VOL. 54 ISSUE 27 JULY 11, 2017 P127
(Left) Getting
ready for battle.
Cycle World
magazine's Don
Canet, himself
a multiple Pikes
peak podium
finisher, is in the
background
(red/black
jacket). (Below)
Scaysbrook's
qualifying run
was hampered
by, err, not being
able to see.
first, me second, thanks to one single run in the dreary fog of a Friday morning from
the Start to Glen Cove.
We were hounded all week by the Kawasaki Z900 of 2016 winner, Bruno Lan-
glois. This was a personal battle for me. I wanted to beat the likeable Frenchman
bad this year after he benefitted from my 2016 screw up, so while Fillmore may
have been a touch out of reach, Bruno was not, even if the times were dramatically
close all week long. His little 900 Kawasaki was unlike any I'd ever seen before. A
200-horsepower beast built by French tuning maestro Akira (the man who used to
build the Kawasaki WorldSBK engines), the green machine sounded like a banshee
with fire in its heart. It screamed up the mountain, but I still knew I had the best pos-
sible machine in the KTM for when it counted, race day.
What put me in a greater frame of mind was the fact that my KTM mechanic Nate
Abila and I had hardly touched the bike all week, save for changing tires, bleeding
the clutch and giving it a general once-over each day. From the first day to the last,
