> 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 ;-)