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The Click

It clicked. Finally. It only took until July. What was it? The bike? The rider? Well, it was both. The two finally … well, clicked. No, it's not the click where I'm suddenly winning races. That's far too bold, naive and presumptuous to say against the competition I'm facing, but I made the first definitive step in going faster.

It's funny how quickly the tide can change. Aside from a 3rd place at Grattan in the rain a couple weekends ago, the races that Sunday were crap. They weren't even worth mentioning. I tried to fix the problem as best I could afterwards. I went right back to Grattan the following weekend and attempted to fix both the rider and the bike, which worked out fairly well. Strangely enough, when both rider and bike work in harmony, good things happen. Who knew.

This same idea/concept was used at Nelson Ledges this past Friday. My dad and I spent all of Friday's practice day (as short as it was; $125 to practice from only 10am-4pm is far from a good deal) working on suspension. After improving the setup at Grattan, we tried to continue that trend. With Nelson being a much bumpier track than most, we isolated one area in the setup that we wanted to focus on and worked on that all day. James couldn't make it out this weekend, so my dad and I were handling things.

I would go out, run three laps and come in. My dad would make a change. I would go out, do three more laps, come in and say if it was better or worse. We repeated this process 10-15 times throughout the day. At times, my guess at what he had done was completely off, so it was ideal that I didn't know what change(s) he made, so as not to have a preconceived notion of what feedback I "should be" experiencing when I'd go and do my three laps, which would throw off everything we were trying to do. It's almost like cheating on a test. In the end we were comfortably doing laps within half a second of what we did the first time we raced at Nelson a couple months ago, which was a good sign.

Progress continued into Saturday in the Solo 20 race (as I posted about earlier) where I knocked a solid second off my laps and continued to go faster, more comfortably. While the 4th place finish wasn't bad, I was focused more on the laptimes than anything else. I was now doing a respectable lap time around Nelson Ledges – something a lot of people seemed to notice. Compliments like, "You looked a lot better out there", "I knew you could ride a bike", to "Looks like someone ate their Wheaties this morning" were all great to hear, but it made me ask myself, "Have I really sucked this long?" The curve of progression has been steadily moving upward; this weekend it just jumped up a little sharper than normal. I wasn't complaining. We were going faster.

Sunday morning presented a lot of potential. We were right on the cusp of breaking into a new second marker (I started with 1:11 laptimes, was able to get into low 1:10 laptimes on Saturday, so getting into any sort of 1:09.x laptime would accomplish that goal). Practice went well. The onboard laptimer showed 10.2, 10.1, 10.0 consistently throughout the morning sessions. Of the middleweight bikes present, two riders were into the 1:09 range in practice (Brent Bennett and Matt Lapham). Dave (Grey) was probably in that range too, but he's a coy racer and doesn't keep his transponder on in practice to not let the competition know what he's running (I can't blame him, I used to do that myself). So basically I was right there with the lead group at a 1:10.0. These guys were faster overall than I was (as practice is exactly that, practice), but I felt if I could get near them during the race they could definitely help pull me along for fast laps.

As the races progressed throughout the day, I found some areas where I need improvement. My starts are far from stellar. Getting a good launch isn't an issue, but it's sticking the bike into turn 1, ahead of all the other bikes trying to do the same, that I'm not very good at. I'm tentative, waiting to see how things shake out, and before I know it, 2-3 bikes come by me and I'm spending time in a short 8-lap sprint race just to get by them. It's a lot different than it was when I had the SV650. It's tighter, more aggressive, different and just something I have to adjust to.

The races continued and I got into the 9's. I was battling with some guys in each race that were a hair slower than me, but I couldn't get by them, so good on them for staying ahead. I was happy to get into the 9's and be running faster times with less effort. Last time here, I was doing all I could on the bike and could only manage high 1:11's. I was tired, sore and overall whipped afterwards. This past weekend was the complete opposite.

I raced with Jonas (McCluskey) in all three races which was something I was more than happy to do, as Jonas is extremely fast and just running with him throughout the day showed that I had made some progress. I wish we had gotten more laps in however, as two of our races were red flagged at the halfway point, so we only did a total of 16 laps in the three races.

Overall it was an extremely positive weekend; my best weekend yet this year. I dropped two seconds and was riding more relaxed than I have all season. There's still more time I need to find around Nelson though – hopefully I can find it at the next race which is the weekend of August 19th.

Thanks for reading,

- Eddie

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 | POSTED AT: 6:20 AM
FILED UNDER: Race Reports