Tales From The Track

Welcome to Tales from the track!  I look forward to what the future holds.  Hopefully you’ll continue to follow along with me and enjoy the ride. 

 Mostly what will be found here is my motorcycle escapades at the best roadracing courses the West coast has to offer.  But there’ll also be other things that motivate me to share.  I have a very active if somewhat strange and sarcastic sense of humor, sometimes an interesting view on life and sometimes not.  Regardless, I hope this adventure will be fun.  But it’ll never be fun if it doesn’t get started.  So with that said….

Motorcycles are a powerful thing.  They can make you feel free and forget all your problems (at least until your butt starts to ache), they can generate endless smiles.  They catalyze people into a “pro” or “con” stance, many parents falling into the latter catagory as mine did initially.

 I got into motorcycles because they looked cool and seemed to be a natural progression from the BMX bikes I’d ridden my entire childhood.  My first exposure was with a friend’s Yamaha YSR50 and a near-miss with the front bumper of a Toyota Corolla.  From that moment, I knew I’d have my own bike.  A couple years later I financed a brand new ’91 Suzuki Katana 600. 2 hours later I had a crashed Katana 600.  6 months later I had a stolen Katana 600 and a $1600 balance to pay.  I became sour on motorcycles until ’94 when I got a used Yamaha FZR600.  A friend I call K.O. took me on his GPz900 to buy it and ride home, I was thrilled.  A few months later a brisk backroads ride with an acquaintance named Bob Gardiner and some others resulted in me getting sucked into some corners wayyy too fast and scaring my skivvies into a different color and consistency.  I then realized I had no clue what I was doing on a motorcycle.

I took a Keith Code course at Laguna Seca and then started doing Doc Wong’s Sunday rides.  By now I’d moved on to a ’92 Honda CBR600 F2 that I’d reverted from race bike to street bike.  I started to learn to work on my own bikes too, as well as develop other motorcycling friendships.  At one Doc Wong ride, there was a guest speaker named Chuck Sorenson.  He’s an accomplished 250cc 2-stroke racer.  He told the story to us of how he no longer was confortable riding the street.  Too many unknowns and dangers.  WHAT?!?!?  How could he justify going as fast as he did on a track and say such things about the street?  Whiner!!  Little did I know……

Eventually life, budget, time, responsibilities, children, etc. meant no more Sundays with Doc Wong’s group.  But I continued to ride for fun as well as commute.  One day a couple of years later (on BARF I believe) I run across news that a local motorcyclist named Declan Lynch was killed and a commemorative trackday was being organized in memory of him.  There’d be tshirts, a group picture on the track that would be sent to his parents back home, and so on.  This seems like a great way to honor a fallen comrade and enjoy some racetrack time at the same time.  This was the beginning of understanding Chuck Sorenson’s attitude.  It was also the beginning of a beautiful symbiotic relationship between myself and K@TT (Keigwins At The Track, the trackday organizer that grew from Lance Keigwin’s efforts to organize a memorial for Declan).   Over time I’ve also enjoyed tracktime with PTT (Pacific Track Time) and Zoom Zoom (except my first-ever experience with their staff SUCKED for my friend and I) From that day forward, I spent more and more time dedicating my riding activities to the track environment and less and less time on the street, excluding commuting.  It was progressively clearer that the track environment was much safer than the street.  Not to say that problems can’t happen there too, they do.  But in this environment you are surrounded with like-minded people and a comraderie that’s hard to explain; in a clean, purpose-specific environment; with qualified assistence (e.g. ambulance and paramedics) no more than 2 minutes away at any point.  Compare that to the street – idiots paying more attention to their cellular conversation then the privilege of driving; roads contaminated with slippery substances or obstacles; stray children/animals; police; stopsigns and lights; haters that only live to interfere with your adventure, and so on.

I have now become a full-on track snob.  I’ve even dabbled in amateur racing, a very small dabble in 2004 with WSMC at Willow Springs Raceway in SoCal.  The first dabble resulted in narrowly missing out on 3rd place thanks to a fast 250cc 2-stroke beating me to the line.   The second and thusfar last dabble ended in crashing out of 2nd place on the last half of the last lap, with a mile lead on 3rd place, because I was trying to catch 1st place.  Oh, I’ll still go on a street ride if a group wants to go.  But in those instances, I’m no more than a back-of-the-pack tag-along, probably enjoying most the viewpoint of the other rider’s rear tires and chains circling round and round.  For you see, other than one person who is related to me, I can’t pay any of my riding cohorts to even try an entry level trackday.  Don’t want to take the time off.  Don’t want to invest in the needed gear (umm, I’ve got spares).  Don’t want to spend the money (99.9% chance it gets blown on something else regardless).  So now I feel just like Chuck Sorenson, I just don’t have his talent!!  Screw the street.  Bring on closed circuit organized riding.  And that is mostly what this blog will be about.  The adventures of …….. whatever is to come; primarily related to motorcycle riding, but probably some other stuff too.

To start with, some archived trackday postings……..just as soon as I can find where I stored them.