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The last week has been awesome. It started with showing up Monday night for the pro school. That entire experience was amazing, but that's a whole nother writeup. Suffice to say it was time and $ very well spent.
Thursday I took the day off & let Leeza ride my bike. It was raining, and I needed the recovery time anyway.
Friday practices were typical, nothing worth mention. PTwin came around and I was gridded up with 2 other bikes, very low attendance. I just went out and ran laps. I don't think I diced with anyone much. 6 crashed in 11 & put his bike between someone in my race and the right hander he needed to make for T12, so he ended up doing the pit in/pit out thing. I knew something was wrong when I lapped him, thought maybe he fell and got back up. Easy win. I did get a pretty good start, and meg got a good picture of me starting as well. That was cool. Thanks Meg!
Saturday started off with GTL. It had been raining and the track was very wet, so we went out on rains. I'd never been on them before, that was a trip. Preteen got a good start, and I just rode around feeling the tires out. By lap 5 or so I was completely by myself, some people were behind me but most were in front, fully checked out on me. As I got more and more comfortable with the rains I picked it up more and more, and finally saw Christian in the distance, most of the way down the straight as I came out of 12. Finally! Something to chase! From then on I got him a little closer and closer each lap, until the red flag. I ended up riding off the track 3 times, but they were all uneventful. Once I ran wide out of 6, the new runoff saved me. Once someone stood it up and went to the oval from 11 and I ended up in the grass for a half second avoiding a collision. The third time I actually flicked the bike too hard for the last part of 12 onto the straight and cut the apex a hair. Ended up in 6th of 12, working my times down each lap to a best of 35.2. Much better than I thought, and for a first time in the rain I'll take it.
Sat LWSM: Got a shit start and had to sort through some traffic from the race in front to hunt preteen. Caught him quickly enough, but could not for the life of me get around him. He was running some crazy lines in the places he knew I usually would pass him, and I couldn't get by safely. Also turns out my tires were shot - there was some question the day before but we did a bunch of suspension work to try to correct it so I decided to try it again. Bad call. I was losing the rear out of 2 & 12 almost every lap, and the bike actually highsided me off in 4 once. I was fortunate enough to be able to hang onto the bars and land back on the bike, which was nice. Now I know why they call it "highside hill". That wasn't much fun. New shoes before I go back out on track for sure.
After the race I mentioned preteen's insane blocking lines to him (not giving him shit, just "damn, I never knew there were blocking lines in 3 & 6!") and he said "I knew you were there, so..." and laughed. Today he says "well I was tired by LWSM, and my lines may have gotten erratic on accident, but I wasn't doing it on purpose". Either way, he ran a good race and a bunch of low 27s to finish in front of me. I ran most of my laps faster but just couldn't make the pass. I did run all 27s and 26s (except the out lap) with a new PB of 26.525, so I can't complain. I know I could have gone faster as well, if I had the rear hooking up and nobody in front of me holding me up in certain places.
All in all, I guess I'm happy with it. I know for sure that next time I'm on the fence about a tire, I'm going to just swap it. Losing a little time is one thing, but that recovered highside in 4 could have gone very poorly, and cost me a lot more than a new rear tire.
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Originally Posted by "Dangerous" Dan K
:
is the world coming to? It must have something to do with the impending 2012 appocalypse!
