Kurt'sSV
Wed 4/21/04, 1:17PM
Willow Springs Motorcycle Club, Round 3, March 21, 2004
After last month’s successful completion of a race, I now had one race under my belt and two points beside my name in the record books. In my first race all I wanted to do was start and finish. This month, I really wanted to try to compete and see what I could do against riders on faster bikes. I had new forks on my bike and an improved geometry that gave me confidence that my lap times would come down. The lap times my friend, Pete Annen, took during Saturday practice showed that I was going faster around the track than I was last month, not as much as I was hoping, but I was consistent.
During the afternoon sessions I was getting much better at turns eight and nine, which is important because those two turns alone make up a half-mile of the track. They are also very high speed turns. Eight is a big sweeper that you take in sixth gear and are supposed to keep the throttle pinned as you are going around it, though I have not yet had the guts to keep the throttle all the way open. I would say I keep it at about ninety percent throttle. Turn nine is a fifth gear, decreasing radius turn that sends you out onto the front straight. If you apex nine right, you get a sling shot effect and you will accelerate much quicker than a person who took the turn wrong. Also, two or three more milers per hour around turn nine will equal five or six more miles per hour at the end of the straight. Turns that lead onto long straights are very important in your overall lap time.
With my improvement in eight and nine I found myself catching people in those turns, which was great. The problem was that I could not get myself to pass them, but instead just pace with them until we got out onto the straight where they would pull away with their superior horsepower. In the last session of the day I was putting behind a rider on a CBR600RR around turn eight. As we were setting up for turn nine I decided that I needed to pass this guy one way or the other, so I backed off a little on the entry so I could get a good run at him and have a much faster exit. I could tell I got on the gas much earlier than he did and began to pull up on him as we exited the turn. Eventually his bike got wound up and he started to take off. At this point, though, I was already hooked up in the draft and even though I was down on horsepower, he was towing me down the front straight. It was pretty cool to actually have a draft work that well, but I also realized that this was the perfect set-up for me to pass someone under braking, on the inside, entering turn one. Turn one became my nemesis in January when I ran wide on its exit and crashed. I had been tiptoeing up to it ever since, but I knew that had to end and the sooner the better. I knew I did not have to make some super late-braking maneuver, a-la Kurtis Roberts, to get by this rider, but I was going to have to be light on the brakes as I slid by him. We approached the cones that marked the braking zone for turn one and I noticed that the rider was already beginning to slow, which was great because that was going to make the pass that much easier. When I reached the first set of cones, I let go of the throttle, lightly pulled on the brake lever with my middle finger, sat up and down shifted once. While I was doing all of this, I rolled right past the guy, turned into one and put him behind me. It was a relief to get that first pass into turn one out of the way.
Besides that little venture, the only other thing notable about the Saturday practice was that the track was buzzed a couple of times by an old Soviet MIG fighter jet. It was pretty cool, though very loud and very, very odd to see a jet fly so low over the track. Whoever it was was trying to get our attention, I am sure he succeeded. I was just glad I was not out on the track at this time. Being that I am not an expert on Vietnam era jets, I did not know what type of jet it was as it was flying over us, I could just tell it was military from its paint scheme. How I found out that it was an old MIG was that Pete was in the gift shop later that afternoon and overheard a guy talking who ended up being the pilot of that jet. He said that the jet was bought from an arms dealer in early 1990’s for 50,000 U.S. dollars. That sounds like quite a steal for a fighter jet, but I do not know how safe I would feel in an old, Soviet plane. I do not remember the Soviet Union’s military machines being known for keeping the safety of their human drivers a high priority.
Sunday was a lazy day. After the two morning practice sessions we stayed under the EZ-up at our pit area and only ventured to the stands for the couple of races that had some friends racing in them. I feel very fortunate that Charlie Curry lets me pit with him because he does it in style. While he is a new SV650 racer like me, he is not new to racing and his racing budget is quite a bit larger than mine. Besides the EZ-up, he also shares his enclosed trailer with me. It is air conditioned, providing a good place to change in and out of our racing gear and he also lets me store my bike and gear in it over night from Saturday to Sunday. Hanging out in the shade with he and his wife made the warm day that much more enjoyable.
With the afternoon finally came the middleweight novice race; our race. Charlie and I hopped on our metal steeds and made our way to the pre-grid check-in. After the warm-up lap, Charlie and I found our grid positions in 20th and 21st place, right next to each other. Cute, huh? The starter put his hand up in the air beginning the countdown to launch. We all kicked down or toed up our bikes into gear and began revving our engines. I eyed the bike directly in front of me, two rows up, and decided that if he did not get a very good start that I would swerve to his right so I would not get stuck on the inside as we entered turn one. Finally the green glad dropped and I launched. I was surprised at how quickly the bike took off as I was letting out the clutch and was even more surprised as I let the clutch out more that the bike had a surge in power. I felt the front end come off the ground, slightly, and I rocketed passed the row ahead of me. The front end quickly settled and I swerved around the outside of the rider in front of me and began my charge toward turn one.
I was accelerating good and hard but once I was shifting into third, the 600’s were finally hitting their power bands and started coming by me. Turn one at the start of a novice race is the most chaotic thing to happen all day at the track. There were almost thirty of us, inexperienced racers, trying to squeeze through that one turn at the same time. I was trying not to let off the gas too much because I needed to keep my speed up if I was to hope to not lose too much ground on the short straight between turn one and two, but I had to check up some when I saw two bikes and their riders go sliding across the track and out onto the dirt. The rider in front of me rode off into to the dirt as well, which helped me out, and as I turned my head to look down the track toward turn two all I could think about the guys who went off was “sucks to be them”.
We were still pretty bunched up as we entered turn two but I had made up my mind that I was not going to sit behind people if I did not have to. I took my usual low line around the turn and went under at least one bike by mid corner. While I was diving for the apex and exit of that turn I had noticed that I was pulling up on Charlie and was on the tail of the bike that was on his tail. We stayed in a nice line down the short straight from two to three and all had about the same braking point. While setting up for three, I had the unfortunate experience of getting stuffed on the inside by a CBR600RR. I was really mad that this guy did this because I totally had to check up to let him through and it killed my momentum. It wasn’t a dirty pass or anything, I just don’t like getting caught napping. He really had to stay on the brakes late so he could make the turn and I was hoping he would run off into the dirt and out of my way. Fortunately for him, he did not. If I was a better racer I would have known that his drive out of three would have been horrible and I would have tried to drive past him up the hill to four. I will have to keep that in mind for next month.
What I quickly learned was that being slowed by the rider who passed me going up into four ended up being a blessing in disguise. As we came out of four “A”, the corner worker was waving the yellow flag. When we came around to four “B” it turned out that he should have been waving the red flag. I saw the rider rolling himself off the track, but still on the track was his bike, spinning on its side. With our low exit speed out of four “B”, the CBR rider and myself were not in danger of swinging out and hitting the bike, we just road down the hill to five and came to a stop on the side of the track. After a minute we were instructed to head back to our pit so they could clean up the track.
Charlie and I arrived back at our pit at the same time, but in very different moods. While I was irritated that the race was stopped because I got such a good start, he was irritated by the chaos of the race itself. Apparently the two riders who went down in turn one were right next to him and the bike that ended up laying on the track in four “B” went down right in front of him and he clipped the bike’s tail with his rear wheel. After that, he had decided he had had enough and was calling it quits for the day. I was disappointed that he was not going to go back out for the restart because I wanted to ride with him around the track like last month, but on the bright side there would be one less person finishing in front of me.
It took them about ten minutes to clean up the track. Because of time constraints with WSMC, when a race is red flagged it becomes only a four lap restart regardless of when the race is stopped, so this was going to be a super sprint race. We did another warm-up lap and lined up in our grid positions. When the green flag dropped I surprised myself again by getting a great launch. Compared to how quickly the bikes in front of me were getting off the line, it was like I jumped the start. That’s the advantage of a V twin motor.
Turn one was chaotic again and I had a guy on my outside pretend like I was not there and almost run into me. We all made it through, though. The four bikes missing on the restart made a difference as we were less congested going into turn two. Everyone’s tires were warmed up and there was no holding back as we roared around the long turn. While we were heading up the hill to turn four it crossed my mind that I might be able to pass one or two bikes if I took a low line around that turn, but I did not set myself up right for four “A” so if I was to take a low line, I would not have been able to carry enough speed to actually pass anyone. I stayed in the line with everyone else, got a good drive out of turn five and to my surprise did not have anyone pass me on the back straight.
The next several laps I was out on my own. No one passed me and the riders in front of me were a ways off in the distance. At the beginning of lap three, for a second, I thought I was going to catch a group of riders because I made up a lot of ground on them entering turn one. My hopes were dashed as they sped away toward turn two and I knew I was not going to be able to catch them in the two remaining laps. However, there was a straggler. Like a lion who singles out weak or sick zebra in the herd, I put my head down and began to stalk this rider. I made up a lot of ground around turn two and closed even more entering three. I am a little slow from four “B” down the hill to five because that is a popular place to crash, but so was the rider I was stalking. I exited five hard and took the hill over turn six well to keep this GSX-R600 from getting away from me. We entered eight at about the same speed but he slowed considerably and I closed on him like a lion that chases a zebra with a broken leg. I really needed to try to pass this guy before we got out onto the front straight because I was not going to be able to do it there. He stayed very low when we peeled off eight to set up for turn nine so I would not be going underneath him there. Instead I kept my speed up and tried going around the outside of him in nine. This did not work quite as well as I was hoping because I was giving this guy a lot of room in my attempted pass which meant that I was taking the very long way around turn nine. I did get on the gas harder and sooner than the rider on the GSX-R600 and it looked like I was going to be able to drive passed him on the front straight after all. We had traveled about a hundred feet when I figured out I was just kidding myself. His inline four cylinder motor finally got wound up and he began to pull away, ever so slightly. My first thought was to move in behind him to get a tow off of his draft, but then I thought better of it. Here I was better off because I was set up perfectly to pass him entering turn one. Since we were starting the last lap, making a pass now was the best thing to do because I did not know if I would have a better chance later in the lap.
Since I did a pass just like this in practice I was confident that I would make it stick and not have any problems. Just as we had passed the cones signaling the braking zone for the turn I saw the rider look back at me. Anyone with any track experience knows that this is a big no-no. You do not look at what is behind you because there is too much going on in front of you. My mentor, Zoran Vujasinovic, told me that “you look backward, you go backward”, so I never look behind me. This did make my pass easier since he knew I was there he slowed down even more to let me buy. Once I hit the apex of one, the GSX-R was out of my mind.
All that was left on my mind was putting together a good lap so I did not get passed by anyone else. Things were going fine until I had a lapse in concentration for a split second exiting turn five and that messed my line up for going over turn six. I had to check up on the throttle as I went over the hill and this screwed things all up. I cussed to myself very loudly in my helmet, but that did not help me to get my speed back up. Then in turn seven, I had two Yamaha R6’es go buy me on the outside. This ticked me off and I thought I could catch them in turn eight. Unfortunately I thought wrong. I gave up thinking I could catch the two Yamaha’s and concentrated on just doing turn nine well, which I did. Once out on the front straight I scooted all the way back in my seat, laid my head down on the tank, held the throttle as wide open as it would go and just listened to the V twin motor roar as I approached the finish line. With just a few hundred feet to go I got passed on my right by a white, GSX-R600. Argh! Curse those inline four cylinder 600s with their one-hundred plus horse power motors!
Ah well, no one expects you to win a middle weight novice race on an SV650, but getting motored buy on the straights is discouraging. If I could get better at some of the turns, mainly one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight & nine, these faster bikes would not be able to catch me on the straights. In time I will. It’ll just take patience and practice.
I would like to thank my sponsors for the help they give me: SoCalSVRiders.org, Jadeblue Creative, Tustin Martial Arts, Cybertrackergps.com and Galfer.
Special thanks to Charlie Curry for letting me pit with him and use his trailer and Pete Annen and Shandra Crawford for coming with me to take lap times and help me out in the pits.
After last month’s successful completion of a race, I now had one race under my belt and two points beside my name in the record books. In my first race all I wanted to do was start and finish. This month, I really wanted to try to compete and see what I could do against riders on faster bikes. I had new forks on my bike and an improved geometry that gave me confidence that my lap times would come down. The lap times my friend, Pete Annen, took during Saturday practice showed that I was going faster around the track than I was last month, not as much as I was hoping, but I was consistent.
During the afternoon sessions I was getting much better at turns eight and nine, which is important because those two turns alone make up a half-mile of the track. They are also very high speed turns. Eight is a big sweeper that you take in sixth gear and are supposed to keep the throttle pinned as you are going around it, though I have not yet had the guts to keep the throttle all the way open. I would say I keep it at about ninety percent throttle. Turn nine is a fifth gear, decreasing radius turn that sends you out onto the front straight. If you apex nine right, you get a sling shot effect and you will accelerate much quicker than a person who took the turn wrong. Also, two or three more milers per hour around turn nine will equal five or six more miles per hour at the end of the straight. Turns that lead onto long straights are very important in your overall lap time.
With my improvement in eight and nine I found myself catching people in those turns, which was great. The problem was that I could not get myself to pass them, but instead just pace with them until we got out onto the straight where they would pull away with their superior horsepower. In the last session of the day I was putting behind a rider on a CBR600RR around turn eight. As we were setting up for turn nine I decided that I needed to pass this guy one way or the other, so I backed off a little on the entry so I could get a good run at him and have a much faster exit. I could tell I got on the gas much earlier than he did and began to pull up on him as we exited the turn. Eventually his bike got wound up and he started to take off. At this point, though, I was already hooked up in the draft and even though I was down on horsepower, he was towing me down the front straight. It was pretty cool to actually have a draft work that well, but I also realized that this was the perfect set-up for me to pass someone under braking, on the inside, entering turn one. Turn one became my nemesis in January when I ran wide on its exit and crashed. I had been tiptoeing up to it ever since, but I knew that had to end and the sooner the better. I knew I did not have to make some super late-braking maneuver, a-la Kurtis Roberts, to get by this rider, but I was going to have to be light on the brakes as I slid by him. We approached the cones that marked the braking zone for turn one and I noticed that the rider was already beginning to slow, which was great because that was going to make the pass that much easier. When I reached the first set of cones, I let go of the throttle, lightly pulled on the brake lever with my middle finger, sat up and down shifted once. While I was doing all of this, I rolled right past the guy, turned into one and put him behind me. It was a relief to get that first pass into turn one out of the way.
Besides that little venture, the only other thing notable about the Saturday practice was that the track was buzzed a couple of times by an old Soviet MIG fighter jet. It was pretty cool, though very loud and very, very odd to see a jet fly so low over the track. Whoever it was was trying to get our attention, I am sure he succeeded. I was just glad I was not out on the track at this time. Being that I am not an expert on Vietnam era jets, I did not know what type of jet it was as it was flying over us, I could just tell it was military from its paint scheme. How I found out that it was an old MIG was that Pete was in the gift shop later that afternoon and overheard a guy talking who ended up being the pilot of that jet. He said that the jet was bought from an arms dealer in early 1990’s for 50,000 U.S. dollars. That sounds like quite a steal for a fighter jet, but I do not know how safe I would feel in an old, Soviet plane. I do not remember the Soviet Union’s military machines being known for keeping the safety of their human drivers a high priority.
Sunday was a lazy day. After the two morning practice sessions we stayed under the EZ-up at our pit area and only ventured to the stands for the couple of races that had some friends racing in them. I feel very fortunate that Charlie Curry lets me pit with him because he does it in style. While he is a new SV650 racer like me, he is not new to racing and his racing budget is quite a bit larger than mine. Besides the EZ-up, he also shares his enclosed trailer with me. It is air conditioned, providing a good place to change in and out of our racing gear and he also lets me store my bike and gear in it over night from Saturday to Sunday. Hanging out in the shade with he and his wife made the warm day that much more enjoyable.
With the afternoon finally came the middleweight novice race; our race. Charlie and I hopped on our metal steeds and made our way to the pre-grid check-in. After the warm-up lap, Charlie and I found our grid positions in 20th and 21st place, right next to each other. Cute, huh? The starter put his hand up in the air beginning the countdown to launch. We all kicked down or toed up our bikes into gear and began revving our engines. I eyed the bike directly in front of me, two rows up, and decided that if he did not get a very good start that I would swerve to his right so I would not get stuck on the inside as we entered turn one. Finally the green glad dropped and I launched. I was surprised at how quickly the bike took off as I was letting out the clutch and was even more surprised as I let the clutch out more that the bike had a surge in power. I felt the front end come off the ground, slightly, and I rocketed passed the row ahead of me. The front end quickly settled and I swerved around the outside of the rider in front of me and began my charge toward turn one.
I was accelerating good and hard but once I was shifting into third, the 600’s were finally hitting their power bands and started coming by me. Turn one at the start of a novice race is the most chaotic thing to happen all day at the track. There were almost thirty of us, inexperienced racers, trying to squeeze through that one turn at the same time. I was trying not to let off the gas too much because I needed to keep my speed up if I was to hope to not lose too much ground on the short straight between turn one and two, but I had to check up some when I saw two bikes and their riders go sliding across the track and out onto the dirt. The rider in front of me rode off into to the dirt as well, which helped me out, and as I turned my head to look down the track toward turn two all I could think about the guys who went off was “sucks to be them”.
We were still pretty bunched up as we entered turn two but I had made up my mind that I was not going to sit behind people if I did not have to. I took my usual low line around the turn and went under at least one bike by mid corner. While I was diving for the apex and exit of that turn I had noticed that I was pulling up on Charlie and was on the tail of the bike that was on his tail. We stayed in a nice line down the short straight from two to three and all had about the same braking point. While setting up for three, I had the unfortunate experience of getting stuffed on the inside by a CBR600RR. I was really mad that this guy did this because I totally had to check up to let him through and it killed my momentum. It wasn’t a dirty pass or anything, I just don’t like getting caught napping. He really had to stay on the brakes late so he could make the turn and I was hoping he would run off into the dirt and out of my way. Fortunately for him, he did not. If I was a better racer I would have known that his drive out of three would have been horrible and I would have tried to drive past him up the hill to four. I will have to keep that in mind for next month.
What I quickly learned was that being slowed by the rider who passed me going up into four ended up being a blessing in disguise. As we came out of four “A”, the corner worker was waving the yellow flag. When we came around to four “B” it turned out that he should have been waving the red flag. I saw the rider rolling himself off the track, but still on the track was his bike, spinning on its side. With our low exit speed out of four “B”, the CBR rider and myself were not in danger of swinging out and hitting the bike, we just road down the hill to five and came to a stop on the side of the track. After a minute we were instructed to head back to our pit so they could clean up the track.
Charlie and I arrived back at our pit at the same time, but in very different moods. While I was irritated that the race was stopped because I got such a good start, he was irritated by the chaos of the race itself. Apparently the two riders who went down in turn one were right next to him and the bike that ended up laying on the track in four “B” went down right in front of him and he clipped the bike’s tail with his rear wheel. After that, he had decided he had had enough and was calling it quits for the day. I was disappointed that he was not going to go back out for the restart because I wanted to ride with him around the track like last month, but on the bright side there would be one less person finishing in front of me.
It took them about ten minutes to clean up the track. Because of time constraints with WSMC, when a race is red flagged it becomes only a four lap restart regardless of when the race is stopped, so this was going to be a super sprint race. We did another warm-up lap and lined up in our grid positions. When the green flag dropped I surprised myself again by getting a great launch. Compared to how quickly the bikes in front of me were getting off the line, it was like I jumped the start. That’s the advantage of a V twin motor.
Turn one was chaotic again and I had a guy on my outside pretend like I was not there and almost run into me. We all made it through, though. The four bikes missing on the restart made a difference as we were less congested going into turn two. Everyone’s tires were warmed up and there was no holding back as we roared around the long turn. While we were heading up the hill to turn four it crossed my mind that I might be able to pass one or two bikes if I took a low line around that turn, but I did not set myself up right for four “A” so if I was to take a low line, I would not have been able to carry enough speed to actually pass anyone. I stayed in the line with everyone else, got a good drive out of turn five and to my surprise did not have anyone pass me on the back straight.
The next several laps I was out on my own. No one passed me and the riders in front of me were a ways off in the distance. At the beginning of lap three, for a second, I thought I was going to catch a group of riders because I made up a lot of ground on them entering turn one. My hopes were dashed as they sped away toward turn two and I knew I was not going to be able to catch them in the two remaining laps. However, there was a straggler. Like a lion who singles out weak or sick zebra in the herd, I put my head down and began to stalk this rider. I made up a lot of ground around turn two and closed even more entering three. I am a little slow from four “B” down the hill to five because that is a popular place to crash, but so was the rider I was stalking. I exited five hard and took the hill over turn six well to keep this GSX-R600 from getting away from me. We entered eight at about the same speed but he slowed considerably and I closed on him like a lion that chases a zebra with a broken leg. I really needed to try to pass this guy before we got out onto the front straight because I was not going to be able to do it there. He stayed very low when we peeled off eight to set up for turn nine so I would not be going underneath him there. Instead I kept my speed up and tried going around the outside of him in nine. This did not work quite as well as I was hoping because I was giving this guy a lot of room in my attempted pass which meant that I was taking the very long way around turn nine. I did get on the gas harder and sooner than the rider on the GSX-R600 and it looked like I was going to be able to drive passed him on the front straight after all. We had traveled about a hundred feet when I figured out I was just kidding myself. His inline four cylinder motor finally got wound up and he began to pull away, ever so slightly. My first thought was to move in behind him to get a tow off of his draft, but then I thought better of it. Here I was better off because I was set up perfectly to pass him entering turn one. Since we were starting the last lap, making a pass now was the best thing to do because I did not know if I would have a better chance later in the lap.
Since I did a pass just like this in practice I was confident that I would make it stick and not have any problems. Just as we had passed the cones signaling the braking zone for the turn I saw the rider look back at me. Anyone with any track experience knows that this is a big no-no. You do not look at what is behind you because there is too much going on in front of you. My mentor, Zoran Vujasinovic, told me that “you look backward, you go backward”, so I never look behind me. This did make my pass easier since he knew I was there he slowed down even more to let me buy. Once I hit the apex of one, the GSX-R was out of my mind.
All that was left on my mind was putting together a good lap so I did not get passed by anyone else. Things were going fine until I had a lapse in concentration for a split second exiting turn five and that messed my line up for going over turn six. I had to check up on the throttle as I went over the hill and this screwed things all up. I cussed to myself very loudly in my helmet, but that did not help me to get my speed back up. Then in turn seven, I had two Yamaha R6’es go buy me on the outside. This ticked me off and I thought I could catch them in turn eight. Unfortunately I thought wrong. I gave up thinking I could catch the two Yamaha’s and concentrated on just doing turn nine well, which I did. Once out on the front straight I scooted all the way back in my seat, laid my head down on the tank, held the throttle as wide open as it would go and just listened to the V twin motor roar as I approached the finish line. With just a few hundred feet to go I got passed on my right by a white, GSX-R600. Argh! Curse those inline four cylinder 600s with their one-hundred plus horse power motors!
Ah well, no one expects you to win a middle weight novice race on an SV650, but getting motored buy on the straights is discouraging. If I could get better at some of the turns, mainly one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight & nine, these faster bikes would not be able to catch me on the straights. In time I will. It’ll just take patience and practice.
I would like to thank my sponsors for the help they give me: SoCalSVRiders.org, Jadeblue Creative, Tustin Martial Arts, Cybertrackergps.com and Galfer.
Special thanks to Charlie Curry for letting me pit with him and use his trailer and Pete Annen and Shandra Crawford for coming with me to take lap times and help me out in the pits.