Steve was at the five mile. Remember he's the one with the salt trailer. So it was up to John and I in the tow truck to get Don off the course. By the time we got there the SCTA safety crew were already there. Those guys are fast. They were checking to see if Don needed their assistance. When a vehicle aborts nobody knows why. It could be a fire or anything. So we hooked him up and towed him the five miles back to the pits on the return road. The return road is between the area where the pits are and the long course. There are turn in roads about every 1/4 mile into the pit area from the return road. They're pretty narrow. The cars have no problem making the turn but a motorcycle streamliner that takes a country mile to make a turn does. So here we were again, about to go through a drill that we'd never gone through and that was to signal the rider to use his brake to slow down the liner, while keeping the tow line tight while the tow vehicle slowed down. Anyway, trying to signal Don to put on the brake didn't work. I slowed down. The liner, which has very little rolling resistance, kept on going, running over the tow line with it's front wheel parting the tow line. This was a narrow escape from a disaster in the making. Somebody up there must have been thinking, "These guys are having enough trouble. I'll give them a break on this one."

Don got out of the liner and this time Don hit the skid lever by mistake and the liner was once again put on her side. No damage. Hartmut felt better I think. Steve loaded the liner up, made the turn and the 200 yard trip to the pit.

Now there was a debriefing with Don to try to figure out what went wrong. He reported that the liner was really accelerating in low gear, pulling like a train. It had lots of torque and then it just stopped pulling and went down to a fast idle. He said he let up on the throttle and the transmission popped out of low , so he aborted.

So the checking out of the liner began. I first thought that it had to be in the fuel. The nozzles, fuel filters, fuel lines were all checked, nothing wrong. Then the fuel pump itself was checked. Nothing wrong. Put everything back together and checked the ignition. Nothing wrong. There was nothing to do but fire it up and see if I could figure out what was going on. It fired right up, taking a throttle at times better than the previous. This was a bit perplexing, as I 'd never experienced this phenomena in all my years of tuning motorcycles. After going from the richest pill I dared put in her fuel system, to the leanest pill I dared to put in her, there was little change. You could blip the throttle and it wasn't right, but not bad. The next time you blipped the throttle it was terrible. Let it idle a bit and it was back to not good but not bad. after about six pill "jet" changes and six start ups I was really starting to doubt my ability to figure this one out. So it was back to checking the ignition. Hartmut on the points. John turning the engines over. Mike Shea, while fiddling around happened to look down the injector with the butterfly open. He said, "The blower is turning, but jerky, then stops when John turns the engine over." The problem had been found. Either the blower drive shaft keys, (there are three of them) had sheared, or the shaft had sheared, or the four 1/4 28 blower shaft flange screws had sheared. Whatever was sheared was grabbing and causing the blower to turn over sporaticly with the fixed ratio between the blower and the crankshaft. It all started to make sense. What was happening, the fuel air ratio was impossible to get a handle on. The blower giving air at times, but never a constant with the engine rpms as it should be. Nothing to do but take her apart and hope for the best. We found that it was the blower flange drive bolts that had sheared. The salt dyno hadn't put us on the trailer yet. This could be fixed.

The fix was to get the sheared off bolts out of the blower gear, replace the bolts and drill four additional holes for pins, for additional strength. We worked on the fix until they kicked us off the salt around 8 o'clock that night. John had taken on the chore of drilling the holes in the flange and the gear, and Don finally got the sheared off bolts out. We were all pretty tired after another day on the salt. This one being 14 hours in duration.