Thread: Tips and advice
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Old November 20th, 2018, 12:04 PM   #16
Frank06
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Name: Frank
Location: Maine/Nova Scotia
Join Date: Sep 2016

Motorcycle(s): many!

Posts: 107
Quote:
Originally Posted by tgold View Post
If you're going to do track days before dipping your toe in the racing pool at least get yourself a good laptimer. IMO if your goal is to race, then you don't want to feel fast, you actually want to know if you are fast. A laptimer is the no BS way to objectively assess your performance. The more sophisticated laptimers will give you the capability to assess your speed at any given point whereas a simple laptime will only tell your overall performance. Certainly at first, just knowing your laptime will be good enough to let you know how you are doing without overloading you with too much information. You can leave the corner by corner analysis for later.

I will say that there is something to be said for simply taking a race school and starting racing right away. It kind of forces you to figure out how to improve in order to be more competitive. That is unless you like getting beat!
The way I see it, the problem with jumping right in is that you could quickly be overcome by what's going on: riders flashing by on both sides, near collisions, etc. And I'm not sure knowing lap times is helpful: when you see you're 20 seconds off the pace will you able to think about the best thing to do? There's an argument to be made for understanding and concentrating on technique w/o worrying about times. That said, at some point I agree a timer can be a good tool for improvement.
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