6
As many of you know, I had my MBA graduation saturday and celebration saturday night, so I couldn't get up to Loudon for the whole weekend. It was a nice cap off to a couple years of really hard work, to pursue (another) masters part-time in the evenings and weekends while working full time, leveraging that into a major career shift, and banging it out in a relatively short timeframe. Exhausting but in the end worth it.
Anyways, I got home saturday night after a wonderful dinner at Morton's in Boston with a full belly and after some wine and scotch decided I would set my alarm for 6am and see what happened in the morning. The alarm goes off, I look outside and it's beautiful, I decide HELL YES I am going! Register for LWSB and LWSS online, drive over to my shop, pack up all my shit, and drive up. Get there and get unpacked and tech'd but not in time to practice, which is alright. I'll just wing it.
Race 2 LWSB - try to get into the groove on the warmup lap and figure I'll just go for it. I'm gridded in 2A which is not a great place to be, but as usual I get a great start. Believe I'm second going into t1. Someone really jams me up underneath in t1a and I have to stand it up, line is blown for 2 and the back straight, so I lost a couple places. Felt like an unnecessary move but would like to see some video, maybe it was ok. Somewhere in the middle of the race I lost a couple spots from to guys who really motored me on the straight, guess they were stalking me and have motors. Set a new PB on the bike, did some 24s. It's feeling better each time. Finish 7th out of 20.
Race 12 LWSS - Gridded in 1D, which is ideal... get a monster start and the holeshot into T1, and hold it through 1a and 2. Brake like a bitch for 3 and someone gets by me. But I'm trying to hang on. I am chasing Faucher and stay with him through the first lap. Someone gets me into three on the second lap and I try to keep with him as well. I set some new PBs again and I'm down into the 23s. As we start to lap the novices I'm more aggressive this time, that was something I wasn't good at last round. It turns out sam 666 and 489 are on me pretty heavily at the halfway point of the race. Sam comes inside me during the flip for 12 when I wasn't expecting it and I have to stand it up pretty bad. I need to protect there more. 489 gets by me as well as my line is blown. I chase them but then get hung up in traffic behind some novices and get a little tired too. I cruise home in 5th out of 11.
Overall, glad I came up for those two races. I could really use some non-race seat time on this bike but having a new job and starting at 0 PTO makes it difficult. So I'm hoping to keep working on things at the classic... would love to do Thursday practice but having to already take Friday makes it tough. I keep meaning to mount my gopro to my bike but haven't had a chance, so that's the plan for next round including oil change and all that stuff. Having done 19s on the r6 and 23s on the motard, theoretically I should be able to do 21/22 on the SV... just need to get there. I'll take the 23s for now though, I'm going a little faster each time I ride it. Need to improve mid corner passing and lapping of novices as its harder on smaller bikes than it was on the r6.
Thanks to my PPS teammates and all my north garage friends for the support and good times... it's not quite a race weekend without dinners and drinks and shenanigans, but it was still good to see ya'll on Sunday. On to the classic!
TL;DR getting more comfortable on bike, new PB on the SV of 23s, awesome starts, mediocre racing and front/mid pack finishes. Need riding to be as good as starts lol.