NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Andrew Hines has dominated the Pro Stock Motorcycle class at zMax Dragway to the tune of seven wins in 11 final rounds, so it stands to reason that he has an affinity for Bruton Smith’s “Bellagio of Dragstrips” but Hines doesn’t necessarily see it that way. He doesn’t claim to have a favorite track and with just a few exceptions, he doesn’t believe omens, superstitions, or good luck charms.

“For me, it’s more about how my bike is running at any given time,” said Hines. “I don’t look at it like this track has been good to me in the past. If my bike is running the way we feel it should be running, then I’m pretty optimistic. If it’s not, then I’m probably a little less confident. I think my mentality has evolved over the years. I probably used to think some tracks were luckier than others but not so much anymore.”

That being said, Hines is thrilled to be coming back to zMax Dragway, not because of his past success, but because he currently has a lot of faith in the performance of his Harley-Davidson FXDR motorcycle. That wasn’t necessarily the case two weeks ago in St. Louis when Hines lost in the final round to Karen Stoffer. Even though he qualified No. 3, Hines felt there was something amiss with his bike, and the similar FXDR entries of teammates Eddie Krawiec and Angelle Sampey.

“We came home from St. Louis and went to work on our stuff,” said Hines. “We made 40 dyno pulls this week and I think we learned a lot. We tried a lot of different combinations and changed a few parts and I think what we’ve got this weekend should be better than what we had in St. Louis.”

For someone who won seven of the first nine races of the season and cruised to the regular season championship, it would be hard to imagine that Hines needed to make wholesale changes to his bike and for the most part, he hasn’t. Pressed for details, he’s clear that for the most part, the problems encountered by the Vance & Hines team are generally weather related.

“I do think we need more horsepower to run with the EBR bikes but that’s not why we’ve struggled at the last couple of races,” Hines said. “All year, our shortcoming has been the weather. We run good when the weather is cool but struggle in the heat. Fortunately, we had good air for most of the races this season. I know we won a lot of races but things started to change after Sonoma. We started to fall behind for some reason. At the same time, we’ve seen the Suzuki teams; Jerry [Savoie], Karen [Stoffer], and even Steve [Johnson] start to run the way they should have run all year long.

“I know it seems funny to make changes to a bike that ran so well for the first ten races, but we’ve got to do it if we want to stay in this deal,” said Hines, who enters the Charlotte race as the points leader, but his advantage over St. Louis winner Karen Stoffer is just 22-points. “I think we had a very productive week and hopefully, what we saw on the dyno translates to big numbers on the scoreboards.”