SOAR Round#4

My first race weekend! I did the practice day on Friday since I did not know the track. Technically, it wasn’t my first time at Cayuga. I did ride it once on my CBR125R pretty much exactly 2 years ago, but I had no recollection of the track layout plus riding it on the 125 and now the GSX-R 750 were two completely different games.

Final corner before the front straight

SOAR was using a cool timing system by Zoomius, so with an RFI sticker on my windshield I was able to get my lap times without having to have a lap timer on the bike. I spent the first session of the morning going quite slowly just trying to figure out which way the track turned, trying to memorize the turn sequence, and get a feel for all the bumps and cracks and bumps. The track has 2 consecutive straights with a fairly tight and challenging but fun infield. The layout wasn’t that hard to learn and by second session I felt comfortable to start adding some speed. Granted I’m sure I was fairly choppy still and my lines weren’t ideal, but I managed to get around at a time of around 1:30 and I knew I could tweak that a bit more. By the end of the day I was consistently doing 1:24’s and I was very happy with that.

Saturday came around and we got a bit more practice time in the morning, followed by qualifying heat races through the remainder of the day. I had entered the Gecko Forwarding Rookie Challenge, a class for beginner racers with less then 5 races experience.