Racing just hasn't been the same..

What's up, fuckers? We're at Barber Motorsports Park for round seven. Don't do that. Rachel's looking at me. Hey, what's up, guys? We're at Barber Motorsports Park for round seven of the Moto America series. I've got my buddy Nick here to do a little bit of video for us this weekend. I've been slacking all year, but he's here. So set up day, Thursday. Guys unpacked the whole truck, set the canopy up, brought the bike out. I had a stupid crash on Sunday morning in New Jersey, which was only four days ago. Went out on the bike for the race, and it felt a little weird. So they're going to go over the bike, make sure everything's straight, check over everything. I'm sitting here kind of pretending to help, wipe down when I can, but mainly just talking to Donnie, shooting ----. So got to go over all my gear, make sure everything's ready for tomorrow morning, and then later on we get to go to a new station at five o'clock and do a little interview for the weekend. Oh. Hey, there. Just kidding. So I've been racing professionally now for like 14 years, but this year, a couple of races ago, Rachel and I decided to get this little bag. I'll wear my helmet, wear my gloves, but she'll bring water bottles, my hat, ice pack for my neck on the grid. Just like stuff that we need on the grid or in practice, she's always carrying it in a helmet bag, but then it's just always confusing. So we got this little bag. I just went to Bass Pro Shops and got this tackle box, basically, but we fill it with stuff that I need on the wall instead of having it scattered all around. So this is just all my nose strip stuff, all the intake breathing stuff. Put this nose strip, one of these, on my nose to help with the breathing. It kind of pulls apart my nose so I can breathe a little bit better. Got earplugs, put the ring in here and stuff. Just kind of lets us be kind of ready on the go. Donnie, meet YouTube. Oh, great. Donnie's one of the mechanics on the team. Ask him anything you want. Josh, obviously you crashed this past Sunday, right? Yeah. What do you have to do to kind of prepare for the next race? Yeah, so basically after the crash and morning warm-up, we fixed what immediately needed to be fixed, the clip-ons, stuff like that, clean everything up. So today, just knowing that I did those things, take it all back apart and have more time to grease everything and make sure all the adjustments are made. Right now, we're just going to check on the motor, too, just do some checking on the internal stuff to make sure we're still good for another weekend. All right, guys, so we're at, what is it, NBC, ABC, NBC, I did an interview with NBC, one of those two. This morning we did, what did we do this morning, CBS? I don't know if they're going to let us bring the camera in, but we don't always get asked to do the news stuff, but every now and then we do, so it's kind of neat to jump all over it whenever we can, because it's good for the sponsors. We haven't been up at the front this year, so we haven't got a lot of TV time, so if we can get something on the news, it's good. See if they'll let you guys come in. All right, we went to the wrong building, we're here now at ABC, ABC interview, live report, with Rachel Heron. Oh, I don't have a mask. That would have sucked. Imagine we came all the way here and I didn't have it. Hey, y'all. Hello. How you doing? Good, how are you? Come on in. Can we bring him in a bed right now? Well, absolutely, yeah. Who are you? Cool. I'm Jeff Spiegel. Josh, nice to meet you. Josh, very nice to meet you. New lid. Scratched mine up last weekend, so Axis paints my helmets. They're out of North Carolina. Monday, I think. Told them I needed a new one. Got it done fast. Every helmet that I get that I run on the track, I take these nose pieces out. Every helmet makes them. I can't stand them. They're good for the street, but when I'm riding on the track, I want my viewport to be as big as I can possibly get it. Whenever I get this nose guard on there, it blocks my view, so I take that off. I also take this off. It's good for noise and maybe good for the street, but I want more air coming in there if I can. I also take these off, which sometimes they're kind of hard to get out, and make sure that yours is supposed to come out. I don't know if I can get it out. Sometimes I just gotta rip it out. I take that out, too. I don't like the way that this... Like I said, all this is good on the street, but there's a reason why they make it removable. This stuff, it just feels like it kind of gets jammed up or stuck on my neck. So whenever I'm going through the corner trying to look through, it feels like it kind of restricts my movement, so I take all that stuff out. We watch you on YouTube every night. Really? Yeah. Nice. Do you ride? Only on the back of mine right now. Mom won't let us get a dirt bike just yet. Oh, that's all right. Yeah. See you. Good luck, man. Have fun. Yeah, thank you. What does that do? It's the nose clip. You just put these magnets on each one of your nostrils on the sides of your nose, in case you didn't know what those are. And then this has a magnet on it. Hopefully it's not crooked because I'm going to look like a dumbass if it is. But it separates my nostrils, so. You see? And then I put this on. Can you see a difference on camera? Yeah. Your bike just feels like it's skating everywhere. I just feel like I can't push. Can I touch the front? Nope. It's like it just doesn't want me riding it. Just finished FP1 here today on Friday. We had a lot of problems with the electrical at the beginning of the session that I felt like we had at the Barber test whenever we came back here in March. It just wasn't comfortable on the bike. I knew something was going on now, though, because I have time on the bike. Where in March, it was my first time on the bike, so I didn't really know what was going on. But since we got a lot of time on the bike and coming off a good weekend like New Jersey, I knew something was funky. It felt like the sector where Steve puts in some electrical stuff so the bike knows where it's at on the track, make changes in certain sections of the track, it felt like the bike didn't know where it was on the track. And that ended up being what it was. So Steve made some changes, got the thing working really good, and we were able to do one change to the front or the rear with the suspension, which helped us a lot at the end of the session. Ended up getting us in P5 and getting up to speed pretty quickly. So we're within a second of the front guys, which I'm really happy about. I feel like I got a lot of confidence going into the second session. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. No bueno. We had a good first session and guys decided to go and want to do a shock change. I was against it and I talked with them and kind of thought, OK, it's worth a try. But I feel like every time I do good, it doesn't matter. In years past, it's like every time we have our good result, people always want to try and get it a little bit better instead of just, you know, the goal is to always improve. But when we're really comfortable on the bike, it's better to just leave it and make small little changes versus doing a big change that then just kind of mess the whole session up. Of course, you want to, you know, try things and see if they're better, but there's a certain time for it. And, you know, it's not Super Bowl. We have one more qualifying session tomorrow, but I'd like to be up front a little bit closer. We had a big moment coming down one of the hills, rolled off the throttle. I was on the throttle, third gear, wide open, came over the rise, rolled off the throttle. The rear stepped out, threw me off and, you know, I was able to hold on, but ran off in the grass and almost hit the wall. So, came back in, put the shock back in, the original shock, and, you know, it was a lot better. What are you watching? Super Stock 1000 race on the Moto America Live Plus app. Pretty sick. I can just sit in here and watch this live, watch the start, see what these guys are doing. Their pace is pretty similar to mine, so I usually kind of, you know, see what the track's like, see what tire choices are. If you're at home, it's a good app, too. Download it, watch us live. I think there's probably like, you know, the whole weekend pretty much is live on here, so it's like you're here. You don't even need to be at the track. It's great. Download it. If you're stupid, then, if you're not stupid, you'll download it. I can't think of anything to say. Rachel, what do you think about the app? It's great, except you've got to listen to Bobby Floyd, huh? Probably similar to what it feels like when people put their balls on your face. Sweaty? Rachel said sweaty. Heavy? You gonna win today? Yeah, Nick. That's a good question. So we just finished the morning warm-up on Saturday and a super full session. In the morning warm-up, I messed my ribs up. It was something that happened in the beginning of the year. I had the high side on the ovale. Messed my ribs up. Doctors think it was an intercostal tear, so whenever I crashed, it damaged it, but it wasn't too painful. And then I had a weird movement at home, and it separated the rib from the muscle or from the tissue, whatever it is. And when I crashed in New Jersey, I felt it started that process again. And then in the middle of the morning warm-up today, I just went to muscle the bike into a corner, and it happened again. So riding around with the ribs messed up a little bit. Super full was okay. We ended up, I think, seventh. Did our best time of the weekend, but just not able to go as fast as the other guys were going. It's been a frustrating year. Lots of ups and downs, but mainly just feel held back. I feel like I should be fighting up at the front with these guys. I feel like I'm riding better than I have in my whole life, but I just can't keep up with them. It's frustrating because it's hard to stay motivated going into the race, but you just got to dig deep and fight for it. Right off the bat, you can see Herring gets bucked up out of the seat. That's going to allow Cam Peterson to go past him. All right, so we just finished race one here at Barber. Pretty terrible. We've been running the same compound tire all weekend. For some reason in the race right now, I did two or three laps in the beginning that were pretty good. I got a bad start, but we were right behind Elias, Wyman, and that group right there. For some reason, turn two, the thing just skated around all of a sudden on the third or fourth lap. Almost high-sided me out of the seat. Whenever I landed on the seat, it messed my ribs up again, but it wasn't crazy pain. I could just feel that it did something, though. From that point on, the tires were just gone. I don't know what it is. Race one in New Jersey and race one here, same exact thing. Whatever happens, my tires dropped off in two seconds and not able to go any faster. It's a bummer for sure. I just kind of nursed it in and hope that tomorrow is better. The guys are going to go over the data tonight and see if they can see anything. Unlucky few races, so try to dig deep and find some motivation for tomorrow. Right now, I'm pretty bummed, so hopefully tomorrow is better. We've been sitting here for a couple hours now trying to figure out what we're going to do to the bike. Aaron, you can see at the beginning of the race, he had a little bit of a shuffling back. Now, the number two, the fan favorite on that BMW. I just finished race two here at Barber. I'm happy but bummed at the same time. We had a pretty bad start, but the changes that we made to the bike were really good. With the bad start, it kind of set us back a little bit. Caught back up, felt comfortable, but then hit a false neutral off the back straightaway and ran off the track into the gravel, cut across the other side of the track. I was happy not to hit anybody coming back on the track. Basically, where I ran off, it cut across through the track onto the other side where the gravel and grass were. Lost a ton of time. Not too happy about that, but we were able to crawl back up to sixth. I'm happy with the finish. Basically, just happy to finish and have the bike improve a little bit, but bummed about the false neutral for sure. Overall, it was a pretty bummer weekend, but we're coming out of here healthy. Got a little time for the ribs to heal, and hopefully have a good one to end it. Thanks to the team for all the hard work. Thanks to Moto America for sponsoring us with the Live Plus stuff. As we said earlier, Live Plus is a really good app to have. I use it to watch all the races. I can go back and watch whenever I want. If you haven't downloaded it, make sure you go check it out and catch up on all the racing for the year. Appreciate the support, appreciate you watching the video, and see you next time. This is my world now.