That evening I invited the crew for dinner at the Rainbow. Hartmut had made a mantel piece from aluminum and presented it to me. It was much like a small trophy, but of jewelry quality. It was highly polished and nicely done. He had hand shaped a piece of aluminum in the shape of Black Lightning about 6 in length. The pedestal was a 7.3 specialloid piston, highly polished with a coin slot in it's crown. There was a threaded and knurled cap for the bottom of the piston, which became the base. It was engraved "To Mad Max from the Ace Hartmut Weidelich" When he presented it he said "Open it up.", which I did. There was a 200 Euro note in the piston's cavity, He had made a statement on jtan that he would not be coming empty handed. Truly a man of his word. I pointed out that there was no air scoop on the model of Black Lightning that he had made and I felt that it would have had a better effect and would have been more appropriate to have used a 13.5 piston than the 7.3. He gave me another one of his unique thumbs up gestures. What a guy.

We all arrived the next morning at 0600 at the pit area. The plan of the day (an old Navy way of doing things, where the plan of the day is read at morning quarters) was to do tow ups. I never thought about this, but the Navy operated pretty much on a day to day basis, much like you have to do when running your machine on the flats.

I gathered up all my paper work, headed for the T-shirt lady's booth, showed her that Black Lightning had jumped through all the hoops required by the BNI/SCTA. She gave me my packet. so four Black Lightning T-shirts, $445.00 and 13 hours of hard work later, we got our sticker. Back at the pits Hartmut was given the honors of putting the sticker on the nose of Black Lightning.

The first thing I wanted to do was check out the liner and see if it still would run, and let the crew who had never heard it before hear the thunderous bark of two blown Vincents. This taken care of, Hartmut commented, "You're crazY! You can hear the horsepower!"

This was the first day of the meet. there was to be a riders meeting at 11:00 a.m. Both Hartmut and Don had to attend the meeting, and the first runs were to commence at 0100 p.m. I made the decision that we would not go to the line for a run until the riders were thoroughly capable of getting the liner up on it's wheels and the liner was ready. So dead stick tow ups, and further checks of the liner were in order. There were a couple of things that I forgot to mention--the motorcycle scrutineers wanted to witness our tow up procedures prior to any runs, and when Don presented his "B" license to the scrutineers it was deemed invalid due to it's age after four years of inactivity. For any rider this license is invalid and he must start all over. Hence our first run would be limited.