Tell Us Another Story, David Pingree

 Ping gave me his recap of his brief time at FMF Honda and then I figured I'd give my memories. Thanks to Chris Hultner for the photo.

 
"This is from 1998 and I was fresh off the Pro Circuit team. I’d been there for three years and things weren’t working out. The best chance I had for a title was ’96 when I broke my femur while I was in second in the 125 points to Kevin Windham. We just understood that I wasn’t getting it done at Pro Circuit, I can’t complain because Mitch gave me three years. Sometimes you just need a change, even if it’s not a lateral move like this one was. Something that’s what you need.
 
In 1998 Honda tried doing a satellite team for the first time since Mitch in the early 90’s and joined up with FMF. I signed up and came on-board. It had some good things going for it, Bobby Moore was the manager and he still went faster outdoors than anyone on the team. The team consisted of Danny Smith, Scott Sheak, Broc Sellards, Jason McCormick and me. There were a lot of cool things going on with it. The bikes weren’t the greatest but they handled good. Maybe they handled good because they were so slow, I’m not sure.
 
The first round of supercross came at the LA Coliseum and it was muddy. That was the year that Sebastian Tortelli won the opener. So it was muddy and I don’t remember how I did. The second round was at Houston and I got second behind David Vuillemin. So I got the team its first ever podium finish. I thought it was going to be really good but I don’t remember having any stand-out riders other than that one.
 
In the outdoors, I had a great opening round. Remember when we did the retro stuff at Glen Helen? I think I got fourth overall that day and might have gotten second or third in one moto. The very next week I blew my ACL out and spent the rest of the year on the couch eating Vicodin. At the end of the day, the bikes weren’t very fast and I think we went back to a 1995 cylinder at one point and that made it better. At the end of the year I don’t really recall what went down but I had an offer from Primal Impulse and I wanted to get on faster bikes. Getting on those Suzuki’s was good for me. And by the way, I do not remember you at all being on the team. Just thought you’d like to know that."
 
So that was Ping's account of the FMF Honda team, let me give you mine-
 
"I remember it being a little different than Ping just because it was my first real job on a real team and stuff. I didn’t come on right away as I had to wait until about halfway through supercross when two mechanics got fired for smoking weed and getting into fights. At one point one mechanic (that stayed on the team) accused the other two of pouring sugar into his tank before a main event to make him look bad. It seemed like a bit of a clown show but I was all too eager to sign up. I have to thank FMF’s Mike Hodges for getting me this job as I was working for a privateer named Ty Birdwell, he had gotten hurt and was out for a long time. So with not much to do but hang out down in Florida (where I camped out in a box van at Reddick MX Park) I was trying to figure out my next move when Mike called.
 
So I got the job and I was off to the races to work for Danny Smith. They asked me beforehand who I wanted to work for and I thought Smith would be great because he was an up and coming kid and was pretty fast. I had these dream of us two sticking together and we rise through the ranks and become champions. A rider and mechanic in symmetry with one another, working hand in hand and becoming buddies forever.
 
And on the second day I met Danny he promptly told me that his buddy Mike (who was Mike Williamson, now tuner to the stars) was going to wrench for him,couldn’t do it for one reason or another but that “he’s going to work for me next year.”
 
So much for the dream.
 
And to be fair to Danny I must’ve looked like an idiot more than a few times in our time together. So with me never having worked on a Honda, I flew on the red-eye from LA to Charlotte for the supercross there. I get into Charlotte around 7 in the morning, go straight to the truck, meet my new teammates and start working. Nothing like getting thrown into something right? Oh and by the way, the motor needs a complete rebuild, you need to split the cases and change everything out. Nice…
 
So that was a two or three in the morning night I was mentally and physically exhausted from everything that was going on but I somehow got through practice ok and lined up for the heat race.
 
Then my front sprocket fell off. Yep, the bolt had backed out of the countershaft and left my rider with a DNF in the mud. It wasn’t very pretty and right off the bat, I looked like a jack-ass. Except it wasn’t my fault. The bolt was tight to spec and loc-tited but the previous mechanic had used an air gun on it so much that the threads were mush inside the shaft. How do I know? Well that’s because I got it back to the truck, re-loctited the bolt, tightened it again and had it come out in the LCQ.
 
Yep, this new job was going pretty smoothly methinks.
 
So I was somewhat absolved of that problem but not really because in the world that mechanics live in, you’re responsible for the bike and everything that happens to the bike. Well whatever, I could blame it on the old mechanic, blame the lack of sleep, the unfamiliarity with the bike and know that I’ll just do a bang-up job from here on out. I would get back to California and get into a routine.
 
When I signed on I was told that FMF owned a house in the Long Beach area that I could stay in while I figured things out. I was living up in Camarillo, California (this is why I still have an 805 area code and my bank’s home address is there) but couldn’t make the drive down to the shop and just figured I could stay in this house. Only one problem though, the house was overrun with South Africans who worked for FMF on the support truck. Like seriously, there was nowhere for me to sleep. Every bedroom and couch was taken up. There was something like twelve people living in this house and no one really seemed like they were welcoming a thirteenth to come on in. So I had to figure something out and the best idea I had was to sleep in the race shop. I bought an air mattress, a night-light and settled into one of the offices in the building which was in Torrance, California. There was a shower there and I could go down to the Mexican place down the road for every meal. I was set. Except this big old building got pretty spooky at night when the lights went out. At least I could hear lots of scurrying so I knew I wasn’t alone. It also got real hot and real cold but hey, the rent was reasonable so who was I to complain? I was just pumped to have a job as a mechanic. I feel like this is the point that I should stress that these are the things that I did to become a mechanic on the circuit. When I get letters asking me how to become a pro mechanic and I say ‘be prepared to sacrifice a lot’ its things like this that I mean.
 
I remember calling Bob Moore, the manager a few times but he lived in Arizona and was still kind of in the "I'm a rider" mentality. He worked well with the riders but not so much with the mechanics. I'd call him up to chat but to be honest, he didn't seem to have too much time for me and my issues. Again, he probably thought I was just a moron and that I'd soon be gone. I don't know, I just felt like a manager should be there every day in the shop to help out and guide the team but what do I know?
 
So the supercross turned to nationals and I was slowly becoming more and more of an idiot to Danny. I was unfamiliar with the Honda and struggling to make it work. I effed up the HPP power-valve system one time so that his bike wouldn’t run, we had these works pistons that pretty much looked the exact same only there was an arrow pointing towards the exhaust side (plus the ring-gap would never be on the exhaust side so you should at least know that right?) I was hung-over and trying to do it in a hurry and put it in backwards. Yes, I actually did that. The bike wouldn’t run and I quickly discovered my mistake but not before everyone else in the shop did also. So that’s something that will live in infamy with me. I’m sure that no one ever told my rider that right? Yea………right.
 
The job was over-whelming me and I thought about quitting more than a few times. The pay was shit, I was living in a warehouse and making more mistakes than Brittney Spears ever did. Danny was doing ok but seemed to crash a lot and didn’t seem to really like me. And I can't blame him in the fact that every time he got on his bike, he was probably worried about the axle coming out and him dying. Although he did give me a Snap-On toolbox at one point which was pretty nice of him, I think it was like one of those parting gifts on the game shows. He knew that I had basically hit the Whammy and was on way out.
 
But yes, I would go out with a bang and that would be the bang my motor made in the 125 national qualifying moto at Budds Creek. Round four or five of the nationals came and in the heat race Danny’s bike blew up big-time. And of course it was at the furthest back section of the track and of course it was literally 115 degrees out that day. I pushed the bike back and some fans helped me get it up the hill and into the pit. I was exhausted and now had to change the motor for the LCQ. With my teammates help, we got a fresh motor in there and Danny went to the line for the LCQ. It was on the first lap that Brad Woosley landed on him and tore his knee to shreds. That was it for me that summer. It was a Honda support job at Ponca City, Loretta Lynn’s and the following week’s quad nationals a month after the accident and then a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ moment at the end of the year.
 
Oh and that motor? Well it seems that Honda's Mike Hooker did a post-mortem on it and discovered that the wrong size c-clip was used to hold the piston pin in. When he asked me where I got it, I said that cardboard box where everyone else got theirs from. It snapped in with the same force, felt like a regular one and everything seemed normal with it…how was I to know it was literally .002 thinner? A short time later, Hooker called me and said he went through the whole box and couldn’t find another one that was the same as the one in my motor. He asked me if I cared to change my story and when I didn’t, he hung up on me. To this day, I know I got that clip from that box but clearly, myself and FMF Honda were not meant to be together.
 
That’s how I remember it."