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.
Coming out of corner 1
August long weekend at Bogie
Leaning into the uphill right hander of corner 6
We spent the August long weekend at Bogie, could there be a better way to spend time off work? Johnny got to go up early again, I made my way up Friday night, rode Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. Riding a track 4 days in a row, that was a first. It wasn’t quite as tiring as I had thought, I guess after a while you start getting used to this.
Making a straight line out of 12B and 13
First time back at Calabogie with my new suit. Being able to actually move freely on the bike made such a difference. I was still having some issues with the plastic shoulder details hitting my helmet and preventing my head from turning as far into the turns as I would want to. I found that dropping my inside shoulder would help with that.
One of my favorite corners rightly named Temptation
Johnny had his new GPS Starlane lap timer so I got to use his hand-me-down AIM timer. Here I was all happy that I would finally start getting an idea of what sort of lap times I do and we couldn’t get that damn thing to work. We tried propping it up on the bike all sorts of ways, and eventually gave up. I ended up using Sandy’s unit (thank you Sandy for letting me borrow it!) so I did end up getting my lap times after all. My times were consistent at around 2:30 and dropped below that a few times. My best time of the weekend was a 2:28 which I was very happy with.