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, so I decided to finish up my bike prep at home, only to be haunted by one problem after another. Between a sudden skin issue that I couldn't identify, bolts breaking, parts not fitting, and other issues, I was in a pretty rotten mood by the time I was getting on the road. Traffic didn't improve for most of the drive, and neither did my overall mood (or whatever was going on with my skin, which heading into a hot, sweaty, stuffed-in-leathers weekend had me a bit concerned).
We arrived and got settled in, met up with friends, and eventually headed off to a very nice Happy-Birthday-to-me dinner where I accidentally ordered the "bowl" of margarita LOL. The meal was enjoyable and we headed back for some sleep.
Saturday morning I was greeted with whatever reaction my skin was experiencing having spread to my legs - grreeeeaaat, just what I needed. OTC allergy meds didn't seem to be touching it, either. Oh well, it was time to go out and ride.
I headed out to practice and I was going SLOW - so slow, in fact, I'm pretty sure I turned faster laps on my street bike than I was. Times weren't even in the ballpark of a decent track day pace for me. This was not looking good.
Three races were on the schedule for me - A Superstock, Formula 1, and Sr. Superbike. While I dropped time from my practices, averaging 2 seconds a race, my practice times were so pathetic that I still was a good 2 seconds off previous race times at this track a year ago.
The only excitement was as I rolled out for my Formula 1 race, and felt something flapping against my leg as I came around to the straight, and looking down saw my right side tank shroud had mostly come loose other than the one zip tie up front. I stopped at the very edge of the track way in back and tried to pull it off as the riders finished gridding up. Just as they were starting to change the boards, one good yank finally pulled it free. I practically threw it at the grid marshall who was walking off, and took off for the race, waaaaay in the back. At least gave me a vintage bike to pass lol.
Trying to hang my hat on consistently dropping time, if I kept that up, come Sunday afternoon I'd have some reasonably legitimate times and maybe have a few other riders I could start actually racing against.
Instead, Sunday morning I woke up to the skin thing getting even worse, and causing some painfully large blisters on one of my feet in addition to everything else. Now this was starting to worry me, but there still wasn't much I could do about it, so I just got ready to go - I could ride without much pain, and didn't need to walk once I was on the bike, right?
Needless(?) to say, things didn't improve much. The only race I wasn't completely alone was the Sr. SB where I held up/got to play with a fellow rider on a 600 - and when he finally managed to pass, it gave me a carrot to chase, and that was my fastest lap of the weekend (still pathetically slow, but at least I had some fun that race).
Since most of my laps were all by myself, I just sat and worked on my own stuff, focusing on lean angle, since I need to start carrying more corner speed, and I can't do that if I'm too scared to lean the bike over. Losing a metric ton of time on the brakes, and being a bit slow to get on the throttle, and cleaning up some more lines were also on my mind, but my main focus was to let go of the brake and lean again - which I did manage to at least accomplish that.
So the weekend could have been worse (no crashes, so that's a plus), bike was working fine, but it basically turned into a very expensive and lonely-on-track track day for me...
2020 may be behind us, and life may be starting to resume for many, but in true AJ fashion, life is taking its sweet time on catching back up to where we left off before the covid mess started. I'm looking forward to my next time on track, as there's been some good progress this year, unfortunately, just not the amount of seat time I apparently need to really get my head extracted from where it seems to be stuck!
Comments
Post a Comment