Random thoughts from a school teacher whose brain feels like that old P.S.A. where they drop an egg into a hot frying pan.
It’s been a quiet week in my home town . . . Actually, no it hasn’t. In reality, it’s been busy as all get out. School finished up this week (and there was much rejoicing. Yeah!) and now I’m in the process of preparing for a road trip to Calabogie Motorsports Park just outside of Ottawa. It’ll be 3 days of irresponsibility at a spectacular facility just to see if I can remember how to ride a motorcycle. As they say in the nuke business, confidence is low.
So what’s been happening here in Fishtail land? A lot and a little, depending on what you keep in focus. I’ve been so tied up with the end of the school year that I had to put motorcycle stuff on the back burner for a few weeks. Believe it or not, I still haven’t turned a wheel on my 916. All 5 of my track sessions (!) have been on the Starship BMW, so the 916 has been relegated to supermodel status (pretty to look at, but hands off!).
Speaking of the Starship BMW, I’ve had a few opportunities to watch Robbie and the S1000RR out at Loudon. It’s an amazing thing to watch. There is a significant difference between someone who likes to ride well and sometimes go fast and someone who wants to win no matter what. Me? I’m pretty solidly in the first category. I’d rather ride well and get whatever speed is available that day than ride faster than someone else and be sloppy. Robbie’s only concern is to get in front of whoever is in his sights. In an alternate time line, someone would have strapped a fighter jet (or tank or attack sub) to his butt and told him to kill all the bad guys. He would have too. And his name would have been Chuck Norris.
As far as figuring out the S1000RR, it’s coming together bit by bit. One of the biggest issues has been getting the bike to launch correctly at the start. It has launch control built into the electronics, but it took time to figure it all out. It would bog at the start and leave Robbie standing there while everyone else rocketed by him. Getting a bad start in an 8 lap race on a tight track is a recipe for runner up at best. At worst, you end up becoming a hood ornament for a back-row rider with slow reflexes. It turns out what he needed was different gearing to fit NHMS. Once that was changed, he stopped bogging off the line. He’s been playing with suspension settings and ride height to get it to turn the way he likes it as well as various other tweaks. The end result is last weekend he ran a number of laps in the 1:11 range. To put that into perspective, the last time the AMA raced at Loudon Mat Mladin ran a 1:09. Wow. Sometimes I wonder if Robbie’s actually human.
That’s about it from here. I need to get my gear packed so we can hit the road Monday morning. I’ll have some actual riding observations to report when I get back.