Archive for August, 2000

So, at the last BB, I was reminded that I never did send out this race

report. It’s a bit late now, and the details get fuzzier every day, but I’d

rather get it out now before I head off to the races tomorrow morning
So, I was packing things up Friday the 25th to head up to the track. Summit

Point is a good 6 hour drive from my house, and more like 8 when you add in

traffic and one food stop and one or two fuel stops. I like to travel

comfortably when going that far, and I’ve long since decided that pushing

myself to go that far with one or no stops just isn’t worth it. Especially

not when you don’t manage to even get out of the driveway until 9PM As it

turns out, I didn’t make it to the track until 4AM Saturday morning.

Fortunately, Summit Point isn’t like VIR, the track gates are open all night

long on race weekends (VIR closes that gates at midnight, so if you are

camping at the track like I do, then you have to be there before they close).
I didn’t get much sleep that night. Getting in at 4AM, I didn’t want to make

a lot of noise. Normally, when I camp at the track, I unload my trailer

(which is a 12′ x 7′ enclosed trailer), set up my bikes and seating area, then

pump up the air mattress and put it and the sleeping back in the trailer.

Well, since I didn’t want to wake everyone up, that was out of the question.

So, instead, I laid down in the front of the truck and tried to get some

sleep. Well, between 4AM when I got there and 7AM when it got to noisy to

sleep, I didn’t get 3 hours sleep because it was too uncomfortable I got

maybe an hour of sleep. I’m sure that doesn’t help a person on the track any.
This particular weekend wasn’t a WERA National event, like my last trip to

Summit Point. This was a regular WERA Sportsman Regional event. That changes

the schedule a little bit, seeing as how there is no endurance race. Instead,

you have the Solo20 races. These are 20 lap races that take roughly 30

minutes at most tracks. At Summit Point, because of track length, these races

are Solo18s instead.
So, I got out of the truck that Saturday morning and headed for the

registration trailer. After getting everything registered, I came back and

set up my pit area. This was the first race weekend where I could unload the

bikes and be ready to race. Prior to this weekend, I had spent *every*

*other* Saturday working on my bikes prior to the races, making me miss one or

more practices each time. This was a new feeling for me to be able to

actually be ready to go out during the first practice. So, I get both of the

bikes inspected at the tech shed, they both pass right off. I get suited up

in my leathers and get ready to head out on the track.
Practice actually went pretty well. My first time at Summit Point had been an

interesting weekend. Saturday had been the endurance race, and I had

crashed. After my crash, we repaired the bike, and I ended up going back out

in the race. However, I only got about 15 laps total in. That’s enough time

to get lightly acquainted with the track, but not enough to memorize it and

really get it down. Saturday had been raining. I ran one race on Saturday,

and one practice. But, running in the rain is *totally* different than

running in the dry. This time out, I was able to run 4 different practice

sessions. That gave me roughly another 25 laps on the track. It helped for

sure, I knew the track much better after practice than I did when I arrived.
Around noon they got the races started. First for me was the Lightweight

Solo18 race. I was in the second wave of the race, and I was fourth in that

wave going into turn one. The three people that got in front of me stayed

there I kept things in reasonable shape for the remainder of the race,

and there wasn’t anything special about my performance. I got passed by a few

other people, and I never passed anyone. There were a lot of people that

didn’t manage to pass me either, so at least that’s one positive.
For those that might recall, in my last race report, I relayed the fact that I

crashed twice in one race I wasn’t happy. The analysis I came up with

was that I wasn’t getting my lines right before I went fast and as a result, I

was going down. I made a decision that I wasn’t going to make stupid mistakes

any more, and going fast before you had your lines down is stupid in my

opinion. I stuck to that decision in this race. I didn’t let someone going

faster than me cause me to push myself faster than I was ready to go. The net

result is that I came in 9th out of 17 riders in this race. Squarely middle

of the pack, things could be worse
Next was the Hvyweight Solo18. I always let my first lap go easy while I warm

the tires up a little bit. I learned this habit from the Michelin Pilot Race

tires. They are *GREASY* when they are even a little bit cold. Once they are

warm they work much better, but on the way there you feel like you are racing

on ice So I let one or two people by as I took the first lap easy. Then

I started to turn the heat up a bit. It wasn’t long before I was thinking

“Gee, this heat seems awful lukewarm to me”. I was running one of the corners

as fast as the Mille could safely go. I had the rear end sliding around on

me, getting lose and acting weird. But, while I’m setting there sliding my

way around the corner, two guys on 600 class machine passed me on the inside.

So I’m wondering how they can go that fast when I’m at the limit of my rear

tire. That kept up for the rest of the race. I didn’t do so well in this

race. I finished 13th out of 15 or something like that (I can’t remember the

exact placing, what I remember is I was second to last). So when I got in

from that race, I was looking the rear tire over to see why I was doing soooo

poorly. Well, it didn’t take much to see what had happened, I *cooked* the

rear tire.
This is the first time I had actually used a tire up since I started racing,

but I had certainly done it to this one. I remember reading a tire test in a

magazine where they would rate how fast the race tires started to loose

traction. I had never realized what they were talking about before, now I

did.
Race tires have this nice property where they will slide softly to begin with

then a little more as you go faster then they will finally let go when you

really push them. Street tires are different, once you start sliding on

street tires, they simply let go and you’re on your back I’m not a tire

expert, but based on what I do know, what I saw on that tire, and what I know

of physics and friction, I think I know how race tires manage thier little

trick. I think the way they do it is by being very soft and having a

reasonable amount of rubber depth. The deeper that rubber is, the more flex

it has. When a slide starts, the rubber has been deformed by the forces on

the tire. It bounces back to it’s original position when the slide starts,

relieving some of the tension on the rubber. This gives the tire a chance to

actually catch on the asphalt again. Well, my theory is that as the tread

depth gets thinner on the tire, it has less and less ability to flex. With

less flex, the slides start coming earlier and faster. The tread on my tire

was reasonable when I went out for practice that morning, but sometime along

the way it started getting too thin to keep up. The wear on the tire is

exponential then. The more worn the tire is, the faster you keep wearing it

off. By the time I pulled in at the end of that race, my right side of my

rear tire was worn to the point that it basically had no tread left. Now I

know what it means to cook a tire
Sunday, I get awoken by Fred in his normal good humor as he yells through my

trailer door something about Jessica having a hard job if she has to get me

out of bed. He had made it up during the middle of the night Saturday night

and set up his spot next to mine. So, I filled him in on the previous days

events, as I had him look over that tire on the back of the Mille. He agreed

with me that it was shot. I was going to go ahead and run the sprint Sunday

on it though, to avoid buying a new set of tires that weekend, but he

convinced me that would be a bad idea. So, I got to work on the Mille, trying

to get the new tires installed. As it turned out, I wanted to try out a set

of the Pirelli race tires instead of the Michelins I had been running, but

Trackside Racers Supply, the normal Pirelli vendor at the track wasn’t there

this weekend. So, I went with the new Bridgestone BT58r tires. These tires

have a more pointed profile on the front tire that is supposed to help the

bike turn in quicker. The side effect to a tire that wants to turn in quicker

is that it wants to go straight less. I found out just how much less during

the races Sunday.
Due to the tire change (which took a long time because the tire vendors air

compressor blew right after I brought my tires up, and since he was the only

tire vendor there that weekend, he had to run to WalMart in Summit Point and

buy a new compressor before he could change my tires) and some unforeseen

track issues (the weekend before, during some car races, someone had wrecked

their car and gotten killed, this weekend there were some officials from

somewhere at the track doing an investigation, and while that was happening we

had to stay off the track, which cut into our practice time pretty heavily and

resulted in the race officials combining several of the practice groups

together, including I got moved from the third practice group on the Mille

into the first group, while the SV was moved from the fifth group to the

third) I was looking pretty bad as far as practice time was concerned. I was

most concerned about getting some practice time on the Mille since it was

going to have new tires. As it turned out, all I could get in the Mille’s

practice session was about three laps because I didn’t get out until it was

almost over. Putting the tires back on, combined with delays in getting them

back from the vendor, combined with having my practice session moved up just

kept me from getting it all done in time. The other side effect of the

investigation was that we only got one round of practice sessions instead of

the normal two. So, when I went out to the HvyWeight Twins race that

afternoon, it was without hardly any experience on the Bridgestone tires.
It didn’t take much time on the track for me to develop an opinion about the

new tires. Even if they did stick to the pavement well, they made my Mille

shake worse than a 90 year old man’s hands after sex. The Mille comes with a

steering damper, but it isn’t adjustable. Before the tire switch, the bike

was occasionally a bit on the twitchy side, and several times we (Fred, Wrenn,

and myself) thought that we might like to be able to add one or two clicks of

damping on the steering damper. With the new BT58r’s though, I needed about 6

more clicks of damping! Coming out of turn 10 at Summit, I’m doing about

100mph, I’m just by the rumble strips, I open the throttle wide open as I

straighten the bike up. Right at the end of the rumble strip there is a

slight ripple in the asphalt. Between the fact that my bike will make the

front end very light when you open the throttle up at 100mph and the little

ripple in the asphalt and the twitchy new tires, my bike tried to go into a

tank slapper at 100mph. It was enough to make me pucker so hard that I just

about sucked the seat into my butt. A few laps later, I had the same thing

happen at turn 9. I had the same thing happen 2 or 3 times coming out of turn

3. All in all, the bike became so twitchy that I had to slow things down just

to keep my shorts clean. I didn’t do all that well in this race either,

although I didn’t do bad. I finished 5th, out of I think 9 or so racers.
Later that afternoon I ran the D-Super race on the SV. In the D-Super class,

the SV is the undisputed horsepower king, so you can usually trounce on all

the smaller bikes, and you only have to worry about other SVs. At the start

of the race, I got a good start. But, I was on those Michelin tires again, so

that first lap saw me getting passed by about 3 or 4 riders. After that I got

myself up to speed. I wasn’t getting passed any more (at least not by other

novices, although I might have gotten passed by a few experts still).

Unfortunately, that’s about the time that they red flagged the race

Someone had gone down in turn 10 and they had to pull out the ambulance to

pick them up. Fortunately, the rider wasn’t seriously hurt and he only got a

ride to the pits instead of to a hospital. We all rode back out to the grid

positions after about a 5 minute break. That meant I was heading back out

with fairly warm tires. They got the race underway again, and I got a decent

start. I ended up middle of the pack into turn 1. As I was running around

the track this time, I was holding my position fairly well. There were 6

people in my class ahead of me. The leaders were really pulling it out and

away, but I was catching the people in 5th and 6th. I had been catching

glimpses of both of them as I went around the track, and each time they would

be a little bit closer to me. I was getting about caught up with them, they

were only one turn ahead of me by now. As I’m watching the track going into

turn 5, I catch a glimpse of them going into turn 6. As I’m coming out of

turn 5, I catch a glimpse of them going into turn 6. I immediately think

“Damn I’m fast!”. Then I immediately starting thinking realistically “Damn,

they slowed down!” It becomes much more apparent as I noticed that they

weren’t really going into turn 6 anymore, they were more like laying in turn 6

now. Then I start thinking “Damn, they slowed down a lot!!”, which stands to

reasons since they were no longer rolling, instead they were sliding. Well, I

guess they were still rolling actually, just not on their wheels, more like

barrel rolls now, and those just aren’t as fast.

They were headed off into the dirt now as a matter of fact. Once they left

the asphalt, I had a pretty good idea that I was sure to be able to pass them

They red flagged the race again, but this time we were over half done so it

was considered a completed race instead of being another restart. Since those

two took each other out, I ended up finishing in 5th.
All in all, I was fairly happy with that weekend. I didn’t have any stellar

finishes, but things were getting better towards the end and I didn’t ever go

down. That’s a first for me, a race weekend where I didn’t go down at least

once
Now I’ve covered that race weekend, and I’m ready for VIR tomorrow. Oops,

that would be today now

> Someone wrote:
>
> Well, the TrackDoD contingent saw the results of Saturday’s efforts at the
> track late in the afternoon. It wasn’t pretty! Fred’s bike didn’t look at
> all like a TL1000 and I understand that the Mille took another beating.

Ahh, well, I guess I can go into the Team Red Hat endurance race results.
I’ll let Fred cover his Sunday of racing and I’ll cover my own Sunday of
racing this time.

So, the short story for Saturday is Doug – 0, Downed Bikes – 2.

The longer version is that I arrived at VIR Friday morning to get ready for
practice. Because of having to run around trying to get parts to make the
Mille reverse shift properly Friday morning, I didn’t even get to the track
until about 1:30PM. By the time that I gave up getting the Mille’s shifter
done in time for practice that day, it was about 4PM. I had precious little
time to get the SV preped to go out on the track. I currently still had rain
tires on the bike and I knew those weren’t going to work on Saturday so I took
the wheels off and carted them down to BJ to get the Michelin Race Pilots put
back on. About the time I’m hauling the second tire back to the bike, the
raindrops start hitting the asphalt.

I say to myself, “Well crap, here I am, just putting race tires back on the
bike, the rain is starting, the tires are ice cold, I’ve never been on this
track before in my life, I don’t even have a map of the track, and I think
they just started the last session of practice for my practice group.” I
wasn’t happy. So, I got the tires back on and snuck out into a practice
session for a different group because I had indeed missed the last practice of
the day for the group I was suppossed to be in. So, I got to run about 5 laps
at a *very* slow speed because A) I didn’t know the track or lines and B) the
track was wet. When you combine A and B above, you get C) my speed was so
slow it made gramms look quick with her walker.

So that was all the practice I got on Friday. All in all, it was a bit
expensive to pay $10 bucks for track entry + $50 for practice fees to get only
5 laps in the wet

That evening I drove into Danville and picked up the tools I needed to really
get the Mille shifter working right, ate, then came back to the paddocks where
I was camping. I fixed up the last bit of the shifter that night, then went
to bed.

The next morning I get up, it’s overcast but otherwise nice. The bike is
ready to go all except for the tires. So, I pull off the wheels and get ready
for Wrenn to take the tires down and get them changed. I also start looking
around for Fred and Wrenn since we still have to register and tech the Mille.
Between getting the tires changed, spending a few minutes riding Jessica down
to the South Course so she could use the SV, and getting registered, we
managed to miss the first morning practice session By the time we also
got the bike inspected and the right sticker on there, we had missed the
second practice session as well. All that was left was the endurance only
practice, and we still had to get our pits set up properly. So we ran around
for the next 20 minutes carting things to the pits so we would have someplace
to actually do our thing during the race. By the time we had gotten all set
up, we had missed some of the endurance only practice as well Fred headed
out on the Mille first, then I went out on the Mille part way through the
practice (which is part of the endurance only practice, letting you change
riders and such in preparation for the race). I think I got in around 5 laps
or something like that.

Things weren’t going smoothly that morning. No practice and only slightly
more prepared than last time in terms of our pits. It wasn’t pretty, really

So we get ready for the race and Fred is going to be starting. I’ll be rider
number 2, and Wrenn will be the last rider. We agreed we would do 1 hour
stints, and each do two of them during the race.

Fred goes out on the warm up lap, comes around to the grid, and waits for the
green flag. The flag goes out and the group is off, with Fred nearly getting
hit by someone a bit on the heavy side with their clutch as the guy manages to
pop two seemingly uncontrolled wheelies at the green flag and just about
looses control of his bike. Fred gets a good start from our far back
position, and he starts running around the track. Of course, the Arclight
Racing team is out in the very front of the entire race, and Fred’s putting in
a good privateer performance running mid pack within the first few laps.
Wrenn and I settle in for a little while to wait for something to happen.

Somehow, we miss Fred going by tapping his helmet at about 30 minutes into the
race, so when he pulls into the pits on the next lap with Wrenn gone and me
the only one there, I’m standing there going “Oh shit!! What’s up?” I help
get the bike on the stand and Fred lets me know that the only reason he came
in is because his arm is pumping up and he needs replaced for a while.
Wrenn’s gone, so that’s my cue. I suit up real quick, put on my helmet, get
some fuel in the bike, then jump on about the time Wrenn shows back up and I’m
outta there. I take my first lap at a reasonable speed and get passed by
quite a few people. On my second lap I start to turn up the speed just a bit
to try and at least keep pace with the middle of the pack type guys, and lo
and behold, I wash out the bike in turn #1 As the bike goes down, I go
tumbling along and out into the grass. When both myself and the bike came to
a stop, I ran over to the bike and immediately looked at the clip on. Oops,
it’s broken again I’m telling you, Aprilia clip ons couldn’t survive a
pillow fight at a girls slumber party. They break as soon as you even talk
about “pavement scraping” or “rumble strips”. Of course, true to nature, the
throttle cables are tweaked beyond usability in the wreck also. The front
brake lever is also broken off. Well, I had a spare clip on and a spare brake
lever in the trailer, but no throttle cables. That ends the Mille’s day of
riding unfortunately So, the crash truck comes to get me (which was being
run by Wrenn’s step father BTW). They take me back to the pits and I can see
the looks of disappointment on Fred and Wrenn’s faces as they see that I’ve
held true to my now well deserved track nick name.

Here I am, thinking that we might just call it a day before something else bad
happens when Fred decides to go ahead and pull out his TL-R and run it (we had
signed it up as a backup bike). Well, I’m a bit nervous after what just
happened. Not about going back out in general mind you, but about taking
someone else’s bike out! So, Wrenn gets on the TL-R and takes it out. He
stays out for close to the full hour, making some good times and moving us
along in the pack (keep in mind that when we switched to our backup bike, we
lost all the laps we had on the original bike, so we were starting over
then pulls it back in to switch riders. At this point, Fred informs me I’m
the next to go out. I’m nervous, but I figure I better just get it over
with. After all, I wrecked at Summit Point to begin with, but after the
initial wreck I held on for a while and ran a vertical race later on

So, I go out on Fred’s TL-R. I’m not used to it at all, so I take it easy the
first lap as I start to get used to the feel of the bike. It doesn’t feel
like it handles as nice as the Mille, but it has equivelant power to the Mille
and does feel plenty fast. It does feel heavier though, which doesn’t help me
any. So, I start trying to get a pace going on the second lap, and when I’m
entering the top of the roller coaster I take what turns out to be a bad line,
I feel the rear tire step out on me, I work to try and get the rear tire back
under me, and very shortly feel the first jolt as the bike actually hits the
pavement. Shit! I did it again as I feel both myself and the bike slide into
the red dirt on the outside of the first right hander going into the roller
coaster. I remember thinking something like “Ahh hell, I did *NOT* want to
wreck Fred’s bike!!!”. So, I get it up, and this time it’s at least ridable
back to the pits. So, I take it back to the pits with no front brake lever
and only a stub of a rear break lever and no right foot peg. Fred looks it
over and it wasn’t all that bad, but we didn’t have the spares on hand to fix
it promptly. So, we had to call it a day. My lap count for the weekend so
far, 5 practice laps and less than 3 full laps at race speed It was a bad
day.

I was particularly amazed at how well Fred handled everything. He was truly a
gentleman in the face of disappointment that was caused by someone else’s
doing. I really felt bad about doing this to Wrenn because he had come up
from Charlotte just for this race because his own bike was out of commission
(he had lost third gear the weekend before and when it went out it trashed
about half of his transmission and the parts are on back order). I could tell
Wrenn was upset, and I couldn’t blame him. Not only did I take out the
primary bike, but I also took out the backup It was a bad day.

So, Fred got to work on his TL-R. He scavenged some parts from Scoob’s bikes,
he got some others from elsewhere (what was that footpeg you used Fred?) and
he actually got the bike back together. It didn’t look any better than before
for sure, but it didn’t look horribly worse either (that bodywork was already
pretty munged from Fred’s get off at Summit Point two weeks ago, thank God I
didn’t do all that damage I think Fred actually took the bike down to the
South Course and ran a couple of laps at TrackDoD II just to make sure nothing
was tweaked that would need further repair. All that pretty much got Fred
running again. He can elaborate on anything else he had to do

Wrenn spent the rest of the day running crash truck, and also did the same
thing on Sunday. He seemed to be a little less upset with me by the end of
Sunday at least. I was happy about that. I felt pretty bad for munging up
his weekend the way I did. Saturday was a bad day

So, I was waffling on whether or not to go back on Sunday and race. I was
feeling bad about how things had went, about crashing two bikes, and about the
fact that I really didn’t have a strong grasp of what had went wrong on both
wrecks. Finally, I decided that if I didn’t go back on Sunday to at least
clear out my jitters, then I would carry them forward to the next track and
that would be a bad thing, so I made plans to go home and get a good nights
sleep Saturday night and come back Sunday morning.

I was registered in 3 races Sunday, and I had planned on running the Mille in
one and the SV in the other two. Well, since the Mille was out of commission,
I decided I would up run the SV into the Mille’s race. I wanted the time on
the track So I got to the track at about 8:15AM. Tech had just opened,
and the first practice session was going to be in 15 minutes. I got
everything together and headed to the tech shed. Shit!.. the lines were
long. I waited through the line to get told that the brake lever wouldn’t
pass since Jessica knocked the ball off the end in her wreck on the SV
Saturday at TrackDoD II. Plus, I forgot my pink sheet that proves I paid for
the races, so I couldn’t tech without that either. Fortunately, Jim from WERA
who happens to be a tech inspector also happens to have a sideline business of
selling levers to people that can’t pass tech inspection (Gee, now is
that a racket or what :->) So, Jim didn’t have an SV 650 lever, but he pulled
out his bag and fumbled through until he found an R6 lever and it looked like
it would fit just fine. So he told me $15 for the lever, and I headed off to
get my pink slip and my money. I came back, passed tech inspection, and got
ready to pull out of tech. Unfortunately, I had missed my practice session,
they were just coming back in off the track by the time I got done.

I went back to my pits, put on the new brake lever (which fit amazinly well,
the only difference between an SV brake lever and an R6 lever is the curvature
of the handle portion, the mount and and the actuator surfaces are all
identical), and then set back to wait for the next practice session.

During this little break in time, I spent a lot of mental energy covering what
might have happened the day before. I came up with the following answers.
First, why did the wrecks happen and what kind of wrecks were they. They
happened because I was flat going to fast. They were your run of the mill
wash outs. The tires lost traction and went away because I pushed them too
hard. That then brought up the question “if I was pushing my tires too hard
and washing out, why weren’t the guys that were passing me doing the same
thing?” Well, the answer to this one was pretty easy. The other guys had a
better feel for the track, they knew the race lines to take, and even though
they were going faster, they were also following better lines that
straightened out the corners far more than mine did and as a result were able
to go faster without pushing their tires too hard. So those two answers led
me to the next conclusion. I’ve *GOT* to figure out the lines of this track
to be any where near safe or competitive. In the endurance race I was trying
to follow around behind guys going faster than I would have on my own, and if
I had actually been smooth and followed the race lines I probably would have
been OK. But since I was being an inexperienced dork and not learning the
lines first, I was wrecking.

There was a reason I was following behind these guys and not just running at
my own pace mind you. (It may be a bad reason, but it’s a reason none the
less) I was concerned about going to slow around all these experts and ending
up getting tagged some time. I don’t really mind a nice low side in a corner
all by myself, but I have no interest what so ever in someone tagging me at
100mph because I got into their race line when they didn’t expect it. I might
not be so paranoid about that if it hadn’t happened once on Saturday.
Fortunately, it was a light contact, but someone did indeed go past me on the
track and because the Mille was running wide a little bit in the corners, my
front tire hit their rear tire as they were passing. It was enough that I
knew it happened, and enough that the other rider turned around and looked to
see if either A) I was still vertical or B) I could see him glaring menacingly
at me, I couldn’t tell which it was.

So, at the next practice session, I made a concerted effort to not just drive
around the course, but to spend a lot of attention on trying to pick the right
visual references to help me grab the right lines and do the right thing.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get much of a chance to do this since my session was
red flagged on the second lap!! Damn! That’s only maybe ten laps in the dry
so far this entire weekend and this was my last practice session before my
first race!!

Well, I didn’t have a lot of time before the first race was scheduled to
start, so I spent it in quite contemplation. When they finally called my
race, I got on the bike, went to pit out area and waited to take my warm up
lap. I took the warm up, gridded for the race, then took the green flag and
went running. This was a two wave start with me being in the second wave, so
the guys up front had a head start on me by quite a bit. This was also the D
Superbike class, which is the class that the SV really RULES all the other
bikes. The only real competition in this class is from other SVs. But, I was
taking my own advice and running the track slowly until I got a better feel
for the lines. I made my own pace, got passed by a few people, and finished
the race without incident this time. I figured I had done really horrible and
came in last. The first three laps I was *really* slow as I worked out some
of my lines. The next three laps I was faster, but not zippy. As it turns
out, that was good enough to finish 9th out of 17 riders.

After this race I had about 3 hours to kill before my next race. So, I got
out of my leathers, met up with Jessica who had just arrived with a friend of
ours, Jennifer, and prepared to go walk around the viewing area of the track.
We ended up walking to all of the parts of the track except down by turn 1.
While I was doing this, I decided to watch the Arclight Suzuki guys race and
see what they were doing. I paid very close attention to the lines the faster
guys were using. Once I saw those lines, they all made sense. The big
difference in most cases is that I was looking at them from the top of the
hill where I could see the progression through the turns where as on the bike,
the course has enough crests in the middle of turns that picking a line from
start to end of the turn is impossible to do from a rider’s perspective. As
it turns out, seeing these lines made me feel a *lot* more comfortable with
the track.

So, I went back for my next race, which is the one where I had intended to run
the Mille. I would be putting the little SV 650 up against all sorts of big
bikes like TL-Rs and Super Hawks and Ducatis and all that. I was giving up a
*lot* of horsepower and a good 30mph top end on the front straight. That
makes it very hard to be competitive. So, I spent this entire race paying
attention to my lines and trying my best to make sure they were good solid
lines like the ones I had seen when walking around the course. It paid off.
Not only did I stay vertical, but I actually came in fifth in the heavyweight
twins novice group (OK, it was out of six, but the one guy I beat was on a big
bike that should out run the SV easily and the guy right in front of me was on
a Super Hawk and I was catching him on the SV when the race ended). At this
point my lap times had also gotten much better.

I didn’t have all that much time until my next race, so I stayed in my pits,
drank a bottle of Gatorade, and did more mental reflection. When they called
up the next race, I was ready. I got on the bike and headed out. This race
was the Lightweight Twins race and one in which the SV was the king of the
hill. Of course, there were a lot of SVs in this group, so it’s not like I
could run away from everyone, but if they weren’t on an SV then I wasn’t
worried about them

The race started in a single wave this time and I took off. I got a pretty
good start and jumped past about 4 guys around me from the line. I took the
track and started running at my own pace. I could see a group of guys pulling
away from me up ahead, and I let them go. I decided to conentrate on my own
pace instead of pushing too hard and wrecking After that, the race got
pretty boring! I didn’t get to pass anyone because that group pulled away
from me, and I didn’t get past anyone. I felt like I had the track to
myself. I found out later from both Fred and Jessica that I pretty much did.
The pack that had pulled away from me was all expert class riders with the
exception of one novice. Then there was a huge break in the racing. Then
there was me. All by myself. Then there was another fairly strung out pack
of bikes that were pretty much all novices. It stayed like that the entire
race. As a result, I took second place in the light weight twins novice race.

So, that was a good finish to what started out as a bad weekend. I was very
happy, I picked up my plaque, I packed up my stuff, and I headed home to rest
and recuperate from this long weekend