Triumphrat

Here it is, about a month later. There have been a lot of developments, and not so many. I have been really busy trying to get the bike ready and dealing with all the things you have to do to race. It isn't a casual track day any more. I feel a bit like Dorothy in the land of Oz sometimes. Were not in Kansas anymore, Toto! I picked up six sets of tires from More Power Racing today, and a set of brake pads and some high temperature brake fluid from Aurora Suzuki, another of my sponsors for the season. Sponsorship sure helps, and I am very grateful to them.

The bike's plastic is painted as much as it is going to be, and I have all the decals it will carry, except maybe Lockhart Phillips. It looks like a NASCAR fender almost, even though I am hardly a highly sponsored racer. WMRRA assigned me number 931. It is a good mid pack number, in my opinion. Getting a number made some kind of psychological difference. Maybe it's an identity thing. The number fits well on a Suzuki, but it wouldn't fit so well on a Triumph. I will be interested to see how my friend Paul puts his number on his 675.

We will be sharing space in my van and pitting together. With two of us, chances are if there are any crashes or other problems, it will only be one of us. We can share all kinds of things, like a generator, a folding table, tools, and so on. Each of us has a pop-up canopy, so we will have plenty of shade, or rain shelter in the early part of the season. Early in the season it will be cold, and chances are it will be raining, too. Paul has a propane heater, and it will be a real blessing. I can imagine being wet and frozen after a race if it is 45 degrees and raining hard, as it often is here in March, April, and even May.

The classroom portion of the new racer clinic was last weekend. WMRRA takes introducing novices to racing seriously, and there are a couple of younger racers who have put together the program. They have put in a whole lot of time, and it shows. The on-track portion will be this coming Wednesday. I hope it either rains the whole time or doesn't rain at all. Switching back and forth between rain tires and DOTs several times isn't my idea of a good way to spend time, but I expect there will be at least a couple changes during the day. It will make it tough to decide whether to heat up the tires or leave them alone, too. I signed up to help with the air fence Tuesday evening. The tires get mounted at Paul's house over the weekend, and we will load up sometime this weekend as well. It is going to be an interesting next week, because my load at work has gone way up unexpectedly as well. With the economy slowing as it is, I can't complain, but it sure is impeccable timing.

The other novices at the classroom session were an interesting lot. I was expecting to be the oldest novice in the room at 48, but I am not even close to the oldest. There were several with very white hair, and they looked to be in their sixties. One was going to ride a 1960 BSA Gold Star in the vintage classes, but the rest were on 600s or 750s, just like the kids in the room. The club seems to be having a big influx of 650 twins, too. They are all SV650s. Nobody seems to race the Kawasaki parallel twin up here, for some reason. There is a guy who came all the way from Montana to race, and he will be racing a Triumph 675, as will Paul. I sat next to a couple of guys who couldn't be more than 20 years old, and they made me nervous. They were not paying a whole lot of attention, and they made it very clear they had been racing motocross for a long time and expected to be very fast on asphalt, too. One planned to race a ZX10, and the other a GSXR750. Both of their bikes were practically brand new, unlike most of the rest of us who were planning to race two to ten year old bikes. Once I figure out what their bikes look like, I will be staying out of their way. I have no doubt they are plenty fast, but I wonder what their judgment is like. The ZX10 will never race in any class I will be in once I graduate from Novice, and I can avoid the 750 if I want to. But, for now, we are all lumped in as novices together. It will be interesting. There are well over fifty new and returning novices, meaning the novice races will start in waves and the track will be very crowded. I am like a little kid waiting for Christmas waiting for the season to start.

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Will
It's a squid thing. You wouldn't understand.
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Go soothingly on the grease mud, as there lurks the skid demon.