Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

~ R RACE WERA VansonIPM Endurance Series: Final round DAD ~ Team Suzuki Endurance (1) gets the jump on Foree Racing (3) and Team Pearls (11) at the start of the four-hour finale to the WERA Endurance Series at Road Atlanta. Gold Hill Racing finished second, despite having to make more pit stops than Suzuki.' Team Suzuki Endurance's first bike had a problem with an oil cooler. Team Suzuki edges Gold Hill By Brent Plummer Photos by George Roberts and Plummer BRASELTON, GA, OCT. 30 he final round of the WERA/EBC Brakes Endurance Series at Road Atlanta was a fitting end to another glorious season for Team Suzuki Endurance. The dominant team, which had earlier won its eighth endurance championship, topped Gold Hill Racing by less than a lap to win the four-hour event. Dutchman Racing - fresh off their AMA/CCS Endurance Challenge win at Daytona - finished third overall, three laps down on the leaders. Virginia Breeze, National Car Rental, and TSBA filled the. top six - all of whom were T 10 competing in the Heavyweight Superbike class. And the race was filled with controversy. First, after little more than an hour was completed in the event, Team Suzuki Endurance's oil cooler came loose on the team's Suzuki GSXR1100, necessita ting a lengthy pit stop for repairs. Luckily, Team Suzuki Endurance had fielded another Heavyweight Superbike team, and they simply switched lead riders Michael Martin and Kurt Hall from the"A" to the "B// Team Suzuki Endurance II (TSE-II) machine. Since every move TSE makes is closely monitored throughout the pits, this caused quite an uproar. But soon it ,was discovered tha t everything was in order - Martin and Hall had signed up as riders for TSE-II before getting on the machine so everything was all very legal. But more problems surfaced. Gold Hill Racing pitted six times to refuel its stock gas tank equipped Yamaha aW01framed, FZRlOOO-powered machine, and their scorers missed one of those stops (mistakenly thinking that it was a lap that was missed). All of which trans- lated into an extra lap on the scoring sheets. So Gold Hill, piloted this weekend by Christian Gardner and Fritz Kling, was originally given the win, makir:tg things tense down in the Team Suzuki Endurance pits - they knew they had won, but had no way to prove it. Eventually, the WERA officials uncovered Gold Hill's scoring error and gave the win to Team Suzuki. However, all of these confusing nuances meant little to the title chase. Team Suzuki had long ago clinched the 1992 title, and ended the season with 1193.28 accumulated points - most of which were a direct result of winning all but three races entered this year. The closest competitor - Force Racing - was second overall and Heavyweight Production class champions with a distant 857.50 points. . If Force Racing, seventh at Road Atlanta, had not finished so well they could have lost second overall to the amazing Middleweight Production COAtenders, Team Pearls - who ended up third overall in the series, first in Middleweight Production with 833.70 total points. Team Pearls had tried everything possible to capture second overall. "We had entered Heavyweight Production on our (Honda CBR600) F2 because we didn't want to start 15 seconds behind Force with the rest of the Middleweight bikes," explained team . rider Marty Lentz. "But then, towards the end of the first hour, I was going up the hill towards turn two and the motor started free-revving; I thought I had broken a chain, so I looked down. The chain was still intact and I pulled off the track thinking that I might be leaking oil. I checked over the bike - which was fine - and noticed that there was not much free-play in the clutch lever, so I yanked the cable and tried to make it back in." Lentz soon realized that the team had a defective aftermarket clutch, and waited for the crash truck to retrieve him. Team Pearls eventually finished 23rd

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