Cold weather brought out droves of racers in the woods of Bartow Florida.
We had 20 Electric entries, 4 fewer than HS2 as some of them competed in the arena cross in Arcadia FL this same weekend.
Entered in the race were 8 starks, several Ultra Bees, Derek Timm on his custom built RME weapon and Mark Peroni with three XE4 riders including himself, his brother Glenn and Shawn Clark.
The super dusty track surrounded a beautiful lake with plenty of natural obstacles.
The silt was choking everybody and made visibility on the course very poor. It seemed it hadn’t rained there in months. Slick hard ground underneath the silty top was treacherous, causing LOTS of minor crashes. Just sitting in the pits for our race we saw over 15 crashes! 2 of them under the transponder loop, 2 in the pits and several before and after the transponder loop and we could only see about 60 yards of the track!
We had some motor overheating issues at the last race but we hopefully resolved them with a larger rear sprocket, a raised over temp threshold and a cooling fan on the EBMX XUB-80 motor. Our Ultra Bee was running cool with the changes we made however the ambient temperature was 15 degrees cooler than the last race so we will have to see how it does in future races.
Kaleb got off the La-Mans style start around 3rd but when he completed the first 10 mile loop, even after going over the bars, he was more than a minute ahead of the Start Varg rider in 2nd place. After his second lap he was still a minute and a half in front of second. The problem was, with the overheating fixed, he was going through batteries faster than before. Lap three we could only give him a battery with 50% charge. He rode in mode 1 the whole lap but still ended up with a dead battery about 2 miles from the pits, ending our day. All he could do was watch his competitors go by one by one knowing that he had their number.
There was a huge plume of smoke in the distance and for a second I thought it might be anger smoke coming from Kaleb’s ears. But it turned out to be a gas bike that caught fire and because of the dry and windy conditions, it consumed quite a bit of brush before it was contained. For safety reasons some racers were diverted off the track and not allowed to finish the race while others were allowed to pass after the fire subsided, which altered many finishing positions.
Despite the disappointment of losing our huge lead, we are getting there. The bike and Kaleb have gotten more comfortable going fast and nothing broke or overheated. That is progress! Next race we will have new custom batteries that should solve the range problem. We will also be moving to Sirris suspension which should allow Kaleb to be even faster at the next race on January 4th.