I have a couple of updates. Dave Biasotti is happily underway. He contacted Bob this morning about his leaking new rear drive. Bob suggested he check the O ring seal for the ABS sensor. We tried to look at it in parking lot this morning, but BMW in it's usual wisdom uses a torx head screw to secure the sensor and neither Dave or I had one. He then left the hotel and went to a auto parts dealer, got the correct torx wrench, removed the sensor and found that the O ring was not damaged, it just simply was not there. He got a O ring that worked, put it back and reported back that it was no longer leaking.
Catfish was seen in the hotel parking lot at about 10:00AM getting his FJR jump started from, man it pains me to say this... an ST1300. He apparently left some electronics on overnight and drained the battery. He was underway shortly there after.
Most of the riders I talked to were on their way to Michigan when they left the hotel.
Alan Barbic fell victim to the most common enemy in the Iron Butt Rally, himself. After making the mistake of going after too many small bonus' on the way to Shane's house and getting there just before the bonus closed, he fell behind and never got caught up. He called me at about 2:30PM Sunday. He was still in Gila Bend AZ. It was 111 degrees. He had stopped to cool off in a Subway sandwich shop because he had started to feel sick and lightheaded. A sure sign of impending heat exhaustion. He made it into the checkpoint in time, barely. But that was just the start of his self inflicted problems.
There is more than one reason to get to checkpoints early in the Iron Butt Rally. The obvious is to be well rested before the paperwork for the following leg is handed out. But there are others. The scoring procedure for the Iron Butt can be time consuming. Scoring personal are encouraged to not hurry, and take their time with each rider to ensure that scoring is done accurately. The riders that arrive early find that most of the scoring people are not busy. They can get through scoring very quickly, then get to their rooms and sleep. As more and more riders come in a line forms that sometimes can take a long time to get through. I heard this wait time at the first checkpoint for some riders was excruciating. Everyone said it was much better at checkpoint 2. But even so, some riders did not finish scoring until 10:30 or so. That leaves them a very limited time to get things done they need, like bike maintenance, and get to bed to get some sleep.
After the experience of waiting at the first checkpoint, Alan was in a hurry to get into the scoring line at the second checkpoint. Instead of taking time to sit down and get all his pictures, receipts, fuel log and other items all together before sitting down at the scoring table, he just winged it. He ended up losing the 4,000 point rest bonus because he left the receipts in the room. He lost the 499 point call in bonus because he misread the time window. He lost some other bonus' because he forgot to fill in odometer or time entries on the paperwork. He finally went to his room about midnight beat up by the heat, disheartened by the scoring result and past dead tired. He woke up this morning suffering from leg cramps, no doubt due to the lack of hydration from riding in the extreme heat from the previous day. His feet got wet from riding in the sever rain of the first two days of the leg, and never dried out leaving blisters on his feet.
He left this morning, not in the position of working on a top ten finish, but trying to salvage a score to qualify as a finisher. This is the life of an Iron Butt rider......
I wish him the best of luck.
