Hi all. It's been a minute.... and a few bikes.... and a lot of miles on track and off. The OP of this thread @
Ducati999 and I did our first track day together waaaay back in 2014, with the help and guidance of sensei @
csmith12. I posted this over on the Facebook group for my track day organization but thought it fit this topic well.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how we progress as track riders and how our focus changes over time. Maybe… hopefully… this will be of use to some newer riders. Apologies for the longwinded post.
This is just my experience: others evolve at different rates and in different ways. Some are naturals and quick more or less out of the box. But looking back, I realize that what I was thinking about and paying attention to early on was very different from what I focus on today as a somewhat-faster-than-mid-pack track rider.
I’m a cautious guy by nature, so my progression has been very gradual. I was in no hurry to move up and the track day organization had to kick me out of the low-intermediate group into the faster group I'm now part of. The mindset was (and still is) one of risk management rather than the pushing of limits.
In the beginning you don’t know where the limit is or how quickly things can go wrong. Without that knowledge, the limit seems like a beast waiting to bite you… and you don’t know what will provoke it. How fast can you enter that corner? How hard can you brake? How far can you lean? How hard can you get on the throttle? How quick do your reactions need to be? Are you actually able to do this or is your ambition getting ahead of your ability?
In the early days, these things occupied a lot of mental capacity while riding. Too much, too fast triggered incorrect actions… “ohsh!tohsh!tohsh!t” moments, blowing corners, running wide, doing a little unplanned gardening off the edge of the track, being way too tense, improper inputs, all of that. Most if not all of us have been there and done that to one degree or another.
That stuff takes brain power away from the things that actually enable you to ride well.
But with experience comes familiarity and comfort. Over time, I didn’t need to think so much about the fundamentals of operating the motorcycle or the constant concern in the back of my mind over how close the limit was. I had a few moments here and there… oh, THAT’S what it feels like when the front chatters… yikes, my knee touched—and gee, that “extreme” lean angle wasn’t so bad… and so on.
And with that comfort, more mental capacity opened up. It became possible to think about different and more useful things. Am I spotting what I need to see? Am I hitting my marks consistently? Am I smooth? All because I now know some of the answers to those questions that occupied so much of my mind in the beginning.
Now, the mantra is Vision-Consistency-Smoothness. And that’s correct. But it’s not necessarily easy to achieve early on, simply because there’s so much else going on.
This year I’ve had the opportunity to chat with some brand-new track riders – which I love doing – and I’ve noted how important vision is. They’d go out for their first open session, come back and I’d say “So tell me what you saw. Did you see X, or Y, or Z?"
The answer was always no. “So look for those things next time. They’re important.” The hope is that planting the notion might get them to start thinking more about the important stuff early, and less about how fast they’re going or whether they’re able to drag their knee.
If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading. Have fun, be safe, and I'll see some of you at the track!