Crashes, Bike Bits, and Confidence Backstory In early 2019 I thought I had finally turned a corner on my current bike, a 2017 ZX10R. The first AFM round of that year I went out and started dropping time like crazy, finally down to my previous personal best times at that track. The next round I showed up with high hopes, only to end up with an epic highside that launched me to the moon and over 50' before coming for a landing. For a very long time, I couldn't figure out what caused that to happen, and while I could come up with things that might have contributed, it didn't quite add up. After that, however, a series of cross-country moves started taking place in my life, as did learning new tracks, new riders, new race organizations, new track providers - plus everything "normal" people deal with on major moves like that. I made some progress over the remainder of 2019, slow, but saw improvements. 2020 saw ANOTHER cross country move to ANOTHER region of the US,
Approaching the Independence Day holiday, I was coming in tentatively hopeful that maybe what I had started to find at Little Tally in May would translate over to a race weekend at Barber. Long and the short of it - it didn't. Not in the ways that really matter anyways (aka, putting down faster laps). Seat time this spring and summer has been extremely limited, partially due to the crash repairs from Roebling and the money they tied up. Add in the job situation not really sorting itself out, making finances an on-going issue with getting on the bike and actually riding. The little time I did get at Barber was rather unproductive - working on a lot of basics and trying to remember that I can actually lean my bike - stuff that I thought I had worked out back in 2016 as a novice, but haven't seemed to carry over very well the past couple years. Friday morning I was meeting my pit buddy and friend, Jessica, with plans to head there in a mini wagon train. Traffic was bad for her,