Velocity Racing's 'Honey Badger' Blog

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,...

 ....and sometimes you do both within half a lap. But that's not how the weekend started. Making races this year was looking very hit and miss, but with RIDERZLAW continuing their title sponsorship, a few rounds were not outside the realm of possibility; as finances were working out, I set up to head to Roebling Road, one of only 2 tracks I made it to last year for a race. I was excited to see if a) mentally I was back to a better place and b) to finally race a familiar track. Friday practice went smoothly, and by the end of the day I was feeling very comfortable at my previous pace, and could tell I had a lot left in me. Issue was, I still wasn't nailing the entire track - parts of it, but there were a couple places that still needed to come together for me, turns 1 and 5 in particular. Saturday I had a fairly early race with Formula 1 - with not even so much as a trackday since last September, it took me the better part of 2+ laps to "remember" I was racing, not jus...