As many of you know, I have been deployed to Cuba and away from racing for the last 4 months. Actually, I haven't gone any faster than 30 miles per hour since landing on that gawd-for-saken island. But I took a week and a half of leave, went to Vegas for some fun and then hit the race track for a different kind of fun.
I arrived Friday morning to find that the weather gods were being very generous. Temps were in the 70's and it was sunny. Felt great in the high desert of California! Now for the lowdown... I haven't been on a bike in 4 months and the bike I am about to get on is a 2006 GSXR1000 with a stock engine, but we have full-on AMA spec suspension. Without getting into details, let's just say, the brakes, forks, swingarm, rims and a host of other things really, really make the bike feel like my 2006 R6! The bike handles like a 600 in every way and was on rails. Without the hp, this is very similar to what Mladin and Spies race, and I'll never go back to racing on 17 inch rims again! 16.5 inchers are absolutely amazing, especially with Dunlop medium compound slicks. I had to keep raising the rear-sets, til there was no room left to raise them, and we still need to bring them up another half inch! Now I truely understand how MotoGP and WSBK/AMA guys get such serious lean angle!
Okay, so on to it. Friday and Saturday was practice and I needed to get up to speed. The bike handled like a dream, but the stock windscreen was a joke, much like the 06 R6 and my foot pegs had no grip, plus they were too low and my entire foot was dragging in every corner, regardless of where I stuck it on the peg. We tried to make the footpegs grippier, didn't help much and we moved them up as far as we could. I was still dragging bits, but it was better. There was very little wind on Friday or Saturday, so the windscreen wasn't to big of a deal, but at 160 mph, it still makes the neck sore fighting the wind.
I was going slower than my R6 times on Friday by a couple of seconds in practice. I knew I needed time to adjust, but it seemed like I was stuck at 1:30 seconds all day long. My best time on the 06 R6 was a 1:27.2 and I only did that once. Most of my times were in the mid 27's. So I was about 3 seconds slower, but I was dealing with a lot of traffic too. On Saturday, we managed to get into the 1:28's a few times so we were making progress.
RACE DAY:
I now had 80 laps on the 2006 GSXR1000 and felt pretty good on the bike, but wouldn't you know it, Sunday showed cloudy weather and wind! The windscreen, or lack there of, was going to hurt!
I went out for my first race which was Open Superbike. We had a quite a few AMA privateer regulars in the crowd up front. I was gridded 14th out of 17 I think. I didn't have any points from the start of the season, and I was glad to be in the back. This was my first race on this bike and I was worried about my lap times, plus, I hadn't even done a practice start! Well, I got a great start, amazingly, and went into T1 about where I started, around 14th. Even though I have been racing for a while now, I was really nervous and it took me about 4 laps to settle down. I ended up battling with a couple of guys at the back of the pack and managed to get into the mid 1:27's on the last lap. I was actually hitting my rythem right then, but due to it being winter, the sprint races are only 6 laps. I finished 10th overall. Not too shabby for my first time out.
Next race was essentially an AMA race without the Factory pro's. This is the marquee event called the Toyota Formula 1 race. If you recognize names like Jeremy Toye, Jeff Tigert, Jason Perez, Jason Curtis, Robbie Dowie and Jack Pfeiffer, then you know what I am referring to. I was gridded 14th again out of 16. I managed to get a pretty good start, and there was someone at the front that got a horrible start and it looked like bikes and racers were running into each other. Turns out that Jeff Tigert on pole position did a rolling burn-out and everyone trying to get by ran into other people. Luckily, no one went down, but I got to T1 in 9th I believe. Well, it wasn't to long into it when I started getting passed by guys. I saw 4 people go by me, but I put my head down and just tried to do good quality laps and get into a rythem. This was a 12 lap race after all. By lap 9, two of the guys that had passed me looked like they were getting tired and I started to close pretty quickly on them. They had me by about 3 seconds at that point, but my lap times were consistent from lap 5 on. I was with in 3 tenths of a second of the previous lap time each and every lap, averaging 1:27.5 per lap. Same as on my 06 R6. On the last lap, I was within about half a second of on of the guys that had passed me earlier and so I put my head down and went for it. Funny thing was, on that last lap, I found a new line coming over the crest of T6 that really helped and I ended up passing the guy and setting a new personal best lap time of 1:26.7! I ended up 13th in the race, but I learned a lot.
Last race was Open Modified Production. I now had some race experience under my belt with the big GSXR and had figured out a new line through turn 6 and knew I could do much better with the lap times. I felt fairly comfortable with the bike, but it didn't help not having a windscreen worth a crap in the 30mph cross wind! It was hell on my neck. Anyway, I was gridded 11th out of 12 guys (again, I had no points from the start of the season in Jan) and got another good start and was up to 7th by T1. I was immediately into the low to mid 27's and stayed there til lap 5 when I got into the mid 26's, doing back to back mid 26's to finish off the race and finishing 6th overall. That was by far the best I felt on the bike the entire weekend and was doing the same pace as the guy that finished 3rd, so a top 3 is very, very doable!
I had a great weekend and once we fix the windscreen and rear-sets on the bike, we should be going even faster and hopefully giving the AMA guys a bit of a run. I need to shave another 4 seconds a lap off! We shall see what happens once I get back from deployment and not off a bike for 4 months! Seat time is critical.
Results here: http://www.roadracingworld.com/news/article/?article=28199 (Scroll down to Tigershark Open Modified Production to see my name):