Hey guys it felt good to run a Grand National twins race in my home state of Washington. Although we were still six hours from my house it was cool to have a twins National back in our state. The weekend started out a little behind schedule from a traffic jam leaving Spokane to having a rain out on Saturday. We ended up rescheduling the race for Sunday which meant I would miss the test day at castle rock.

During practice we tried a set up the bike a way we have never ran before and it seemed like it worked okay but was definitely a little too soft. After practice we changed gearing and that was about all we had time to do. The gearing helped a lot with slowing me down into the turns and getting me off of the turns. After qualifying we decided to change the spring to one a little stiffer. It seemed to help me but it still had a bad bounce or wobble out of the turn. We stiffened the back up more and did a lot more of other changes to the bike. We made so many more changes that it became questionable if it all would end up working.

My heat race ended up going pretty good. I got an okay start and I think I was running about eighth and the top six are direct transfer to the main. The line I ran in practice and in qualifying wasn't working in my heat so I came down to the bottom of the track where everyone else was running and I slowly found myself moving forward. I ended up passing into the last transfer spot with about five laps to go and made a move into fifth on my last lap but lost that position in turn three and four. I was happy to have a direct transfer to the main and to try and get a few more points going towards my battle for Rookie of the year.

Going into the main I tried to pay close attention to what the track was doing. We made a little change to the bike which I think started to work good towards the end of the race. I had a really bad start in the main and tried to run the high line and pass the guys that were stuck in traffic. I think it worked for a couple guys but I shortly figured out that I needed to move down into the racing line before I got freight trained and find myself going backwards in the main. As the race went on I started to find better racing lines and I found myself moving forward again.

I ended up coming home with an eleventh place finish in the main. I was happy with that. I wish I would have found those lines a little sooner in the race. The bike felt good and I have to say everything we did helped. I have to say thank you every one for your help and we are looking forward to the Sacramento Mile this weekend.