WEIGHING THE COUNTDOWN CASE FOR PSM TOP SEED HINES
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CLOSING IN ON MILESTONE
If, for a second time, Andrew Hines earns a third consecutive Pro Stock Motorcycle championship, he will match Dave Schultz’s class record of six.
He said he never thought his named would be mentioned along with the late Schultz’s when it came to on-track performance.
“No. When I started out in this sport 15 years ago, it was never on my radar that I could get to this point. It was years and years ago I wanted to retire. I thought I'd done enough for my level of racing,” Hines said.
“Luckily it's turned the corner and everything has come back to me here recently: a couple more championships and a lot more wins the last few years. That kind of smooths over any rough edges I had about it years and years ago. I was 19 years old when I started. I was happy to go out there and race every weekend, have fun, ride a motorcycle that goes 200 miles an hour in under seven seconds. It was something that was never on my radar. I would look at some of the stats those guys had and think, ‘Wow, that's a lot of wins. I'm going to be well retired or not in any shape to be racing by then.’ It's just an evolution.
“I've had an awesome team the entire time that's given me the capability to go out there and perform and have a flawless motorcycle every time,” he said. “There's probably a handful of times in my 15 years where I haven't either made it all the way to the finish line or maybe less than three or four times I've had to push the motorcycle off the starting line. We're talking about a couple thousand runs in that time frame. To have a team that's that resilient, to always give their best effort, make sure everything is flawless, that's how you get to achievements like this. You got to have a great team behind you.”
LUCKY HINES
Q. Do you ever wonder what it would be like to go out on your own and create your own team from scratch?
ANDREW HINES: Well, it would be definitely tough. I've seen the roads these guys go down. People have found different ways to build motorcycles and find horsepower, bring out different innovations. Working closely with our Vance & Hines customers, Jerry Savoie and Tim Kulungian, [I see] they've built basically an entire team from the remnants of an older team, but they found different ways to come out and find different horsepower.
“When I got kicked off in drag racing, yes, I was with the premier team that had been around for a long time with my dad leading the way and my brother racing. But they instilled in me if I wanted to learn how to do this, I had to learn to do it from the ground up. I started with a chassis as a normal person would. I had to figure out a way to build that motor, getting parts from this person, that person, stealing a lot of my brother's spare parts, doing fabrication myself. I had to work my way up through those ranks.
“Never had to drive my own truck to the race. We would travel around in motorhomes. There's a level of respect I have for the teams that have gone the hard way of doing it. I'm fortunate enough to have the backing of a major American company. Harley-Davidson has really helped pave the way for us in the last 15 years.”
LUCKY HINES, PART 2
Hines was being grateful, not smug, when he acknowledged last week in an NHRA-arranged teleconference that he has enjoyed a success throughout the season this time around:
“This season has come pretty good to us. We've had a lot of I'd say unexpected success on my side of the team. We always keep Eddie's [Krawiec’s] bike consistent. I'm the guinea pig on the crew. We make a lot of changes to the motorcycle for tune-up things and research and development for later in the year. This year everything has worked out in our favor. Years past I've been up and down on performance. This year it's been a lot better. We've been making smarter changes, figuring out what our motorcycles need in different types of weather. Last year at this time, we were hitting our stride because we had struggled with figuring out how to burn the Sunoco fuel. This year we've had a lot more notes to fall back on from last season. Everything has been pretty good. I had a few rocky stumbles there in the beginning of the season with a first-round loss in Atlanta. We can chalk those up to learning scenarios. Everything has been good as of late. Still haven't had the quickest motorcycle but found our way to the winners circle on Sundays and Mondays.
“We take a different approach with my motorcycle. Fortunate enough to have two teams running for Harley-Davidson. We can treat each motorcycle a little differently throughout the weekend. We use one as a barometer to see how we should be running and we can run the other one around outside of our tuning window to find performance here and there. We hone in on that and figure out what we need to do for Sundays. It's been working for us. Like I said, the season has been going really well. My performance turns around on Sundays typically. You've seen that in races here more recently. Maybe I haven't qualified the greatest but I can pick away at it slowly on Sunday. The more rounds we get, the faster we can be. Quite the adventure we've been on here recently. It's a little frustrating when you're moving around and trying to learn things throughout the weekend but it all pays off in the end when you can find the performance on Sunday and start going rounds.”
THE EDDIE FACTOR
Probably Andrew Hines’ biggest rival on the racetrack is teammate Eddie Krawiec. But Hines said it’s fun to have that battle with the man he can’t escape from at the office, the track, or even his own neighborhood.
“Having Eddie as my teammate, it's probably made it harder on the rest of the class, because we try to push each other so much harder because we each want to have the faster bike in the pit area.
“We work on that every single day here at the shop, to make sure our motorcycles are going to be as prepared as identical as possible. We are very proud about how consistent they run with each other, while being near the front of the pack. You see other teams that have multiple vehicles – maybe they can't get one of them to run. Seems like nearly every weekend we have consistent power and consistent enough runs where we're both able to have a chance to run late into eliminations on Sunday,” Hines said.
“We push each other every single day to be better. We keep each other in check on Sundays and throughout qualifying, making sure we're making the right calls, analyzing and preparing for each weekend. A lot of our race wins happen because of the preparation that happens here at the shop. We may get to the track and look like we're not working hard. That's because everything happened here at Vance & Hines.”
THE DECLAN FACTOR
Andrew Hines has repeated victories and championships. After his Labor Day victory at Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis, just two or three miles from the team shop in Brownsburg, Ind., Hines and son Declan duplicated something extra-special.
“We repeated a picture that we took when I won the U.S. Nationals in 2012, when Declan was two years old. It was me holding his hand walking down the left lane of the racetrack. We wanted to repeat that exact same picture,” Hines said.
“We got hold of my parents, who were at my trailer. They dragged him up to the starting line, repeated that same picture,” he said.
“At the same time, he's been bugging me. He wants to drive a Junior Dragster real bad. Every time he gets on that subject, he wants NHRA to start a junior motorcycle class. I had him stage right where the starting line was, went down on the golf cart. He wanted to make his first quarter-mile run. He did that when he was six years old. He was laser focused. He drove a simulator last year at the Indianapolis car show, some display they had there. He was making laps around Indy Motor Speedway. He just had this super-intense focus going on,” Hines said. “I saw that same look on him the other day when he rode down the track here at Lucas Oil Raceway. He's going to be a tough competitor. I think he's got that same blood running through his veins that I got. He's passionate about every single thing he does, whether it's his Tae Kwon Do practice, shooting the BB gun, riding his dirt bike, and ripping up the grass in the yard. He's 100-percent committed to everything he does. I think it runs in the family.”
Dad predicted Declan will get his first Junior Dragster soon: “Probably over this off-season. He'll probably be out there running in the five- to seven-year-old class next year. It will be a different experience for me. He'll have four wheels instead of being on two.”
File this tidbit under “Daddy Needs Another $75,000 Championship To Break Even On That Deal.” - Susan Wade
When one sorts out Andrew Hines’ remarks during last week’s NHRA-generated teleconference, it’s really hard to tell whether the No. 1-seeded Pro Stock Motorcycle racer he thinks he has a better than 50-50 chance to earn an historic sixth series crown.
Hines, who said, “We're ready for the battle and we're ready for everybody,” was totally positive about his odds. He simply was being practical about the high quality of the competition.
So here, in Hines’ words – and Competition Plus’ imposed pro/con format – is his assessment of the six-race 2016 Countdown to the Championship . . .
Top 10 reasons Andrew Hines will do well in the Countdown to the Championship:
1. “I feel like I'm pretty confident right now. The last two years, notably 2014, I was less confident because I had been racing for 10 years or eight years since I won my last championship. I'd gone in the Countdown battle with a couple people years prior and made major mistakes along the way. It was always in the back of my mind I didn't want to go back and make those mistakes. Luckily I've been able to learn from those mistakes, notably in 2007 and 2010. This year and last year I feel more confident than I did in 2014, for sure.”
2. “My performance level has been higher this year. Haven't had any red lights the last couple years. I'm knocking on my desk right now because it's made out of wood. I've been kind of dialed in on the reaction times.”
3. “My riding has been fairly decent. Haven't been a superior rider as of late. Been kind of making some rookie mistakes on getting the bike to go straight down the track.”
4. “Been pretty focused on staging and keeping it as shallow as I can to get the most E.T. possible. My lights have excelled because of that. I needed to improve on reaction time to pick up maybe a couple hundredths on the other end. I feel good about this year.”
5. “I'm getting back into better physical condition than I have been in years past. Been doing a lot more running, keeping my stamina up, which helps on Sundays when you're going rounds.”
6. “This is when experience comes into play, keeping pressure out of your head and in the right spot. You can learn from things like Indy this past weekend. I made a major rookie mistake on Monday. I didn't eat breakfast. I paid the price come the semifinals. I had no blood pressure, light-headed getting away from the computer after looking at a run. I had to sit down in front of our big fan in the pit area, cool off, drink as much water as I could to get my blood pressure back up. That's when the seasoned experience rolls in. We rolled up for the final round, I was feeling horrible. As soon as I put my helmet on I felt like I could run a marathon. Get your head in the right spot.”
7. “We're doing the best to make sure my bike is consistent.”
8. “[If I ] work on our 60-foots . . . we'll be there with everybody else.”
9. “It's fortunate for us these [first] three races are bounced around Indianapolis [at Charlotte, St. Louis, Reading, Pa.] so we can get back here and do normal maintenance on our motorcycles, go home and sleep in our beds, not worry about traveling around the country too far.”
10. “I love three races in a row. Keeps your mind sharp, keeps you going from one race to the next. If we can get off to the right start, be on the right foot, it sets the tone what's going to come in the next few weeks after that.”
Top 10 reasons Andrew Hines might have a struggle in the Countdown to the Championship:
1. “It's going to be tough. The Pro Stock Motorcycle competitors have found every which way to make the class tighter than it has been in years past.”
2. “I always talk about the class getting better, but you can see that's the truth: separated by one-tenth of a second. Killer racing going on right now in Pro Stock Motorcycles.”
3. “It's going to be a dogfight all the way till the end.”
4. “If you have an average race, you can still lose this thing. You have to get every round win possible.”
5. “You make one mistake, it could cost you ultimately at the end of the year.”
6. “I think everybody's got their combination dialed in right now.”
7. “Obviously the playing field is tough. Most of the field this last weekend, like I said, a 10th of a second from one to 16. If you look from two to 16, this is seven hundredths. That is probably the tightest we've had in the history of this class.”
8. “Everybody has brought their best out here for these last few races. You're going to see more and more of that throughout this Countdown.”
9. “It's going to be decided on the starting line from here on out. You want to make sure you get that advantage. You don't want to give up any little bit at the starting line. Makes a difference on the finish line.”
10. “If you have one bad race, then you know you got two more that you can attempt to try to make up a bad race. These days, it's not going to happen. You're going to have to be super-consistent. You're probably going to have to go to the semifinals every single race of this Countdown to have a shot come Vegas, Pomona.”
