Twisting Asphalt - A SoCal Ducati Motorcycle Blog

The big track at Willow Springs bills itself as “The Fastest Track in The West” and while I have no idea if that is in fact a true statement I can tell you that it is an absolutely amazing place to push your own personal limits. Now that I’ve had a few days to cool down and process my latest trackday experience, I can unequivocally say that this was one of the greatest mind blowing rides I’ve ever taken. Sunday I learned a tremendous amount about the 999 as a motorcycle and even more about myself.

On an average weekend in the canyons you can only open up the throttle up so far and when you do, there’s an internal clock that counts down inside your head because as riders and drivers we all know there’s only so far you can push it. I’m not even talking legality here, but rather simple survival. Instinctually when that internal clocks hits its limit it tells your hand that its time to roll off and slow down. It’s exactly the same as the clock inside a quarterback’s head that tells them when to release the football before they get hit. Only on a bike on the street the consequences of waiting to long can be far more devastating.

On a racetrack everything changes. You have the opportunity to open it up all the way - for what feels like an absolute eternity and at a place like Willow Springs that eternity lasts longer then you ever thought was possible. Whatever your conception of eternity is gets completely revamped. When your mental clock hits zero – that exact moment when you’d normally would start rolling off the throttle – you’re just getting started. There’s another mile of track to go. It’s an unreal experience because it fights so much of what you’ve learned over the years. In the past few days since getting back from Willow it has occurred to me that no one ever takes you out when you’re learning to ride and says go as fast as you can and then slow down. No one asks you to run the bike all the way up to its limit. That’s just not the way riding is or should be taught. But a trip to a place like Big Willow radically alters your perception of riding. Because it teaches the untaught. It expands your mind and lets be honest, your skill.

Sunday I was able to push myself farther and further than ever before. Perhaps that’s ultimately what makes racetracks special places, they allow you to do things and feel things that you normally and legally can’t do on a public street. By the end of the day I was very conscious of how much my sensation of speed had changed. What was fast for me is now slow. The sensation of rushing down the front straight away in 5th gear at 8 or 9,000 RPMs and having to bring the bike down three gears and seventy miles per hour before you hit Turn 1 is unreal. It’s beyond what I thought I could ever accomplish on a motorcycle and it’s a full fledged, heart pounding out of your chest, eyes wide open rush. If this doesn’t get your blood pumping, wow..

It’s amazing when the sensation of speed can feel both fast and yet take a long time to finish.

Sunday The Morning

The day started early. 5 AM early. Unlike previous trackdays, MotorMilt and I didn’t stay at a local motel the night before the event. While Willow Springs opens their gates at 7am, the Trackdaz group doesn’t start their trackdays until 9am. So we figured that gave us plenty of time to drive up from LA. This turned out to workout fantastically well other than the early wake up call. That early in the morning there’s quite literally no traffic on either the 405 or the 14, so we made incredibly time getting out to Rosamond, California. Perhaps even record time. We arrived around 8:00, which gave us plenty of time to unload and get the bike ready for check-in and tech check.

Trackdaz

Before I signed up for the event, I had asked a few other riders on the Ducati Monster SoCal Board what it was like attending a Trackdaz event. One of the responses was that it resembled a family gathering. I didn’t quite understand what that meant at the time – as no other track day that I’ve ever gone to has felt like a family event - but I totally get it now. Trackdaz isn’t a school and it never claimed to be; but it’s definitely a social scene. People bring their friends, their families, their BBQs, their RV’s and their dogs. It’s not like a CLASS course and it’s not quite like going to an AMA event. It’s somewhere in the middle.

Around 8:30 the general riders meeting started. So we all shuffled into the main snack room. Looking around a room filled with sixty or seventy riders in various stages of track attire, from people already decked out in their racing leathers to the sweatshirt crowd, is a complete trip. It’s like a real world Days of Thunder, only with Styrofoam coffee cups and no Star Wagon Trailers.

Dustin Coyer, the Trackdaz organizer, lead the twenty-minute discussion. He quickly explained that the day is split into a basic rotation between the three riding groups; the Street, the Sport and the Race groups. Obviously Race is the fastest while Street is the slowest. Yet as I soon found out slow and Willow don’t quite go together. Everything here is fast.

Over the course of the meeting, Dustin covered a number of topics; from the basics like where and how to enter the track, all the way to what different colored flags represented. Having never had corner-workers waving flags during a trackday, this whole concept kinda threw me for a loop at first. It was the first clue that this group ran a different kind of event. As Dustin started quizzing people about the different meanings of the different flags, I had a sense that this would be unlike any track day I’d ever done before and boy was I right.

Once Dustin wrapped up his general riders meeting, there was a second meeting for the first time Willow riders. So twenty or thirty of us walked upstairs to the announce room/booth and were introduced to instructor Steve. On a chalkboard was a map of the course and after going over the flags a few more times, Steve started talking about how fast Willow was. “It’s a scary fast place,” he said repeatedly while pointing out the fast corners. Towards the end of the meeting I caught my second glimpse of the day when someone asked about what to do during a crash and Steve calmly said, “Take it easy, find out where you are and getting off the track in the quickest possible manor, you don’t want to get a four-hundred pound aluminum enema from someone coming up behind you.. That’ll hurt..”

Forty minutes later..

Pulling up to the grid on pit row felt awesome. Dare I say it felt like racing? Thirty bikes packed together with all the peripheral trapping of real racing. Checkered flags, people mulling about in the pit area, tire warmers, crowds, and a host of other assorted paraphernalia all gets you in the mood. It’s hard to ignore the vibe. I got the direct sense that several of these folks were here specifically to practice for the lower level racing circuits.

Of course the biggest reason it felt like racing was that this was the Big Track. It just feels like a real racetrack. Unlike the Streets of Willow, there aren’t any cones marking corners. This place is all tiger-teeth and curving asphalt. It’s hardcore. There’s an ambience to the place and a girth that just makes you smile. As my engine idled as I waited to be let out on the track I found myself being very conscious of trying to slow my approach down.

At this point it was still relatively cool out and you could just feel the impending doom that would result from not letting the tires warm up. So I decided to chill out and letting people pass as much as they wanted until I felt comfortable with my tires. Around lap 3 I finally started to push it a bit.

Since it was so cold out, one of the great challenges of the day was physically getting my body warm. I’m sure everyone rides differently, but for myself I ride my best when it’s 80º degrees out and I’m sweating. When I’m feeling cold everything seems hard. Even harsh. So since I couldn’t’ change the weather conditions and my two sets of thermals weren’t exactly heating me up, I tried to slowly work my way into a mental and physical situation where I felt comfortable. As it turned out my mental approach seemed to work out remarkably well and I’m oddly kind of excited about that.

As each session progressed I felt my personal pace pick up. I have no hard data to back that up since the speedo had to be taped up, but it’s a very strong gut feeling. There was a definite sense that as the tires and I got warmed up the bike got happier.

Initially Turn 2 through Turn 6 were my most comfortable spots on the track. I suspect this was because the speed being carried through those corners was the closest to what I was used to.

Turn 7, which isn’t much of a turn but rather a small hill that opens up to the back straight away, starts the obscenely fast parts of Willow. From 7 you shoot down the back straight into Turn 8 and start a one-hundred-and-eighty degree sweeper that ultimately carries through Turn 9. I was told it’s possible to set your line for 8 and carry it all the way into and out of 9. I found this incredibly difficult because of the semi-straight in the middle between the two corners and because people started making some incredibly poor passing decisions in those two corners.

Turn 9 opens up to the front straight. Suddenly the big track gets very, very fast. The kind of heart racing fast that simply blows your mind. Because it’s freaky fast in a way that you seldom if ever get to experience. Hell, I rarely use 5th or 6th gear on the freeway and never use them high in the rev range. But here it’s a whole different story. This place was built for a bike like the 999.

For the first time in my life I felt like the bike was on a track it was meant for. Gearing was fantastic. All my complaints about being to tall on the Streets Course were null and void here. I was able to use the bike for what it is, a full-fledged rocketship. Amazingly as the speeds picked up the bike seemed to get more settled.

One of the more amazing parts of the day was when I realized that I was hitting the rev limiter in a number of places on the track during the first session. Suddenly I flashed back to my last CLASS course and realized that it was time to start getting higher. From that realization point forward the track kept getting smoother and more comfortable. Amazing how that works.

By the end of the first session I realized that I was having issues with Turn 8 and 9, not because they are fast and you have to really lean the bike, but because I was in the wrong gear. I was hitting the rev limiter in second gear. So when I moved into 3rd gear before I knew it I was carrying those two sweeper type corners around 7,000 RPMs give or take a few grand. The explosion of speed didn’t seem to be in five mile per hour increments, but rather chunks. Once the bike got happy it was easy to get it going faster.

Of course to keep the bike settled at that speed I found myself using more inputs than normal. Not only was I getting over in the saddle quite a bit, but I was also forcibly pushing down on the inside peg. A kind of power user bodysteering that I’ve never had to do. It’s amazing how physical the actual inputs on a sportbike have to be when you’re leaned over at around a hundred miles per hour. It’s insane. And while there were moments when I found myself thinking, ‘what the fuck are you doing? This is crazy fast’, there were far more moments when I was glowing with that sportbike wowzer smile that only comes from nearly freaking yourself out but somehow living. Until Sunday I never considered myself a thrill seeker, but quite obviously I am – at least when I’m in control of the bike.

Later in the Day

Coming out of Turn 9 places you at the beginning of the front straight away. Welcome to wide open throttle city. Tucking down on the Ducati, I keeping whacking the throttle and upshifting until I was rushing down the straight in 5th gear at 8 or 9,000 RPMs. Now obviously anyone can get a bike going in a straight line. That’s not hard and it’s actually quite stable up there, but I’ve never been that wide open for that long at that speed. I mean 8 or 9k in 5th has to be worth 140, maybe 150, right? Insanity. Amazing. Exhilarating. Pure frigg’n speed. What a ridiculously charming rush.

Since it was my first time on the Big Track, focused on getting up to speed and staying in a decent tuck until just a bit past the start/stop finish line. That was the point I picked out to start slowing down. So would pop out my tuck and very consciously smoothly start breaking before the first downshift. Next time I’ll move my braking point forward, but for my first big track run I felt like being safer than sorry. One of my objectives heading into Sunday was to gain confidence on the Big Track and at those speeds. Remarkably I found the process of shifting and braking at high speeds to be relatively smooth. I was expecting at least one or more dirty downshifts but I didn’t experience one. Perhaps I was more on or more focused on being smooth. Or maybe it was just that I gave myself plenty of time to get comfortable with the closing distances. I don’t know, but by the end of the day the sequence events required to make Turn 1 off the straight away felt very natural. I can’t adequately describe how quickly I’d like to try it again.

Crashes

I’ve been at or around five different CLASS course events and have only witnessed two crashes. At Trackdaz there were two crashes in the first rotation of the first three groups. By the time the day ended there were somewhere around ten crashes total. Maybe even more. People here push it. While conceptually I have no issue with that, it dramatically slows the day down. I’d imagine that everyone else at the event lost one whole riding session to other folks laying their bikes down. Thankfully none seemed to have horrific consequences, but I don’t know that as fact.

My greatest annoyance with the number of crashes is that it leads me to feel a bit tentative and even a bit unsafe out on the track. While you have to expect the unexpected no matter where you are, I also think most people tend to think that if you’ve taken the effort to come to the track you have a certain amount of skill and know when and where to make clean passes. Obviously some people don’t. So as the day wore on I found myself very consciously picking my spots to pass and my spots to let groups of riders run out ahead of me. Willow is an extremely wide track and I think that leads people to go three and four wide in places that they really shouldn’t because when the inside guy in Turn 8 can’t hold his line it forces everyone else to widen out as well and that causes problems.

When I signed up for the event, I choose to run in the Street group since this was my first run on the big track. It seemed safer. I’m not sure it was. As with most track day organizations the slower group doesn’t allow passing on the inside. Conceptually this is a great idea. It gives you a place to go if someone comes flying up behind you. The downside and the reason I don’t think I’ll sign up for another ‘slow’ group is that some people take extremely wide lines through corners that can’t really handle them and this creates a tremendous amount of issues coming out of the turns when you’ve got three or four speed demons coming up on your six fast. There’s no place for you to go because you’re stuck between a wide line rider and a bunch of guys who’s braking skill may or may not be up to par. I don’t mean to sound fast, but I’m just no longer sure that allowing no passing on the inside is in fact a safer way to do things. Especially since the inside line is usually the tightest and fastest.

How was Trackdaz?

All day I couldn’t help shake the idea that this was one step below amateur racing. At least that’s how it felt. I recognize that the Trackdaz website might say that it’s not a race organization but people were there to push it. Plain and simple. So while I’d sign up for another Trackdaz event again – because it’s a rather financially reasonable way to get out on the track - I’d like to check out a few other track time outfits first. Having three riding groups running in twenty-minute sessions in my opinion is one to many and creates too much downtime and not enough track time. So for my next track day experience I’ll be looking for a two riding group event.

Pushing Limits..

Up until now my track time has been directly linked to CLASS courses and while I love what Reg does for the sport, I was curious what other track day organizations felt like. So I signed up for a Trackdaz event for the Big Track and I’m glad that I did. Sometimes it’s not easy to push yourself to try something new. But in this case it was well worth it. Up till now nothing has made me feel more worthy of riding an superbike than getting a chance to run this track. The 999 was built to ride places like this. It’s happy here. It’s geared for this. It’s thrilled to run you up to 150 miles per hour with no questions asked. I never thought that sort of speed could ever be possible. To experience it something tremendously cool. It’s beyond what I thought was possible for mere mortals like myself. On some level pushing yourself and your skill is what riding is all about. The big track at Willow is an absolutely fantastic place to experience the sensation of finding your personal riding edge and pushing it just a bit further forward. It’s a blast of a track to ride and one day it’ll be an absolute thrill to be able to get around the place without thinking about where the road is going.. I’m look forward to the next time I can get back out there.

Some other picts:

Rushing down the back straight

Starting to break tuck and begin braking

The Pits

Another straight away shot

Waiting in the Grid

The Antelope Valley

Did you know Willow Springs is a Historical Landmark?

The famous (well not really lol) TwistingAsphalt worn tire shot

You can find more photos here

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