Donington Today

Knackered, but 12 laps went by bloody quick!

Qualified in 9th in the rain and got (the usual) flier of a start
and was 3rd for a couple of laps as it had dried out by the
afternoon. Got mugged for a couple of places and then
drifted off to sleep somewhere in the middle and finished
7th with a new personal best of 1:27.83 round the national
track - not bad for a shitty old 620 Ducati!

Points mean I'm still in 4th in the championship, but no
longer joint 4th.

Didn't bother with the SV race even though I qualified 2nd,
as it started pissing down 10 minutes after the DD race
finished and I didn't fancy sliding down the road, even with
the prospect of a 1st place.


Next round Snottyton on 2nd/3rd Sept.

 

Well done. Keep up the good work.
--
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'^' RBR Clues: 27 Pts: 490 Miles:1992

 

In uk.rec.motorcycles, antonye belched forth and ejected the following:

I don't like rain, either

 

I think the fastest lap was a 1.24 in the race, but I don't have
the timesheets to hand and they've not been posted on the
official website [1] yet either.

There is a bunch of bikes, basically the top 5 atm, that are
all within hundredths of each other, then the rank and file
(like me) a second or two behind. I know that my bike is
just as quick as theirs now, from being up the front at
Donington and getting a tow, but I need to work on my
technique to start shaving off those hundredths and bring
my laptimes down.

It will come with time and practice, I'm sure!

[1] http://www.theresults.co.uk/new_2006_era_results.htm

 

It is a very fast track and one that takes a lot of
courage to take some of the corners at speed and
do fast laps.

Coppice is a great corner if you know how to do
it, and for me that was just following someone
round it and watching what they did; way out left
on the entrance as you come up the hill, braking
in 4th [1] but not changing down. Tip it in before
you reach the crest and run the first apex quite
wide, but constant lean, and you'll make the
second apex wide but fast too. You'll be wide out
of the corner onto the straight, and into top gear
halfway down the blue/white kerbing on the left
at the corner exit.

I was hitting the rev limiter in top at the 200 yard
marker on the back straight (which is a calculated
138mph) so we went down two teeth on the back
sprocket for the race. It also helped to sort a couple
of corners where 4th was too low and 3rd was too
high, which saves losing time on shifting and helps
maintain the speed.

I know this is not much help to your casual road
riding trackdayer, but the luxury of being able to
change gearing means you can sometimes make
a terrible corner into a really easy one.

It's not an ideal line!

For me it's 5th from just out of Hollywood (after Redgate)
and carry that all the way down into the Old Hairpin, over
to the left (outside), back one into 4th and swoop through
the corner (drag fairing!) and then take Schwantz quite
wide to bring you back in on the slight kink before McLeans,
as this makes it a straight run and sets you up perfectly
for the inside line.

And still fast too!

It is a great track, but very slippery (dangerously so?) in
the wet, which is why I really didn't want to go out in the
additional SV race with it bucketing down. I'd rather throw
the £50 race entry fee away than the bike into the gravel.

[1] only a 5 speed box, y'see!

 

Yes, OzMick lent me his books and they really, really
helped get my head round things. I think this is why
I improved so much since last season.

The two things that made the biggest impact for me where
the lessons about front and rear contact patch balance
(the 40/60 rule) and how this is tied in with grip, and to
always maintain a positive throttle. The second was the
lesson about ground clearance and which way the
suspension goes when you open the throttle and how
it will give you more ground clearance - KC says to put
the rear wheel against a wall, hold the front brake and
try it!

The widescreen vision is something that I did anyway,
as I think most road riders do to some extent. The other
techniques he discusses all make sense and I've been
trying to apply them as much as possible, but sometimes
in the middle of a race when you're 4 abreast into a corner
and fighting for tarmac ... it kind of gets forgotten!

As a side note, I bought Andy Ibbott's book of MotoGP
Performance Riding Techniques, or somesuch, and have
to say that it's just the TOTR stuff rehashed by him with
comments from MotoGP riders. It's a nice enough book
and maybe it would be better to read this first as a
prelude to reading Keith Code's books, but certainly
not the other way round.

I'm not doing enough trackdays at the moment, so I
really need to go and practice, rather than going out and
trying to go As Fast As Possible. I've contemplated
going to CSS, and hope to at some point as I'm always
open to learning - as I said before, it was a shame that
I didn't make Mallory as I'd have loved for you to have
done a bit of observation and given me some tips.

 

Aww shucks <flutters eyelashes>

Seriously though, any kind of feedback is useful even if
it is just "yep, you seem to be doing that right."

 

Results have now been posted, FL was 1:24.18

http://www.theresults.co.uk/new_2006_era_results.htm

Interesting to see that I averaged 80.23mph round there!

 

Cheers fella, shame you didn't come but the weather
was not the best again!

 

if its anything like the TT you'll need to have to be quicker than
last year.
--
Adie
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