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Once You Go Track...



It seemed like it took forever, but the track season has finally recommenced for Honey Badger Racing. Returning to Sonoma Raceway, a track that I have not had much time on the past couple years, it was great to get the chance to blow the dust off and enjoy a beautiful day doing what I love.

To make life easier I arrived Friday evening and set up most of my pit space then settled in for a slightly chilly sleep. The dawn broke bright and clear with promises of a beautiful day in store for all of us. Sunshine and a very light breeze lived up to the promises of the morning. Since I had not ridden the Triumph since the last race round in October, I knew the first part of the day would be spent just getting everything set up where I wanted it. I had made a number of changes to the bike over the winter, so priority number one was getting everything adjusted to where I wanted it.

I spent three sessions doing just this, getting at most 2 laps in before pulling in to adjust some other little thing. Basically, the entire morning and then some was spent getting all the adjustments completed, but eventually I had things where I could live with them. I finally had the chance to go out and really begin working on my big “next step” project of working on my braking. After doing a fair bit of studying and reading on fastersafer.com, I had managed a couple of “ah-ha” moments in understanding braking. The way Ken and Nick were explaining it finally made it click in my mind...mostly because they were very specific about when and where your attention was needed, and why you needed to do what, when. Rather than the only other advice I’d gotten of “Brake harder!” “Be smooth!” “Brake harder smoothly!” their advice was FAR more specific, dealing with the first and last 5% of our braking, how that applies to going faster, and how that is what can make or break good braking performance. The other aspect was finding brake release points – every other time I can recall braking being discussed it was ALWAYS about where you START braking – not where you are releasing that final 5%. Sure, instructors would talk about trail braking and trail braking deeply, but I don’t ever recall someone having me think about braking from the final release point backwards. 

I’ve been trying to implement the 5% rule on the street since I got the information, so was excited to start putting it into play on the track. Combining that with getting used to my upgraded rear suspension and trying to find good release points my attention abilities were pretty maxed out. Speed was not the concern here, but those items were (all of which will translate to speed at some point). 

My first full on track session was spent on getting the dust blown of myself and getting back into track mode instead of street mode. The next session after that I went out to really continue working on my exercises with a fair bit of success. Even with a combined A/B group (meaning B group traffic) and so much of my focus on what I was working on, I actually still got down to the times I had been at last year at the one race in October that I had been to at Sonoma. While nothing to brag about, I found that rather acceptable for the day.

My final session wasn’t as productive as by this point I was just plain old tired. I tried picking up the pace for a bit but caught myself making a couple small mistakes so just backed off and focused back on the things I needed to.

Overall, it was a good start to the track season and at least got the dust blown off before Round 1!

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