PSM Preview: H-D Uncertainty Heightens Competition For Bike Opener

Don’t tell the Vance & Hines Screamin’ Eagle Harley-Davidson team it is a shoo-in to win this weekend’s Amalie Oil Gatornationals.
 
The Brownsburg, Ind.-headquartered organization has won at Gainesville, Fla., in five of the past 12 years. Reigning and three-time champion Eddie Krawiec has won the last three visits, and last March there he set the national speed record at 199.26 mph and the track elapsed-time mark at 6.750 seconds.

It’s going to be a learning curve. We’re not sure how we’re going to start the season. It’s going to be tough. – Andrew Hines

But with NHRA-mandated changes last September, Krawiec and teammate Andrew Hines have been scrambling all winter just to prepare their bikes. For both, the NHRA’s 2013 East Coast debut and the first of 16 races for the Pro Stock Motorcycle class is a huge question mark.
 
“It’s going to be a learning curve. We’re not sure how we’re going to start the season. It’s going to be tough,” Krawiec teammate Andrew Hines said. Hines is the national E.T. leader at 6.728 seconds, also a three-time champion, and the 2004 Gatornationals winner. But he indicated he’s expecting an early struggle.
 

The NHRA announced Sept. 19 among its technical changes to the bike class for 2013 that the Harley-Davidsons will be allowed a maximum 160-cubic inch displacement (cid), for a 60-degree, two-valve, pushrod engine and setting minimum weight at 625 pounds. The four-valve Harley-Davidson engine combination no longer will be allowed. The new maximum of two valves per cylinder for all engines (with the exception of a Kawasaki engine, which may have four valves per cylinder) forces the two-bike team into an unfamiliar situation.
 
“Our Harleys are going from the four-valve dual overhead cam engine, which is the basic exact duplicate of what comes in the factory motorcycle,” Krawiec said. “They’re taking our engine and making us convert it, from a four-valve dual overhead cam to a pushrod engine. We’re not exactly happy with the way it went, because now it has zero resemblance to the way the American side of things were for our engine. They’re just trying to make it more of the American pushrod engine.”

 
The Vance & Hines riders made their statements last fall, then got to work, re-engineering and designing their power plants, for, as Krawiec put it last November, “we have nothing that we can currently throw on our bike that is NHRA legal.”
 
After what he described as “a lot of late hours put in,” Krawiec said his team still is pushing to be ready for Friday’s first qualifying session: “We were lucky enough to fire the engine up for the first time February 27th, had the motor running, and just recently started the R&D March 3rd where we were able to make poles and start running it on the engine dyno.”
 
In a March 6 phone call, he said, “Currently our motors have not even sat in our chassis. Our chassis had to go through a total change also. We had to refront the front half of our bikes to accommodate the motor and changes to make sure it worked correctly. As of right now we’re working hard on trying to fit all the parts. We just got some of our final air box pieces [that day]. Our bikes have not been down the track, have not been tested.

This is a major sponsorship. We all want to win another championship. – Kenny Koretsky

“It’s exciting just to be able to make Gainesville at this point,” he said. “We needed every bit of that off-season. I wish we had another three or four weeks. It’s going to be a long road from here. It’s going to take quite a bit of development work and effort to be competitive,” Krawiec said, predicting that his team might not start showing its full potential until May or June.
 
“I think the changes are going in the right direction,” team owner Gary Tonglet, father of racers LE and GT, said.
 
Meanwhile, 2010 champion LE Tonglet has reunited with Kenny Koretsky and will be riding the Tonglet Racing/Nitro Fish Suzuki.
 
“This is a major sponsorship. We all want to win another championship,” Koretsky, also an associate sponsor of Matt Smith’s and Angie Smith’s Buells, said.
 
The Arana Family will become a triple threat with 21-year-old Adam Arana joining his father and brother, “The Hectors” aboard  the ProtectTheHarvest.com/MAVTV Buell.
 
Missing from the entry list is unfunded Karen Stoffer, the 2007 winner and 2010 top qualifier who finished No. 5 in the standings last year.
 
Krawiec’s job away from the racetrack is to help prep many of his competitors’ engines.
 
“We build Suzuki engines for customers,” he said. “The Suzuki platform is going to be an exciting one this year. We were able to do a good, solid six months of development on our Suzuki program. I’m definitely going to say you’re going to see some of our Suzuki customers stepping up their game.”