I’ve spent the past three days reflecting on my latest trackday experience and while there are a number of words or phrases that could be used to describe how it felt perhaps the most telling attribute is that I simply can’t stop smiling.

Every time I stop and picture myself out on the track with the 999 this amazingly glorious smirk emerges. It was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable riding days of my life and the afterglow buzz has been so intense that even now it’s hard for me to feel like I can honestly communicate to other people how amazing it felt to be out on the track with the bike. It was simply one of those intensely personal days when you’re pushing yourself and your bike harder and further than you thought you could or would ever go… And with each passing lap you find yourself in the midst of the most wonderfully romantic experience you can imagine as you and your bike become one and right before your eyes you witness yourself riding faster and more proficient than you ever have before.

[Note: Since I’ve already detailed the basic mechanics of how a CLASS course works in my previous post about my experience with the yellow 999 at The Streets of Willow earlier this year, I thought I’d skip most of the perfunctory review elements and instead focus this entry on how my latest trackday felt and the specific things I learned… ]

The Morning

The great Gaz and I arrived at Willow at roughly 7am. (I’m getting ahead of myself here, but even though I know that Gaz has never read Cecilie’s How To Be Track Buddy blog post, he was an absolutely amazing track friend to have around. Not only did he take some amazing picts, but he also was an incredible help in ‘the pits’!… Plus having your buddy around to share the experience is pretty cool. So thxs )Turned out that they don’t start letting people into the track until 7:30, so that gave me ample time to stare out the window and check out everyone else’s bikes… And more importantly trailer set-ups… It’s oddly strange how you start becoming very aware and curious of how other people bring their bikes to the track once you start thinking about taking your motorcycle obsession a bit more seriously.

Finally at 7:30 the gates opened and we were navigating our way around the big track and heading over the Streets course. Driving around the big track it was hard not to fantasize about running it one day. It just looks like a rush and it looks very, very fast.

As I pulled into the parking / pit area of the Streets course it didn’t take long to realize that the weather gods had blessed us with a magnificent morning. There was absolutely no wind at all… No wind at Willow! Who would ever thought those two things could go together? So as Gaz helped me unload the Duc, I found myself trying to just take it all in. Between the wonderful weather and the golden early morning light it was a picturesque moment to be standing at a racetrack. And it felt amazingly relaxing… The complete antithesis of being unable to chill out…

With the bike out of the Van, I rolled it over to tech check where longtime CLASS instructor Fred Willink was leading the charge and making sure everything was cool with the Duc. Since I had pre taped the running lights the day before and had a fresh set of tires on the bike, it was a pretty painless process. Truth be told pre-taping the lights was perhaps the best idea I’ve ever stolen… It allowed the morning to get going without feeling rushed, which was a noticeable improvement compared to my last CLASS course when I was hustling all over the place. Once I passed tech check Fred slapped the ‘approved’ sticker on the bike and started asking me about tire pressure. I suspect this is their usual drill because as I started to answer 32/34, Deveaux Hill, another CLASS instructor, walked up and joined the discussion.

On my previous trackday at Willow the CLASS gang had suggested that MotorMilt and I run 30/30 front and rear psi on the 999’s. On that particular day it was relatively cold and the idea of dropping the psi seemed to make a great deal of sense. However I wrote in my post trackday blog entry that I had wished I had gone 30/34 so as to not chew my tread up so quickly. Of course at the time I was running the 999 at 32/36 on the street ,so 30/30 seemed rather extreme to me. These days I’m running 32/34 on the street, which seems to make the bike feel the most nimble and at the same time give it the best tire wear on the Michelins.

Fred and Deveaux had other ideas however. They started talking about running 28/28 or maybe even going lower. Since I knew the day was going to get warmer – weather.com had predicted 97º – dropping the air pressure down that low just seemed like it was going to waste a new set of tires a heck of a lot quicker. So instead I decided to go 30/32. I have no idea if 2 psi really makes a difference or not, though on the street the 999 feels very different with even the slightest psi adjustment – but at the track I thought at least it would be close to what I normally run while at the same time giving a nod towards lowering the air pressure so that the contact patch could expand a bit more. In all honesty I don’t know that I’ve had enough time at various tire pressures to make an informed or intelligent decision but I digress…

As I rolled the bike back over by the van, Reg started ushering people into the classroom/garage area and just like that the day got started. Having been to a few of his schools before I sort of knew the drill at this point. There was a relatively quick introduction, a bit of schedule talk and some safety discussions before the first real hurdle of the day.

Like most trackday or schools, Reg runs two groups, an A and a B. The A group is the faster of the two and usual comprised of riders who’ve been to multiple schools before. The B group on the other is usually a tad bit larger and basically made up of first or second time track riders.

So when Reg asked, “How many of you were thinking of run in the B group?” I momentarily paused and looked around.

All week long I had more or less planned on riding with ‘B’ group – for a variety of reasons. First and foremost I was concerned if I was really good enough to keep up with the A group. My memory was that the A Group was usually way faster than the B group. I was also very concerned with scuffing in the new tires. This was the first time that I’d showed up to a track with brand new tires that had never spent any time on the road on in the canyons.

This line of thinking changed almost instantly however once Reg asked for a raise of hands to see who was running with the B group. At that point it was plainly obvious that it was time to move up. Of the fifty or so folks at the course, roughly thirty-five were making hand gestures that they wanted to ride with the ‘B’ group.

So now it was a logical numbers game as far as I was concerned. The Streets of Willow course is only a 1.7 mile track. With 14 turns it doesn’t take much for people to bunch up and going into the day there were only two or three places I felt comfortable with passing someone else. So with that, I made a leap of faith that I could keep up with the A’s and moved on up. In retrospect this was the best idea of the day…

At 9am we split up into the two groups and finally got out on the track. For the first two sessions the A group plays follow the leader behind one of the CLASS instructors. (If you want a detailed description of how Reg works the schedule of the day, I suggest you check out my post about my previous experience with CLASS.) During these first two sessions I found myself lagging behind as I very deliberately tried to scuff in the new tires while I got my bearings since it had been awhile since I was on the Streets track. At the time I was pretty sure that I was going to be the slowest guy in the A group.

As I walked inside the classroom area for our first session with Reg, I had a total Maverick & Goose moment from the beginning of Top Gun. There I was hanging out at a racetrack in the middle of the desert, feeling the air temperature rise seemingly second by second and as a group we were mere minutes away from Edwards Air Force Base. Looking around the room I couldn’t help but wonder who was the best? Who were the fastest guys in the A Group? How fast was that?

As the third session of the day started, the CLASS instructors started letting the A groupers out on the track one at a time to evenly space us out. The entrance puts you dead on the beginning of the main straight away. It’s the easiest place to get your bike going fast and given modern motorcycle technology it’s hard not to look very, very quick when you zoom away from everyone else. Given my lack of confidence in the tires at that point I was starting to question why I went with the A group.
Finally it was my turn to get out on the track and as I started opening up the throttle for the first time without an instructor ahead of me, the bike breathed fire and came alive. Quite literally at that moment I stopped worrying and just started riding. By the time I hit Turn 1 things felt locked in place for a good day.

Then I hit Turn 2 and I put my knee down. It was at that point that a good day transformed into a great day….

My initial reaction was holy shit, there’s at least one corner on a racetrack where I can put my knee down. How cool is that? And did Ian Donald, the CLASS photographer get a picture of it? Of course given my previous weekend of riding, this probably shouldn’t have been quite as shocking but somehow it was. Don’t ask me why.

When I hit Turn 3 on my second or third lap and preceded to get my knee down there too, it suddenly became clear that this wasn’t an anomaly. That this was in fact something I could control in any corner on the track. From that point forward, I spent the rest of the morning dancing from side to side, swing around in the saddle and whipping the bike back and forth like I’ve never done before. It was the most thrilling whiplash I’ve ever experienced because I realized I could manipulate the bike faster, further and with smoother than I ever have done before.

And then somewhere towards the middle of the morning I took the next step… I realized I not only could get the bike over in any corner on the track, I could get it over further at any moment while in the corner. I suddenly was very clearly recognizing that I was leaned over in the corner and could still go further… Not on the next lap. Right now. It was just unreal how comfortable and how in control of the motorcycle I felt.

Mid Morning

In the fifth session of the morning Deveaux , the CLASS instructor, pulled ahead of me and motioned for me to follow him for a few laps. As we whipped around the track, he’d pull ahead of me on the straights and then I’d play catch up in the corners. Eventually he raised his left arm – the universal ‘we’re leaving the track’ indication – and I followed him off the track so we could discuss my riding…

“You’re riding awesome,” Deveaux told me, “..but you’re wasting to much motion through 9,10, and 11”

As we talked about what was going on, Deveaux’s made the point that I could keep the throttle open longer and all I’d need to do is barely weave my way through the 9-10-11 chicane part of the track. There was no reason to move around. Logically this made a great deal of sense to me, but I was curious how it would go in actual practice. As you come out of Turn 8 – commonly called ‘The Bowl’ since it’s a highly banked 180º double apex corner – you’re coming wide open on the throttle and heading up hill towards Turn 9. Only the track crests there and you have basically aim at a small cone and take it on faith that you’ll be in the right spot.

At that point I realized that it was getting close to the end of the session, so I leaned over and asked Deveaux if he’d follow me on the next session. Thus began what amounted to a day long one on one session between me and Deveaux.

In many ways the idea of one on one time was one of the main reasons I decided to take another CLASS course in the first place. While I got a tremendous amount out of my previous CLASS experiences, I never felt that I did my part in asking for enough one on one time. That’s my bad. Not the courses. I’ve also either participated or shoot four different CLASS courses in the past several years. Therefore I’ve heard much of the lecture information a number of times. My goal for this CLASS course was a more hands on approach to getting better. I wanted someone to critique my riding and offer tips, tricks and information. Of course as it turned out before I could ask Gigi to find someone to help me one on one , Deveaux (And his 749R ) got to me first…

For the better part of the rest of the day Deveaux and I followed one another around the track. It wasn’t every lap and he helped other people, but ultimately I couldn’t have asked a better or seemingly more constant one on one. And after each subsequent chat I’d go back out on the track and get faster and better and more and more confident.

And not all of it was technical info either. After lunch Deveaux pulled me over and said, ‘Hey dude you got to get your head screwed on straight. You’re trying to go to fast. Slow it down, let the speed come back to you.” And he was right. It was after lunch and I was pushing it. I slowed down and by the next session I was going faster and smoother than at any other point in the day.

Another one of our conversations dealt with Turn 8 – otherwise known as the ‘The Bowl’ – We spent a good five minutes going over braking points and when and where to upshift. It was a very relaxed and non-judgmental method of teaching that ultimately made me a much better rider throughout the course of the day.

To put this in perspective at the last CLASS course I took at Willow when I was on the yellow 999, I spent a great deal of the day hitting the rev limiter in first gear. By the end of Friday I was hitting corners in third. Now I know this doesn’t sound like much, but on a bike that can hit 80 in first gear it really is. Especially given how short The Streets course is. There’s really on two very short straight aways.

By the end of the day I was flying around the racetrack and it was simply spectacular. The bike and I were dancing from corner to corner with minimal movements. Spending a good portion of the day rabbiting Deveaux had not only helped me waste less motion while on the bike, but had also helped me conquer my fear of keeping the throttle wide open in a couple of place – such as coming off the straight away and carrying more speed through Turn 1 or keeping the throttle open from the exit of Turn 8 all the way until the end of Turn 11. So while the CLASS course is not a racing school, ultimately it made me a much faster and I would think much better rider.

One of the over-arching tenents for the day in many ways was a suspension of fear. Reg at one point mentioned in a lecture session that he didn’t know where everyone’s individual limit was or where on the bike they became afraid, but that managing fear and the sensation of fear was something that every good rider has to do and has to learn on their own. I thought it was one of the more telling lines of the day because the more times I got my knee down on the track the more I realized that, and this really is no surprise, but the bike is more than happy to do it and the tires will definately hold. It’s the rider that holds the bike back and as riders we hold the bike back because ultimately we’re afraid. We’ve hit our limit. We’ve gones as far as we feel we can go. We get scared. Yet there’s way more there. This concept vaguely reminds me of a Peter Egan line from years back, when he wrote ‘when in doubt leaning further‘. He was right then and it’s probably even more true now. The more comfortable that I get leaning the bike over the clearer it becomes that it’s not my technic that has greatly improved - though I do think it has improved - but it’s my ability to physical move off of the bike, lean it over and not be afraid in the process that has ultimately allowed me to progress.

Conclusion

For the first time nothing felt ‘hard’ or ‘scary’ or ‘difficult’ about being on the bike on a racetrack. Instead I found myself surrounded by this sensation of security and riding suddenly felt instinctive and dare I say, ‘easy’. I went into the day unsure how good I was and ultimately I discovered I’ve become pretty decent. More than decent really. That probably sounds more competitive than I mean it to be, but ultimately if you take the sport of riding seriously I think it goes without saying that you have some sort of desire to get better and to improve. Ultimately improvement in this sport means speed. That’s one of the reasons we all ride.

What made Friday so amazing was that instead of feeling overwhelmed by the thought process involved in riding at speed - such as where to downshift and when to do it and how to do it smoothly - everything just happened. On its own. And while I’d like to say that I took some remarkable leap forward in picking out and hitting visual markers on the track, it was just the opposite. Perhaps it sounds egotistical – but then blogging about your riding exploits probably already crosses that line… so I digress - but I felt completely ‘in the zone’ as a professional athlete might say after a great game. I felt absorbed in ‘the ride’ and with the bike and corner after corner the fluidity of the day was astounding. Every motion just happened. Every effort felt controlled. Perhaps on a subconscious level I was highly involved with the details of riding, but none of that spilled over into the moment. I felt more free and more relaxed than I have in a very long time. Reading over that previous sentence, there’s a part of me that just shakes my head. It’s mind boggling that one can feel relaxed at 110 miles per hour, but its true.

And if there’s anything that stands out right now about Friday, it was the lack of thinking and the lack of feeling bogged down. The pure freedom of being out on the track and for the first time feeling like I could tap directly into the soul of the 999. And it’s an amazing soul…

All in all, it was just one of ‘those’ magical days when you realize that you’ve come full circle on so many levels and in so many ways. It sure feels like I started riding a very longtime. And as I mentioned in my previous post about the day, the lightbulb has most definitely gone on and for the first time I truly feel worthy enough as a rider to actually ride a Ducati.

Perhaps that’s an odd way to describe it – and I don’t mean to make this sound like one more poser at the Rockstore discussion – but it was emotionally exciting to finally feel like I could and can continue to hold up my end of the bargain with the bike. That I could compete with it. Up till now the bike has always bested me and unquestionably it still does, but it’s nice to finally know that I can now speak to it on it’s own level… That’s amazing to me…That’s progress.

In that regard one of the most inspirational components that made the day really sing was renting the van and driving the bike up to the track. It was a massive upgrade on a number of fronts but perhaps most importantly because I felt so much more refreshed having not made the 85 mile trek from the Westside of LA to Rosemond on the bike. Without a doubt from this point forward I will never ride a bike to the track again. Having the van also allowed me to bring all sorts of goodies like a tire pressure gauge (handy when you’re low on psi ), a cooler filled to the brim with gatoraid, a wheel caulk and all sorts of other relatively meaningless but somehow extremely handy to have around junk.

Having ProItalia put a fresh set of rubber on the bike also was instrumental in the success of the day. Unlike my previous trackday experiences my tires held up ten times better since they were new and at no point in the day did I feel like I was lacking or running out of traction. Once I scuffed the stuff they use to get the tires out of the mold, my confidence skyrocketed because I knew the tires had their peak amount of grip. And grip matters, just as being out on a racetrack does…

I’ve often heard that the only place you can safely test yourself on a motorcycle is at the track and nothing seems truer tonight or since I got back from Willow. Being out on a controlled surface removed so many elements of danger that exist in daily riding. I don’t know what percentage of your mind has to be dedicated to things like gravel, oncoming cars, bicyclists, animals, cars pulling out of driveways, or any of the other of the thousands of obstacles that exist on normal non-track rides, but it has to amount a great deal of your mental capacity. Or at least it should, I would think. Not having to think about those things opened my mind up and as I sit here tonight it’s clear to me that there is no way that I would have made as much progress if I had to deal with all of those everyday distractions while I was out on the track. I certainly doubt that I would have felt as relaxed while riding and if there’s one over-arching thing I’ve learned about riding, it’s that being relaxed on the bike easily equates to being a better rider and having a better ride.

In the end taking the CLASS course was a fantastic experience for a number of reasons. First and foremost it was just a kick to be out there. I had a blast and I learned a tremendous amount. Reg and Gigi run a first rate operation that really makes it easy to feel welcome and they create an environment where no questions ever seems stupid or repetitive.. Deveaux taught me tons. I can’t say enough about how much he helped me get over the hump and into the next level of riding.

Without a doubt I will be back on a track. Soon.

Gaz is still processing most of the 800 photos he took, but here are a few of the ones I’ve seen so far…