EDITORIAL
Less than Triumphant
Author: Jim Richardson
Some days you just can’t catch a break
 We plan each trackday with thoroughness and meticulous attention to detail that rivals the Normandy invasion. Route maps, track maps, surveillance (in the form of YouTube onboard video), training, equipment, food, fuel, spare parts; everything is obsessively marshaled for the assault. Each eventuality is foreseen and planned for, from lost valve stem caps down to legal forms for power of attorney to make medical decisions and a living will. Our checklist, of which we are quite proud, has been developed through a comprehensive assessment of actual needs, potential needs, remotely possible needs, cool gizmos we may never need but which we've seen others bring, and a litany of stuff we've forgotten on previous outings. It is more complete than the one NASA used for the Apollo moon launch but sometimes, it's the things you can’t control that get you.
Halfway through my second session of Saturday morning at Carolina Motorsports Park, I was beginning to get comfortable with the track. It was time to wick it up. Coming lazily around the triple-apex sweeper, I tapped it down a cog and prepared to pass a Ducati that was impeding my forward progress. I live for moments like these! I let out the clutch, twisted the throttle to the stop and got…. Nothing. The engine dropped to idle, the twistgrip went limp, and in the five seconds or so that it took to put my left hand up and coast safely to the inside of the track, three things occurred to me. First, I’d obviously just experienced a broken throttle cable. Worse news yet, I was riding a weird-Alice English bike with hard-to-get parts. On the plus side, it was still early on a Saturday and shops would be open. Having once repaired a BMW clutch with a bicycle brake cable, I believed I’d be able to MacGuyver a solution and be back on the track by the time the lunch break was finished. Then the crash truck showed up.  Sitting in the back was a long, shiny aluminum ramp specifically made for the convenient and easy loading and unloading of motorbikes. Instead of using that, the driver lowered the tailgate of the flatbed trailer, got a good running start and pushed the bike up. There was an ugly grating noise as the bike bottomed out where the gate hinged to the trailer. Suddenly a large pool of fluid appeared beneath the machine which, despite its Britishness, hadn't leaked so much as a drop to this point in its life. As it turned out, the angle of the tailgate was too steep, causing the drain plug to snag and rip a big chunk of aluminum out of the bottom of the oil pan. I watched helplessly as four quarts of high-tech, high-dollar synthetic oil poured from my wounded Triumph onto the trailer and the track, not to mention pooling onto my brand-new set of Pilot Sports.
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