miles into the 24D-mile race. Most of the other racers waited until the second half of loop one before their troubles began, but once the problems started, they came thick and fast. Alexander and Ellis got seven miles into the second half of loop one before they had to return to the pit to fix a rear fla t, and the Yamaha piloted by Brad Christensen and Ed Sorenson had the same problem in the same place. George Pennington wa s pitched over the bars when his four-stroke hit a big boulder, and the Northrop /Steele Honda lo st time with a damaged chain guard. With 39 miles under Davis' belt, the le a d duo' s fu t u re was lo ok in g ev en mor e promising at the end of the first figure eight. Twenty-five-year-old Davis completed his ride in jus t under an hour a nd ha nde d the flyin g green machine back to Hamel six minutes ahead of the Zitterkop f/Gray KTM on adju sted time. And the margin wid ened to almost seven and a half minutes when Gray ran ou t of gas at the very beginning of pit row and had to get off the bike and start pushing. Roger Hamel, who had just finished gassing his son's bik e, sprinted to the re scue with a quick dump and gave Gray enough fuel to get to his own gas at the far end of pit row. With Gray back on his wa y, there w as a three-minute gap be fore Folks headed down pit row for the second time. Paul Krause took over the KX500' he shared with Ted Hunnicutt in fourth overall, but things were not sounding good for the number-two Kawa saki team. "The bike started to sound bad goin g out and I wa s fairly confident at that time that I wasn't going to be back in the pits under the power of my own motorcycle," said Krause, whose fears we re confirmed when he lost the lower end on a pipeline road 15 miles in to loop two. Krause's misfortune put 250cc Pro leaders Kawell and Hen ge veld in to fourth overall, ahead of Bryan Folks who shared a 250cc KTM with Destry Abbott. Like Krause an d Hunnicutt's Kawasaki, the Folks/Abbott entry suffered mechanical problems on its second lo op of the figure eight, which w as already starting to tum to deep, silty powder, full of hidden rocks that had been dredged up by all the traffic. "We had a lot of problems," sa id Folks. "The rear brake line locked up, then we got a flat tire - we were way down after that." But their problems paled compared to those suffered by Brian Miller and Mark Morris' Op en Expert entry . " Wh ere do I sta r t?" sa id Morris, when asked to describe the team 's problems. "The throt tle stuck ri ght a t the beginning, we had to yank all the packing out of the silencer, it seized about six miles from the end and I bet there's no water left in it, but other than that, we had a great time." The Op en class KTM piloted by Jeff Lu n dgreen a nd brothe r Mark Lundgreen of West Jordan, Utah, was seventh in the overa ll standings at the end of the first loop, and Scott Morris and Aron Huntington (KX5OO), the Miller /Morris Open Expert entry, and John Flores and Bren t Bloun t (CRSOO) rounded out the top 10. The 250cc racers came alive as the second loop of the figure eight got underway . Kawell and Hengeve ld launched a blitz tha t ricocheted ,them up from fifth to second in the time-adjusted standings, and the Morris/Huntington Kawasaki leapfrogged three.places up to fifth overall, but Hamel continued to pu ll ahead and had built up a 15-min ute lead when he handed the bike back to Davis mid-way through the loop. Stopwatches clicked on to check the margin between the lead bike and Zitterkop f, who had been running second on time and in the .physical stand ings, but when the second bike appeared ou t of the loop it was Folks' KTM. Zitte rkopf hit pit ro w more than 15 minutes later, ri di ng on the back of a non-race bike. He grabbed a gas can, got ba ck on the bike, and two-u p ped his way back up pit row. "Our rid e started out extremely well and went steadily downhill," said Zitterkopf, who h ad looked like the onl y serious thre at to Hame l and Davis in the earl y running. "I ran out of gas every loop . I even carried gas and I still ran out." Zitterkop f' s team lost more tim e changing the gas tank to try to remedy the problem, but the refueling effort had alrea dy dropped the KTM from second at the end of loop one to 17th at the end of loop two and the damage was permanent. . Davis turned in what he thought wa s a lightning- fast dash around the second half of the course only to find that he was a minute slow er than he had been on his first circumnavigation of the 39mile loop . " I thought I was doing really well but the course is getting very silty and I gu ess th a t slo w ed me down;" said Davis. "You have to be careful on the tw o-tracks, as well. Rocks are com ing u p everywhere and some of them are getting pretty tricky." r Despite Davis' "slow" loop, the number-one bike was 19 minutes ahead of the competition with jus t one loop to go, so the leaders opted for a filter change and a new rear wheel jus t to be on the safe side. "It's a really good thing we decided to change the filter," said Davis "For some reason, the glue in the old one had started to separate - like it does when _ you wash a filter in really hot water, and it was starting to come apart. I don't The runner-up team of Daryl Folks and Danny Anderson took the checkered flag 25 minutes behind the winning DavlslHamel pair. think we would've made it the whole way with that filter." The solven t in the new filter made the bike.hard to start and Kawasaki's fast pitting effort turned into a minute and a half ordeal before Dav is started pushing h is 200-plu s-poun d partner down pit row in a n effo rt to fire the bike. "Push-starting Dann y is an awful lot harder than ridin g," said Davis, panting from the exertion. Daryl Folks, with a little help from desert-racer-turned-car- racer Danny Anderson, was still in second with twothirds of the race behind h im , and ' Kawell and Hengeveld had their 250cc entry three minu tes back in third ahead of Blount/Flores an d Morris/Huntington. Seventh overall on adjusted time were Brandon Gerber and Dustin Headman, who left the start way back on the 29th row because the exp ert di vision was the first one that had a class dedicated to four-str okes. Gerber would 've been happy if the race had finished at the 160-mil e mark because his Husky thumper started losing compression just a few miles into the final loop and quit altogether with 20 miles still to go, "I had to push it to the top of a big hill so I co ul d get it go ing again and then I could n't let it di e down o r it would qui t again," said Gerber, shaking his head in d isappoin tment. "We had ev ery Ex pert beaten until that ha p pened." With Gerbe r losing po wer, the Expert lead passed to Dale Morse and Donnie Morrison, Over-3D Experts on a KX500, who were 27 minu tes behin d the leaders in eighth ov er all. Mike Longtine an d Richard Wilk held second in the Expert division until they disappeared from the running in the final loop, and John Braasch and Oakley Lehman held the 23

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