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Pulled this off the NEAR list so i'm sure a number of you have seen it there.....but I thought it was pretty cool
Loudon, New Hampshire. One of the trickiest tracks in the world.
I've always had a particularly fond spot in my heart for Loudon, New
Hampshire and its history in the world of racing.
My first visit was in 1962, I went up to race my 200cc Ducati in the
Sportsman events that used to be held along with the AMA Nationals. In those
days it was simply called Laconia. At that time we raced on a park road, the
real classic course, which was in the Belknap Recreation area. It was
nothing more than a park road in the woods and, yes, it had trees around
most of it.
In 1964 the event moved to Loudon at the Bryar Motorsports Park. Keith Bryar
was a real pioneer and carved the track out of the woods at the current
location of Loudon (NHIS). The AMA races continued up to a few years ago
when they stopped for safety issues.
Luckily, most of those issues have been fixed after the track management
moved barriers and bought soft fences. We actually quit going there, partly
because of the safety issues, a few years ago. Now we are back and running
again: it is a much improved facility.
The thing I like most about the NHIS/Loudon course is its technical aspect.
Very few tracks in America have such an interdependent setup. In other
words, what you do and how you do it in turn #1 can follow you all the way
back to the front straight. It's about 14 turns and you'd think you could
pull it back together after just messing up one turn but that's not quite
the way it works.
Under a certain lap time, you really blow the flow of the course. It can
happen in just about any area of the track. Your original error is long gone
but somehow you seem to still be dealing with its offspring. One of the
proprietary knowledge points that local racers have is this: they've figured
out how to mitigate the effects of a mid course error and recover
sufficiently to still put in a good lap. That is one of the closely held
secrets of the track. I'm not sure that the locals even know it is a secret.
I had a factory rider who was quick at most tracks but Loudon had him
stumped. He could get one or two sections right each lap but it never seemed
to be the same and was unable to put together the whole track into a decent
lap time. I added up his best section times and showed him how he would be
on the pole if he could just put together one lap.!!! Even top pros battle
with the track's intricacies.
I'm please to be running back at Loudon (NHIS) again and if you are up to
one of the most unique challenges in America come on up, we'll be there on
the 30th and 31st of July for single day schools and also the 1st and 2nd of
August for our exclusive 2-Day Camp.
Hope to see you there.
Best,
Keith
27 years - Motorcycle Racing School - California Superbike School
800-530-3350
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Originally Posted by Paul_E_D
LOL
