COMMERCE, Ga. – Following a successful two-day test session at Royal Purple Raceway in Houston, Jerry Savoie and the White Alligator Racing team head for this weekend’s Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals with a renewed sense of enthusiasm and confidence. At last weekend’s Houston event, Savoie rode his Buell V-twin to a best of 7.01-seconds in a round one loss to Eddie Krawiec. After two of 16 events, he is ranked 13th in the NHRA Full Throttle Pro Stock Motorcycle standings. “That’s not good,” said Savoie. “The weather was warm in Houston but we never made a six-second run all weekend. That’s unacceptable. We ran in the sixes at almost every event last year and we should be at least that good this time.” Savoie, crew chief Mark Peiser, and the rest of the White Alligator team stayed behind in Houston and made eight runs. Their original plan was to test on Monday but they elected to make additional runs on Tuesday as well. The end result was a much improved 6.92-second pass at over 193-mph. Savoie also tested last year’s Suzuki and posted a very conservative 7.01-second run, giving them two competitive bikes for this weekend’s Atlanta event. “We could run our Suzuki this weekend and I know it could qualify in the top half of the field, but we will almost certainly run the Buell because I still believe it has the most potential,” said Peiser. “While we were testing, we discovered a problem with our fuel injection system. Basically, the injector we were using wasn’t big enough so we went to a larger one. That 6.92 was a pretty conservative run but it showed us that we were headed in the right direction. Now, I believe we have something we can tune on.” During his successful rookie season in 2011, Savoie qualified ninth in his first appearance at Atlanta Dragway and defeated Michael Ray to reach the quarterfinals. He is expecting to equal or surpass that performance this weekend. “When we get to Atlanta, we’re going to surprise some people,” Savoie said. “When we got this new Buell we knew there would be a learning curve and there has been. We’re still learning but Mark has made a lot of progress, and I think we’re going to run a lot better going forward.” From: Kelly Wade
