Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

I didn't time it right, What can I say? He beat me by a few inches. It was fun. It was a great race. "It was just a deal that if you were out front, you had to be wide open the whole lap," King added. "If you lifted, three or four guys would pass you. It was a lot of fun racing with Chris and jay and Smith. It was a good time. My plan was for only one guy to get me on the back stretch, and that's what happened. Chris cut a pretty good corner in three and four, but I got a really good run off of him in three and four, and I came up on him a lot qUicker than I wanted to, so I had to roll out of it a little bit, trying to set up the draft. I got into that hump, and I was off the gas over the hump. When you lose by a couple of inches, you want that last lap back. I've won some that way, and I've lost some that way." Carr said that he thought King tried to keep him from leading it down the back straightaway. "He ran real low down the back straightaway," Carr said. "I was able to draft by on the outside and ran it in there pretty deep on the last lap. It worked out. Today, we didn't have to worry about tire wear; we could have done SOO laps on our tires. My tire was new going out, and it still looks like brand new. It was a dropthe-hammer race. I think that's why you saw the top five so far ahead. It was wide open the whole time." problems stopped Mechanical Roeder's race on lap 23 and also left Springsteen limping home in 14th. Smith edged Cool beth for the last podium position. "I wanted to win," Smith said. "I led it early, but on the restart I missed a shift. I don't even know where I was at through the first corner. I was just kind of stuck a couple bikelengths behind the leaders; I couldn't really get up there with them. Then, finally, I ended up cutting the corners off a little bit lower and caught back up to their draft. I got up there in the mix. I never got to lead again, but I would have been leading if there had been one more lap. I slipped into third coming off of four, which is pretty much where I thought I needed to be. I slipped just a little bit, and that's all it took. I think I was probably only half a bikelength from winning. It was just that one little slip. That's why that guy [Carr) has the number-one plate." Briefly... Chris Carr may have had the AMA Ford Quality Checked Flat Track Championship wrapped up, but the battle over second place between former longtime teammates Kenny Coolbeth and Joe Kopp wasn't. "Dang it, Coolbeth got me in the points," Kopp said. "I knew it was kind of our battle out there tonight. He was looking better than I was earlier in the night. Off the original start, he missed a gear. He was lined up right in front of me. I knew he would be coming, and sure enough, he passed me right before that red flag. I was getting so far away from that lead pack, and I looked back once because I knew that somebody was going to be catching me. I didn't know if it was Kenny or johnny or who was back there. He caught me. I was just fighting it terrible. It's kind of frustrating for me, but we had a good year. We've had an up-and-down year. I guess if it was easy, everybody would be doing it." "We're second place in points; that was my goal coming into today," said Kenny Coolbeth. "There's only one place to go now, and it's up. I'm happy with the finish of the year. We had a couple DNFs, which kind of hurt us. We just have to take them. You can't complain about them. You can't do anything about it." Chris Carr is the model of consistency, conSistently up front. "It was a good year - we had four wins," Carr said. "I had a couple off days, but every other finish was in the top four. We were in contention to win a lot of races this year, and we won four. Three of them were miles." Kevin Atherton (23), Bryan Smith (42) and Joe Kopp (3) run side by side. Atherton had mechanical problems, Smith finished third, and Kopp ended the night in fifth. Coolbeth's recovery from his missed shift on the first start was somewhat hidden by the red flag, but he had come from dead last to eighth in five laps. "When I first kicked down on it, it went into false neutral," Coolbeth said. "I was kicking the heck out of it. I just couldn't get it into gear. I pretty much had to come to a stop to get it into gear. I finally got it into gear and took off. I put my head down. I was on a rampage. I think the restart kind of hurt me. I had some good momentum going. I'm sure I would have caught those guys. We were only five laps into it. It happens. I caught the leaders by the end of the race. I just really couldn't do anything with them." Latus Harley-Davidson/jones Powersports' joe Kopp ended up fifth. "There were a couple of positions handed to me, with Kevin crashing and walking away and Springer breaking and Roeder breaking," Kopp said. "With the way it was looking at the beginning of the night, I was happy with fifth. I really had to work for it. Last year, it was the same deal here. I started fighting it in the heat race. I was haVing a problem with getting traction on the rear end, more or less. I was real sideways through the corner. I wasn't Bryan Smith quietly put in a solid year after starting the season by trying to recover from a broken ankle suffered in a training accident. Smith finished strong, with his first GNC Mile podium and the SOScc Support victory. 'The best mile finish I've had has been sixth or seventh," Smith said. "We've been fast here before, just always had problems in the main or I screwed up or whatever. We were just rolling all day on both bikes. I love this track. The goal this year was to get one win and finish in the top five. We got two or three seconds and a couple thirds. We got in the top five but no wins. Iguess we'll have to maybe get sixth in points next year but win about 10 races, if we can do that somehow. A win would have been nice, but I did alii could do. Maybe next year." Three riders returned to action from injuries, trying to repeat the magic that Mike Hacker had in 2002 when he returned from his broken leg to win the race. Ironically, Hacker was one of those riders. This time, the SuperTrapp/Lombardi Harley-Davidson-backed rider's night ended on lap I3 of the National, due to mechanical problem. Hacker officially finished 16th. American Suzuki's Jake Johnson was back aboard his Suzuki, finishing fifth in his heat and third in his Continued on page 43 CYCLE NEWS. OCTOBER 12, 2005 41

• Cover