Catch Up On My Summer Riding

[Donovan]

Well my lack of posting has caused me to miss out on the entire season of riding.

So the readers digest version: Got A Ticket on the 748 -> Stopped ridding on the street -> Bought Triumph 675 For the Track -> Sold 748 -> Rode The Track All Summer

Now some clips from my post on other sites:

Okay Here's a Legend:
TCK is Confirmed Need Passenger
TCK is Confirmed Has Passenger
TCK is Tentatively Scheduled
Someone Else Is Going to The Track!

The 2008 Schedule:
June 30 & July 1 : Thunderhill - Keigwins (Mattv & Gaurawa)
July 12-13th : Reno-Fernley - ZoomZoom (Sidm Confirmed Passenger for Out but not Back *UPDATE-Tentatively have passenger for return trip*)
July 13th : Thunderhill - Keigwins (Mattv)
July 20th : Thunder Hill - ZoomZoom - (Waitlist Success!!!! There are more spots open now so sign up!!!!)(Passenger For The Return Trip Home)
July 26th-27th : Buttonwillow - Pacific Track Time (Since august is so light)

August 9th-10th : Reno-Fernley - Pacific Track Time
August 12th : Thunder Hill - (Mattv)

September 1st-2nd : Fast Way Around Thunder Hill (track will be freshly re-paved) - Pacific Track Time (special school)
September 20th-21st : Reno-Fernley - Keigwins
September 25th : Infineon - Pacific Track Time - (Now I just need to get the day off work)

October 11th-12th : Thunder Hill - Keigwins (I've paid but on wait list)

November 9th-10th : Thunderhill - Keigwins

[Donovan]

Okay bitches.... More then half way through the 2008 schedule...

Got to hit the track with non-other than Mr. Tigre himself this past weekend. The wind at T-Hill was OUT OF CONTROL!

I'll do a bit more of a write up later... But had a great time and dropped my PB by about 4.5 seconds consistently, to put me into slow A pace.

A couple pictures I like, meant to buy the special from GBM but forgot in the heat of packing up:
Turn 11 - The school SUPER helped me get an awesome drive through this section onto the back straight away


Turn 3 - Worked with Corey Call in the morning (he was on a borrowed Twin) really changed my line through this area, dropped my speed a bit through T3 but helped set me up to get WOT power through 4 and up the hill to 5. This is a corner I need to work on a good amount


My timer batteries died before I could get my later sessions downloaded, but here is a comparison between my fastest lap on Monday and my third session on Tuesday (Yellow is obviously the second day). Not bad for my second time at T-Hill (Just FYI I dropped almost all my time between the top of 5 to the top of 9.)

[Donovan]

Well I had my first K@TT weekend at RFR... One thing comes to mind after the weekend, wow are we lucky to have so many close tracks and so many good trackday providers.

I was kind of nervous going into it cause all the people saying, "If you like PTT you won't like K@TT and vice verse" All I could think was how much different could they really be? But let your worries be put to bed, whomever came up with you can't like both is probably a grammer Nazi on some My Little Pony forum for fun.

I'm not as eloquent as our own Mostrobelle, I write more caveman style. Me ride bike. Bike go vrooommm. What I will say is I look forward to my next K@TT weekend. I had a great weekend even though my weekend started like this:


Not because I was taking a two up ride, I was there for the other reason. At least there are a bunch of cool stills of my bike:


But some encouragement from Mike (I believe, man I'm horrible with names) to try and fix it and 1 package of JB Weld later:


I was back out attacking the track:


Overall good weekend, dropped my personal best down to a 2:51, Things I've now learned the hard way, when you're sleeping in the back of your truck and the temp drops into the 30's-40's the tires are going to be much colder and are going to take longer to warm up. You'd think that would be common sense but it evaded me Saturday.

See you guys on October 11-12th.

*EDIT*

Oh yeah I'm signing up for T-Hill on the 6th of October need to use my last PTT track pack day.

[Donovan]

Well another trackday completed. It was the season finally for PTT and it couldn't have been much better of a day then it was at T-Hill yesterday.

I came hoping to really set in place the teachings from the Fast Way Around Thunder Hill school put on by Micheal Earnest and the PTT staff. I was on the cusp of riding A group but with the PTT 2:06 A group pace I wasn't ready to be a lamb amongst the wolves. My corner of special interest was going to be T3 the off camber and debatable line choices really have me feeling it out. But I wasn't getting WOT between 3 and 4 which was hurting my drive up the hill into 5, not a make or brake it section of the track but every bit helps.

Well starting out I didn't need a recurrence of the last trackday cold tire incident so I came out and parade lapped it and left the timer off It was good ran around lots of traffic but I didn't do many passes. Turn 3 was still giving me issues:


As the day progressed there was still a fair amount of traffic so I got to work on my passes. Started getting a lot of people on the brakes and still feeling comfortable in the turn. The Spies throttle grip really helped me keep positive throttle through the turns but made trail braking a bit interesting:


I was turning in consistent times, 2:13/2:14 but needing to make lots of passes and wasn't getting wide or turning late enough to make any gains. I was sacrificing a bit of corner speed in 12 to get a hard drive out of T13 which gave me a few passes:


But things didn't start gelling until the last two sessions, when the herd thinned out a bit. I started to really nail T3 and had some space to work with in 6-7-8-9 to keep the pace I would like to normally. I got a 2:12 and was pretty stoked and thought the day a success but was going out for the last session. This round was pretty empty consisting mostly of people taking their NRS and A groupers looking for some more seat time. Well everything just sort of fell into place I was able to take the lines I wanted, paint to paint, got to bomb over T5 lofting the front a bit which was nice to have the room to execute that turn with some speed... I pull in a lap early, I was a bit tired, check the timer... 2:08 nice. More then a successful day broke the 10s mark which wasn't even part of the goals for the day and was purely icing on the cake.



Well look forward to seeing you guys and gals this weekend should be another fun one for sure.

[Donovan]

Yeah the weather sucked but oh well... I almost made it the whole weekend without a cool story until I dodged a knee puck flying at my face at a GPS indicated 140mph on sunday...

or the expressway I made to bypass turn 12


Great riding with you guys again... look forward to hitting the street with you all soon. I think this weekend ended my season at the track as well.

[Donovan]

Well there was my season all wrapped up in one thread.