posted on October 12, 2011 10:59
My UK Adventure!
Just when I think I can't get any luckier, another awesome opportunity always seems to come rolling along. I didn't even learn to ride a motorcycle until I was 20 years old, so even though I have big hopes and dreams I try to be both optimistic AND realistic in setting goals. I started getting support this year from Tony Dexter at Motodex- Performance First with some cool Brembo goodies. We'd worked together earlier in the year, when the possibility of a World Endurance team came up, but after it fell through, he started talking about doing a wild card at a British Supersport round. He thought it would be a great way to promote his business, but it still seemed like a long shot to me. I was still pretty excited when I found myself sitting on a plane headed for London for the last round of the British Superport Championship at Brands Hatch.
When Josh [Hayes], Joe (my fearless mechanic/babysitter/buddy) and I showed up in London we met with Tony who gave us a quick tour of London. I remember seeing Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the London Eye, and a midget dressed as the Queen. We were all in a big fog from the flight over though, so once again I succeeded in traveling to new places for racing, and yet still avoided getting any culture! The next day we piled into our rental car and headed up towards Donington Park Raceway. Josh was a pretty brave soul figuring out the right hand side drive and only hit a few curbs. When we got there, they had a cars on track doing a track day. I managed to mooch my way into a Porsche 911 and a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo to try and get a look at the track. That was definitely pretty cool! I also got to meet the guys from Mar-Train who Tony had leased our bike from. They're all Irish guys and super cool. The bike itself looked awesome with a special American Flag motif on Carbonin bodywork. Jon Jessop showed up also, so that we could get a few promo shots before we tested the next day... This one is my favorite here.
Tuesday morning we got signed up for the track day so that I could get accustomed to my new ride. Donington Park is a really amazing track. It's probably up there with my favorites. The first bit of the track has this downhill set of s-bends called Craners that is really fast and fun. Most of the track is really fast and flowing, except that last bit which was some really fun hard braking into hairpins. The bike was SICK too. Their Supersport class rules are a lot more open than Daytona Sportbike, so the bike was a lot faster than any R6 I'd ever ridden. It had cool electronics on it too, with auto-blip for downshifts which I've never used before. They actually had to disable some of the goodies, since they weren't allowed in the Supersport Cup, but they were still fun to check out. The only downside to the whole day was that it was really crowded, so it was really tough to ever get a clean lap, but in the grand scheme, that was just a small complaint.
After that we went to Chaz's [Davies] place. Of course it was pretty exciting since he was celebrating wrapping up his World Supersport championship. His Dad runs a go kart track right there at his house called Kinsham Raceway. It's pretty nice. When Chaz was in the US, I beat him in karts a few times so there was a lot of trash talking leading up to our trip. To be honest, he totally handed me my butt, but it was still a lot of fun riding his dual engine karts and some mini-bikes too.
When we got to Brands Hatch things really started to get hectic. The schedule was really working against us. The track has two configurations, one called the Indy circuit which has sub minute lap times and the other called the GP circuit which is the configuration we would race on. Apparently in the UK, people complain about noise as much as they do in CA, so Friday we were only going to get one 45 minute session on the Indy circuit. Then Saturday we would get one 30 minute practice on the GP circuit before going into qualifying. Talk about a trial by fire. Then, just to really throw a wrench in the whole operation, we had an engine failure after only two complete laps on friday. There are few things worse than sitting in the pits listening to your class on the racetrack. I was getting worried.
The guys worked all night to swap engines to have me out in the first practice Saturday. I rolled out and tried to figure it out the best I could. I got really frustrated when the track didn't come to me as quickly as I thought it should. It's got some tricky and blind stuff and it just seemed to take forever to get my bearings. Before I knew it, practice was over. Going into qualifying I was pretty nervous. I knew I needed to find a lot of time. I set out trying to accomplish what I could and started making laps. It still didn't seem to be coming to me the way I felt it should. I made some bad decisions that left me a pretty dismal lap time. I was well within the cutoff, but still going really slow. I was pretty unhappy. To make it even worse, later that afternoon, Supersport had a makeup race from an event that had been cancelled earlier in the year. Since I hadn't been at that meet, they wouldn't let me in the race. That meant everyone else got even more track time while I sat and watched. I didn't like the pattern that was developing! Saturday morning we woke up and it was raining. I really didn't mind one bit though because I like rain racing. We mounted up some rain tires and I got ready to splash around a bit. But it turns out I may have over-estimated my rain riding skills - because a highside happened on my 3rd lap. Ooops!!! It gave me a lot of bumps and bruises but I'm grateful I didn't hurt myself. Josh likes that I still had a hand on the throttle with both wheels off the ground.
The first race Saturday was in mixed conditions so we went out on intermediate tires. I'd never ridden on those since in Daytona Sportbike we only have full rains or full dry tires. The guys were racing to fix the bike in time and even though I missed the sighting lap we made the race start. At that point I decided I didn't care if my lap times weren't there yet, I just needed to figure it out and race. I passed a couple guys in the first few turns but then I missed a downshift and the revs fell so badly coming out of a corner that they all came back through. Some problems developed so I had to pull in a bit early which sucked.
For the second race it looked to be a mostly all dry track, which was good. But on the warmup lap I noticed the gear shifter was really messed up. It was almost impossible to make a downshift. I guess tossing the bike on its side must have damaged it. There was no time to fix it on the grid so I tried to make the best of it. I was missing downshifts everywhere which made it really hard. I hated running around in the back - it's embarrassing, but I really wanted to finish the race for Tony Dexter of Motodex since he had put so much into the event. He seemed pleased to be in the race at all, so that was good. Although I would have liked to have done so much better, it was nice that he was pretty cool about the whole thing.
Despite some of the chaos it was still a really cool experience. I met some really awesome new people... There are probably a lot of Brits and Irish guys out there that wonder if I know how to speak English since I kept having to have them repeat themselves so much. For the most part everyone I met was so nice and cool... And as for the few that weren't so nice... well hey - I respect your passion for the sport. =D I hope I get another try at it, so I can make sure everyone knows I'm capable of better than what I was able to put on display.
I just really want to thank Tony at Motodex Performance First for the opportunity!!
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