The adrenaline demon has been satiated. Released from his bonds and fetters for the weekend, the little devil ran amok at the track over in Deming NM. The two day experience was good overall, despite the couple of issues my compatriots had to deal with. Two of the BeginnerBikers.org crew (AZridered (Mark) and Mordygan (Josh)) and I decided to hit the track. Mark and I trailered from my house starting at 0515 on Saturday morning, for an arrival time at the track of just after 0830. The temp gauge in the truck said it was 38* when we showed up, and anywhere a shadow could keep it from melting, there were little rows of snow (under guardrails, along fencelines, etc). Bringing the space heater for the back section of the trailer was definitely full of Win on my part.
The track was clear, and after an educational trackwalk with the owner (Roger), it was time to get set up. Unloaded the bikes, got the EZ-up awnings up and tied down, started up the generator… and then waited for it to warm up a bit. The first two sessions before lunch went well, except that Mark couldn’t get his bike fired up. It ran fine on choke for about 2 minutes first thing in the morning, then when he pushed the choke in, it died and was never able to be resurrected for the remainder of the weekend. He checked everything, and I mean everything, but to no avail. Such is life. First session back from lunch, 4th corner in, and Josh’s bike goes down. Low speed lowside, but enough to put the bike out of commission. It hit on the right side clutch cover, which cracked off a piece of magnesium the size of a half-dollar… and that was all she wrote for the RC51. There is apparently another Josh who also has a number of RC51s who races at Arroyo, and he was going to be there Saturday night… and had a spare side cover. Unfortunately, he forgot to hand off the piece that evening and by the time Roger got ahold of him Sunday morning, he was halfway to Santa Fe. Again, such is life.
The rest of the afternoon went fine, and I got a lot more confident both on the brakes and with lean angles. I scraped a toe-slider for the first time, which is pretty cool. We packed up and headed off to the hotel for the night. I slept like a brick. Haven’t slept that hard in ages. Sunday morning, and we get back and reset our pit area. Mark gives the GSXR one more go, but no luck. I offer the Superhawk, and he accepts. We each did 2 sessions that morning, and 2 more that afternoon. Some of my best laps of the day were during the last session, where I followed a 2-stroke for a number of laps, and after seeing some of the ‘carry corner speed’ lines, I put my head down and charged for about 3 laps after he pulled off the track. Murphy is a bit of a bastard though, and it seems my card had filled up a couple laps into the session, so I couldn’t compare my best clockwise lap times to the CCW times from Saturday. Best lap I had recorded for CCW direction was a 1:26.2, which is as fast as I was going on the CBR race-bike during the spring. I managed a 1:30 running the other way, but that wasn’t nearly my fastest lap going that way.
Lessons Learned:
Bring LITHIUM batteries for the GoPro. Change them every other session, and pull them between sessions.
Bring 2gb cards for the GoPro, at the least. 2 sessions will fit on a 2gb card for sure, but 1gb? Not so much.
The space heater was the best idea of the weekend. High was around 48 on Sat, which was COLD after the adrenaline heat from riding wore off.
Bring legit food instead of just junkfood. Duh.
Pictures and links to the YouTube vids are all uploaded and linked from the page along the right hand side of the blog sidebar. If you’re interested in getting the full-sized images, find me over at the Beginnerbikers.org site (my screen name is Galaxieman), and I can email you the full-res images. I’d post a link here, but it’s generally too hard for bots to go look me up on another forum, so every chance to prevent spam I can take, I will.
Yep, I’m definitely addicted.
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