AMA team testing at Laguna Seca

January 23, 2003

by dgrace:

So Jimil and I headed down to Laguna yesterday.

Beautiful sunny weather on the drive down and at the track when we got there. No admission fee, the lady at the front was really nice. We just had to sign in as "guest"s and stay out of the way, no worries! Parked the car and headed over to the turn 3 fence to watch Tony Miering, EBoz, and Larry Pegram go tear-assing around. We look over next to us and there, sitting by himself on a little scooter, is Ben Bostrom. Jimil says "How's it goin'?" and he asks us to wait a sec - he's trying to hear the shift points one of the other guys is using. When he's done he takes a minute to say hi and we wish him best of luck this season, and he poses with Jimil for a photo. Which I fucked up, since I thought the camera took it but it didn't. But if it had worked, it probably would have looked a lot like the composite below.

Anthony Gobert wasn't riding Thursday but his brother was out there on a Yamaha, as was Damon Buckmaster and Jamie Hacking. Those things backfire like crazy going into Rainey corner. We walked over to the Corkscrew and took a bunch of video there, then crossed the bridge over turn 9 where we met a couple of other fans - they'd been there all week! I got good video of one of the Yamahas (#40, don't know who that was) having a pretty good "moment" coming down the corkscrew. We told the other guys who we are and they said "CanyonStrafers? You guys know John Hughes?" Turns out one of them is Leo, a guy who does trackdays with John. Small world!

We walked around to 11 and got some more video, then it started to sprinkle rain, so we headed back to the paddock as all the teams started to pack up. But the rain (really just a thick fog) stopped pretty quickly and the sun came back out, so the riders started lapping again. Headed over to turn 2 to shoot more video and then finished up the tape over at turn 5.

Ben Bostrom never did get in a lot of laps, he kept going out for like 1 or 2 then coming in. His brother was tear-assing around all day, and so was Tony Miering. Kurtis Roberts was out a lot on an RC-51, so was DuHamel. The stacks of tires those guys have to work with just made me cry, and no, they weren't chucking take-offs over the wall (I checked). Looked like they were packing them back into the trucks to take home.

By the look of the trucks coming in, looks like the CART guys are going to be there this weekend.

Coustier was right - a good day to play hooky from work. The link to the video is below.

dave

Jimil meets Ben Bostrom outside of the turn 3 fence

Da Video