Velocity Racing's 'Honey Badger' Blog

After my less than enjoyable weekend at Barber, and spending some time going through some self reflection, I decided I needed to change my approach a bit for the time being - many of the reasons behind this had nothing to do with riding or racing, but other "life shitake" was affecting me to the point of it heavily impacting my riding. So I approached the next race weekend (at a new to me track) with a very different attitude. I went in with zero expectations - other than "try not to crash" and "improve" there were NO expectations. I had a Friday trackday to try to learn the track at least a little bit and make sure my pace was "don't get lapped" fast enough (not saying much with a 6 lap race), and then racing on Sunday with a day off in between. Friday went okay. Roebling is very different than any track I've ridden - outside of the front straight, you are in a corner the rest of the track with no straights between the corners - at a...

I questioned even writing this post as I have a very mixed bag of feelings on how my weekend went. So, let's just start with the facts. I had attended two track weekends at the beautiful Barber Motorsports Park prior to showing up for a race there. The first weekend I was experiencing bike problems most of the weekend, and my times were downright pathetic (~12-14 seconds off my goals). Because of the bike issues and just never really getting comfortable with a few things, I decided to stretch the finances and make the weekend the end of June, just before the WERA races over the July 4th weekend. That second weekend I dropped some time, but nothing like I was hoping for - only a few seconds off what I had been doing the prior weekend. I was getting more comfortable on the bike, and getting it dialed in, but I was still - off. I hoped that a race, getting a green flag and launching would help me get over the mental rut I seemed to be stuck in after not being on a track for nearly...