Hey guys, I'm sure most of you remember riding and racing at the track in Live Oak (Use to be amp) that got closed by the county a few months back. This has nothing to do with amp now and will be operated totally independent from them since they went to Madison. My family owns the property and we've put our application back in with Suwannee County to try for our special exception again. I'm pretty confident that we will get it. We've hired a really smart attorney and the board already passed us once back when they first issued us the permit, it just got revoked thanks to an error the county made when they issued the permit. Was totally 100% out of our control.

 I am keeping a blog with all the update information and a little back story at www.gmimx.net Our application hearing will be November 20th at Live Oak city hall. I know the economy isn't so great right now but at least fuel prices are coming back down. I hope that some of you guys and gals that enjoyed the track will be able to make it out to speak in favor of it. I will keep the blog updated as often as I can, and if anyone has any info or can help out in any way with the preparation for our hearing, that would be great. I know some of you during the SSQSA had issues with the neighbors as you were going in and out too. If you were one of them, please get in touch with me as well. I sill have a couple of you on my PM list I think from back when it was happening.  With your help we can get a group together and get this thing back through again and have it re-opened.

believe in.

Its been interesting, to say the least. I'll start off with a few things that has happened in my normal (HA!) private life. As I've posted in bulletins and blogs here before I was an owner of the Amp extrememotocross park here in Live Oak. That went south, really south back in February and culminated here in the last few days by my previous business partners removing from the officer list of the corporation....and then we found out that Suwannee County is in the process of revoking the permit to operate the track, gettin boned twice over that. Its pretty screwed up, the way everything has been going with that. I really liked the track and spent thousands of hours working on building it and keeping it up. I didn't get much time to hang out or talk with the riders that came out because I was always doing stuff and I do really regret not making time to do that now. I guess the whole thing will just have to be chocked up to one of those life lessons.

So anyways...back to me racin'. The SFTL went through some re-structuring and combined with Brady from Thunderbowl and is now the "Southern Dirt Track Association". We've had one race of the season already at Cross roads motorplex over in Jasper. It went really well. I started building a "new" flat track trike back in December and was just getting it finished up in March in time for that race. Infact I was up till about 4AM the morning of that race in my shop still wrenching on it. Since everything was so new and un tested I just took it easy on the track, didn't have any major issues other then an exhaust mount broke and I had to wire it to the frame for the main event. It ran very very strong and considering I hadn't even got the carb dialed in right and I pretty much chopped the frame in half to do my mods I was very happy with it.

Theres a race coming up this weekend, the 17th at Ocala Speedway on the 3/8 mile stock car track. I'm plannin on going ahead and really opening this thing up there. I'm gonna give myself a fighting chance and run in the knobbie class, hehe. I got some 18inch turf tamers I put on it and I lowered the suspension on down a little bit more. I'm running 15/36 gearing and am expecting to reach speeds in excess of 85mph on the straights at this track since its so big. The ole 500 motor I slid in my flat tracker should help with that.  I did most all the fab work myself. Mike @ WRC here in town did the bottom frame rail bends for me but I welded and put everything else together.  Came out pretty factory looking, needs some paint on it though. Someone hook me up with a powder coating sponsorship, eh? Heres a couple pics of it...

Well, the races got off to kind of a rough start. We got rained out Saturday evening. I put about 6 laps of practice in, and then about 10 minutes after that it poured. After everyone sat in their vehicles for about 30 minutes they decided to call the race, to wet. Everyone was suppose to be back at 10:00AM Sunday to resume. I got there around 9:30 and the track was nasty nasty nasty. In addition to that, I guess most people packed up and had left after the night before. The crowd was pretty small. After a while we got together with the track owner and came up with a plan for everyone to get out on the tracks and just drive around on it a lot to try and get the water squished out of it and dried up. It was still really overcast so the sun wasn't helping much. After about 30-35 laps we got it dried out. Karts ran on it and got the groove started, and then we REALLY got it going. By the end of the day it was awesome and hooking up freakin insane, like asphalt. I've been trying and have finally gotten where I can do pretty good at pitching the trike before I even get into the corner instead of driving a 1/4 of the way through it and then starting to slide. Normally, when I'm on one of these aggressive tracks the tread on the outside of the tire will be burnt, and the inside will be like brand new. This time the inside is feathered almost as much as the outside. It didn't get as light because of my riding style. It was still crazy though, when I would come in and get sideways to start with the tires would be barking just like it was on pavement. And they (the tires) were hot!!! when I got back off the track. It was just Walter and I, and we ended up running with 2 other quads for our heats and main. I got ahead of the one quad guy in the second heat for a long time, probably 4-5 laps and then I blew through the groove on one corner and he got around me. In the main I was ahead of the other guy for 2-3 laps and then he finally got around. Thats better then I been doing though. Tough work to even hang with the quads. Overall everything went really well, looking forward to the next race up in Valdosta.

I got a phone call after having been at the track for a few hours on Saturday afternoon that there was some bad weather headed our direction. It didn't look to bad at the time so I sort of wrote it off. We ran our two practices and by the time the heats started it was drizzling. While we were on the grid it was coming down enough to get on my goggles and make it where I kept having to clean them. I eventually took them off and put them under my arm so they would be out of the rain to a certain extent.  We got on the track, and I pulled a holeshot (Shoulda probably been a jumped start, but they didn't call it so I aint complaining!) Kept it the whole time although I came pretty close to losing it on the final lap. As soon as we rolled off the track it started pouring and didn't quit for almost an hour. They called the race, but because everyone had ran a heat it was enough for it not to be re-scheduled. So, I got first place, but I was hoping for a rain out date to finish up...oh well.

Sup people, lots of stuff going on lately. I want to start off with saying THANKS to MotoXsupport for picking me up as one of their support riders. I ordered some crank seals from them for my 265 race motor I''ve been working on for months now and everything went great. Check em out!



As for racing, July was a pretty slow month for competition. The Southern Flat Track League took all of July off. I did race at Thunderbowl at Round 2 of their new TT race series they have. First time I ever did that and I had a lot of fun with it, will definitely be doing a little bit more of that in the future.  I'm also making some changes on my race bike. I've been running a relatively stock 250R engine sine the beginning of the season because of some technical problems I've had with my regular race motor. To keep a long story short, the crankshaft I had in it was manufactured wrong and the center cases were warped from a previous owners repair that kept letting oil into the crankcase whenever it ran. I've solved both of those problems and actually have it sitting in my R chassis over in the shop right now awaiting on me to finish assembling it.  Hopefully get everything buttoned up and dialed in for the up coming race this weekend 8-11-07. I did buy a quad finally...hahaha, a 250R of course. Maybe I'll post some pictures of that on here in the next couple of days.



I've also started a business venture with some guys that the local FLA and GA riders will be interested in. We are building a Motocross park here in the Live Oak area. Its called "AmpXtreme" Check it out http://www.ampxtreme.com We've all been working really hard on this, we have our first race scheduled with the SSQSA for October 14th. I know some of you guys race the SSQSA series so more then likely you'll be seeing me out at the track in a few months. The rain has been messing us up a bit lately but we're still pounding away at it and will have the track finished in just a few weeks. We have really big plans for this place and hope to work our way towards a national caliber facility. This is something I've wanted to do since I was a very young age. Pretty surreal to make a dream like this reality although its definitely not been without its ups and downs.  All the riders have been very supportive though and thats most important thing.



Thats pretty much what I've been up to and how I've spent my summer so far. If anyone has any questions on the track or anything else hit me back with a message and I'll be happy to answer them for ya. Good luck out there to everyone and stay safe.





Billy

I got an offer from Barry @ Bdawg's a few days ago, and after filling out the app and sending it in, it looks like I'm officially part of their supported team. Barry has been really generous and easy to work with. Their prices even without the racer discounts are really competitive, especially on the shipping end of things which is where most online stores and retailers gouge the crap out of you.   Check em out! www.bdawgsplastics.com/

Round 6 of the SFTL series is tomorrow back at Thunderbowl in Ocala FL. We'll be short one racer in our class, Alan (sykolincoln) is on vacation and won't be there. Quick opportunity for me to pick up some points I've lost in the last 2 races!

I've been a huge fan of the Magura 1/4 turn twist throttles for many years, and have always ran and preferred them over any other brands. I recently received a sponsorship offer from them and I was more then happy to accept it. I'm very familiar with their products (Excellent products BTW, I might add) and was pretty stoked to get deal with them.



So Magura, FEAR NOT! I The crazy maniacal three-wheeler racer will sport your products and do you well on the track.

Just from the second heat and the main event at the last race, Round 4 at Eastbay. Check em out in the video section.