Promising
results from Ashcroft
The 2013 CMDRA season kicked off at Eagle Motorplex near Ashcroft,
B.C. May 25-26th. Thirteen Time Champion Ethan Barkley came into
the event with nothing more than a bike that idled. The last four
months had been spent designing and building one of the most state
of the art Pro Street turbo systems on the market. Taking on such
a task was a massive undertaking and it came down to the final
hours before the Eleanor was up and running but it was far from
race ready.
The Saturday morning test session started off a little rough as
the bike wouldn't even accelerate without stalling. The next several
runs in qualifying were less than spectacular but each pass was
better than the next. Ethan spent every minute with his head buried
the laptop tuning the newly installed MoTec M400 ECU. This type
of system requires more than just a simple downloading of a file,
the entire ignition and fuel maps needed to be created from scratch
and then uploaded to the bike. By the time the qualifying session
had ended, the Ethan was making clean runs under power with a best
elapsed time (E.T.) of 9.34 seconds at 167 mph.
Sunday
morning's test session allowed Barkley another chance to tune
the bike
for the upcoming elimination round. It would prove
to be worth its weight in gold as he made a ton of progress posting
a 8.35 @ 175+ mph. That pass put him right in the range of number
one qualifier Ken Froese who was running consistent 8.20's. The
two would meet during round one eliminations, but that was where
Ethan’s luck would run out. After a strong start he edged
ahead of Ken slightly until the bike faltered. A data entry error
before the run caused far too rich of a mixture and the bike ran
poorly to say the least. Ken would go on to take the win over Ethan
and went on to win the event.
Ethan's
weekend wasn't over yet, he entered the CMDRA Gas Shootout where
the two quickest qualifiers would go head to head
for bragging rights. He wasted no time getting back on the laptop
in the pursuit of a good tune up in the new system. The hard work
was starting to pay off as Ethan posted an 8.08 @ 177 mph, good
enough for top spot. In the finals Ethan kept tweaking the ECU
and put up an 8.18 @ 179.89 mph and took the win.
Starting with bike that hardly idled and ending up with the low
E.T. and top speed of the Pro Street competitors was more than
Ethan had hoped for. It was obvious that the new system was working
and showed amazing potential. With 7 weeks until the next event,
Barkley will undoubtedly be working the bugs out of the new system.
Photo by: seven62
Follow Ethan on Twitter @ethanbarkley
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