Las Vegas Superbike School

[Yakaru]

So this post is more than a little late. Largely out of embarrassment. But since I posted about my first track day I figure it's time to finally talk about this. I promised Misti after all.

I took the two day class from California Superbike School in Las Vegas this March. It's a new track for me, and I took it on the school's BMWs. I was getting my bearings and slowly picking up speed during the first session (focusing on wide view) and feeling pretty good, if rusty. Unfortunately right at the end of the session things went awry. I'd already passed the first checkered flag and was doing a series of tighter turns on the back side of the track. Then everything went south and I took a fall. Entirely my fault, and sadly entirely predictable given the things I wanted to work on.

• My body position was crossed up (a known problem I'm trying to address)
• I reverted to my bad habit of adding lean while already rolling on in a corner, destroying my traction budget.

This was my first time going down and I was pretty upset and frustrated by it. Thankfully I was perfectly fine and amazingly my helmet was spotless. I took the next session off to cool down and spent some time doing off track exercises. Unfortunately, my nerves never quite settled and I kept having survival reactions overwhelm me on the track and so track control pulled me for the day (a decision I agreed with).

Day 2 I had calmed down and went to work and things went much better. I worked on a lot of core skills and Misti was, as always, completely amazing. I still have some fundamentals to work on (I'm still un-training my instinct to add lean) but I did my best to pay attention to that and work on the lesson and had significant gains. My school notepad for these sessions is something I plan to review before every track session (and add to in the future). We did some creative work on fixing my body positioning (we focused exclusively on getting my upper body right and just having my legs grip the tank) and on being more gradual on my throttle control among other things.

Despite the unfortunate wreck it was definitely worth it and I can't wait to return this July where I'll be going again for 3 days. In the meantime, I will be practicing everything I learned and seeing if I can't improve on my own.

Thanks for reading! Here's my video bike session from day 2!

Link to original page on YouTube.

[Motofool]

[Mechanikrazy]

Sounds like a lot of fun was had, even with a minor dust-up. Although it's not ideal, any embarrassment of a crash should be relatively shortlived. You're definitely not alone on this forum for having chucked a CSS bike.

The throttle and brake information on the video bike is pretty nifty! And it sounds like you made gains and also figured out what you're looking to work on.

[Misti]

Great post!! Thanks for putting this out there and I'm glad you were able to get back out there and enjoy a successful 2nd day! It's never easy getting back on the bike after your first wreck and its hard to shake off the nerves but you did it like a champ!

Keep on working on the fundamentals and it will all come together!!

Misti