Today was my first track day sense going to CSS.  I spent the day with Loan Star Track Days (LSTD) at Motor Sport Ranch in Cresson, TX.  I rode with the street group on the new 1.3 mile track.  After Mid-Ohio I thought I could handle things pretty well.  The new track at MSR is a real handful.  It is short with a number of decreasing radius turns and to make it even more fun it has some serious elevation changes.

Straight out of the pits it seems like you dive down forever.  Then you are greeted with a great little up hill decreasing radius turn, real fun trying figure that one out (hint - there isn't an answer to it you just slow down).  Anyway the rest of the track is just like that.

I worked the morning session and took a ton of pictures (183 were kept, I'm going to sort the rest and upload to flickr later) and shot some video (havent looked yet).  In the afternoon I manages to video one session.  I plan to edit the videos together and upload to youtube later.

I was on my 99 ZX6.  My first session I really didn't trust it and started off averaging about 1:40 per lap (1:37 was best).  Everybody was blowing by me.  The next set I had more faith in the bike and brought my average down to 1:37 (1:32 was best).  Third set was again better: 1:35 average (1:32 still the best).  By the end I wasn't being passed as much, but I still need a lot of work.  I also need to trust my bike better.  However, I kept banging the freaking pegs.  I still don't hang off,  I just move my chest from side to side.  I've never before experienced anything like that.  Imagine going around a turn, leaned way over when you all of a sudden feel/hear this bang-scraaaape.  Freaked me out big time.  Did it three times on the left and once on the right.  Basically, the ZX6's suspension is too soft and it is more street/touring oriented.  It still did a great job and I should be able to go a lot faster. 

I had good lines and stayed pretty close to them from lap to lap.  The trick is that in a few turns I'm still hunting.  Finding a better line in a few turns should be worth a second or two per lap.  Then it will be time to work on adding more throttle in places where it is needed.

Can't wait for next month - Oak Hill.  I'm told it is a very technical track too.

Thumbs up to the LSTD guys.  They put on a great event.

My friend down the street sold his bike and gave me the ramp ends that he had bought.  Originally he was using a 2x8 piece of lumber for the ramp.  I’m chicken so I got two 2x10 pieces and set them up so I can bolt them together (2x4s underneath).  So now I have a ramp that is about 18” wide and 8’ feet long.

The ramp works pretty well, I found that if I back up toward the drive way the bed of the truck and the drive way are a lot closer together and riding the bike up the ramp is a lot less scary.  The evidence speaks for itself:

So I can load the bike by myself.  Unfortunately, I’ve not figured out how to unloaded it alone.  My neighbor came over and helped me unload and showed me a trick.  Initially I thought he would stand beside the ramp on the other side from me.  Instead he held the rear handle and straddled the ramp.  He just walked backward while I held the brake and steered.  Really easy.

I’m happy that I can load the bike, turn it a little and then close the rear gate.  I won’t be as worried about the bike rolling out accidentally now.  The next trick will be loading the ramps along with all my other gear and actually fastening the bike in so that it won’t tip over.

All in all though – I’m ready for my first track day.

Oh, originally I was going to try to set it up so I could get two bikes in back.  There is just enough room that it would be possible.  However, the rear gate would have to be left open and I’m not sure I would have room for everything else I want to bring.  Eventually I’ll get a trailer.  But for now I won’t be able to carry a buddy’s bike to the track with me.

If you have to build your own flavor of EntLib and it needs to be signed things can get complicated.  Because of the dependencies between projects you end up having to touch nearly all of the projects.  In fact you even have to edit some of the AssemblyInfo.cs files to doctor up the InternalsVisibleTo attributes by adding the public key. 

You can do this by hand, or you can buy a short little program from for $5 that will do it in about ten seconds.  I've tested it with the 2006 release of Enterprise Library and the new May 3.0 release.

If you're interested PayPal $5.00 to jakew@guerillaprogrammer.com and I'll ship you a zip file with the project and instructions on how to use it.

I know this is a crappy way to release a 'product' but it's quick and dirty and things have to start somewhere.  I'll get a real store front setup this week so I can be a little less lame.

So I’ve been to school, learned to ride better (Ok a lot better, but I have a long way to go before I consider myself good) and now I’m setting up to do track days whenever possible.

The first thing I want to secure is a way to get accurate laps times. In my opinion if I’m not going to time my laps I might as well just ride through the back roads.

Ideally I want a transponder like the XT Racing Ultalap it uses an infrared transmitter you sit on the side of the track to time your laps. You then plug in to your computer and download the data for analysis. Pretty cool, easy to use, and not too spendy ($300 for the receive, transmitter and software).

However, a friend pointed out that if you have a small video camera you can get pretty good laptimes that way. I happen to have a bullet camera and a PVR that I can record on so…. You mount the camera on the bike, start recording before you leave the pits. Find the start finish line and then fast forward until you get to the same point and see how much video time elapsed and that is your lap time. It is manual, but if you already have the camera you have a free laptimer. Another benefit is that you can study the lines you are taking through the track to see if you are consistently hitting your turn points, making mid turn corrections, etc. combining the camera and the lap timer would make life easier.

Then there is the TRAQMATE. This thing freaking rocks. I wanted one when I was autocrossing. It gives you almost all of the instrumentation professional racers use. Actually, I bet most privateers don’t have this much instrumentation. The unit uses GPS to locate you on track. It has sensors for RPM and other stuff (ok, not sure whatelse). But based on the data it has it can tell where you are braking, accelerating, how many lateral Gs you are pulling. To put the icing on the cake it has video in so you also hook up a bullet camera and it will overlay data on top of the video. That way you can see everything that is going on while watching yourself drive on the track (off as the case maybe).

The trick is that TRAQMATE is expensive. I would love to have one but unless I’m going to go pro (don’t I wish) I can’t really justify dropping that much money. Too bad.

Something I’ve considered is using my little GPS unit as a lap timer. It as a breadcrumb mode that will record my locations as I move around. I need to look at Garmin’s web-site and see how that data is stored. If it includes time and it records often enough then I could possibly write a program that can get some of the TRAQMATE features. But frankly – just getting the Ultalap and using my existing bullet camera will be the cheapest way to go.

Just saved the word doc and remember what I set out to write about…. It’s all related. This spring I’m planning on getting a new ZX6. Yeah, I just got a ’99 ZX6. It is really nice and I’m having fun with it. But I want the new technology. Oh, yeah, I said I’d never buy new again. I seem to lie a lot. Seriously, if you spent some time on the back of a new ZX6 or any of the other modern super sports you would be jonesing for one too. I used to want the ZX10, still do sort of, but seriously the ZX6 will deliver a serious ass kicking if you know what to do with it. But we’ll have to see what happens in April. Included in the purchase of a new bike will be CSS Level’s 3 and 4 so I can get even better. I’ll take the bike with me. If I’m really successful between now and then I might even try to get a traqmate. How cool would that be? Be able to collect all that data to get even better coaching.

If I’m going to pull this off I need to shut up and get back to programming.

I’m an NLP master practitioner (or soon will be) so the things that our brains’ do on our behalf of us is of interest to me. So when Keith brought up what our brains do during an accident it got me thinking.

To set the stage better we were talking about panic and tunnel vision; something near and dear to many motorcycle riders’ heart. You’re riding along, things get wacky and you go in to panic mode. Your vision slams down to a nice tight focus on whatever is in front of you. Perhaps it is the nice SUV that just pulled out in front of you. Personally, I think you had tunnel vision before this otherwise you would have noticed it moving to were it could create this excitement, but I digress. Keith addresses this with the whole idea of wide angle vision. Your eyes are still receiving all the same stuff. It is your brain that is ignoring peripheral data and focusing in on what it doesn’t like. So instead of flicking the bike to the left and giving you more room you head straight in to rear bumper. Can you always save it? Nope, but I’d rather go down fighting.

But the piece that really got me wondering was what happens when things go really bad. Have you experienced time slowing down? You’re in an accident and it seems like it goes on forever. You can see everything so clearly and things just seem to drag on forever. The first piece you can learn to do. That is what wide angle is about. What sucks is that you can’t do the second part 2 or 3 seconds before the accident happens (or starts). Sucksville. Imagine if you had the ability to switch on that slow motion thing whenever you consciously thought you needed it. You’re flying down the back straight at Mid-Ohio and think to yourself “time to setup for turn 6” and blam! Time just slows down. Instead of a perceived 2 seconds to do your business you have a perceived 10.

Maybe I’m not describing this right, but I want to find out if there is a way to trigger this without having to do something dumb. I wonder if real scientists have looked in to this. Does it have a name? Maybe I’ll find out.

I’m still lost as to what to say about the two days of CSS. They manage to cram so much in to such a short amount of time your brain gets melted by it all.

Going in to class I considered myself a safe rider who could get himself to and from work with a minimal amount of excitment. I did not consider myself to be a good rider or anything like a fast rider. By the end of the first day I was going a hell of a lot faster than I had ever thought possible and I was having so much fun.

Take any drug addict, put them on a bike and teach them this stuff and they’ll never need another hit for the rest of their life. I’m like a crack addict now waiting on my next hit at the track. Its two weeks away and can’t get here soon enough. It really is that much fun. When I finally got off the bike Monday I was grinning like a little boy who just got handed a new toy he had been wanting for the past year. I’m still grinning.

In general the level one and two classes are made from the material in Twist of The Wrist 2. Reading it, it sounds simple enough: “Once the bike is leaned over roll on the throttle”. Putting it into action is another matter. Same with the rest of the stuff. I don’t mean that it is hard. Simply that there is a huge difference between the intellectual exercise of reading and the actual doing.

The first on track drill is “Roll On”. Keith sends you out with his coaches and you practice rolling on the throttle as you go through the turns. Trick is: no brakes. You do it all in fourth gear! The goal is to teach you a sense of speed. Get that “Propensity for Velocity” thing going. I’m still alive so it is ‘safe’, just use your eyes and your sense of speed will guide you. My favorite set of turns at Mid-Ohio was the esses (6, 7, 8, and 9). You come screaming down the longest straight and have to toss the bike to the right. You are going uphill as you apex and then down hill on the exit toward 7. 7 is back up hill to the Apex and the road just disappears. It is freaking awesome. You’re leaned way over, if I was the type to lean off I would have had no trouble dragging my knee. The pavement is right there under your left arm, so close you can touch it. But you can’t see the road. It disappears down hill to turn 8. Just have faith and throw it left.

That isn’t right. It isn’t faith. It is the reference points. You look inside turn seven. There is a telephone pole there with a gray utility box on it. You look there; get the red rumble strip just over your left arm (I said you’re leaned over) and you’ll be lined up perfectly to go down hill for 8.

8 is flat. At least it felt flat to me, but you’re going really fast. There is a dark square of pavement way out to the left. Drive in to it and dive to your right. Get the red rumble strip under your right arm, hard on the throttle up over the hill for turn 9. If you do it right, you only need to make a small adjustment to clip the red rumble strip for 10. Add a little left drift going out on to the yellow rumble strip and then dive hard right again.

I could go on describing the whole thing. I can barely stop myself replaying it in my mind. I made so many mistakes that I want to go back and correct. You learn so much. The most important thing to me though is that there really isn’t any magic to it.

Keith has researched this stuff down to a pretty straight forward recipe. Every rider is going to interpret it a little different but at the end of the day – anybody can learn this.

Day 2 was less about the inputs in to the bike and more about how you use your eyes. The reference point stuff is super important, but learning not to tunnel vision down on to this is also super important. If you keep what Keith calls ‘wide screen’ view things seem to slow down. Approaching turns doesn’t feel as rushed. You have time to use his “three step” process. As you approach the turn point, without actually turning the bike look at the apex, when you hit the turn point using your peripheral vision, flick the bike in. Once you know you are going to hit the apex where you want, without turning the bike, look at where you want your exit point to be. It’s right there in the book. It is completely different when you have his coaches chasing you around the track though. You actually learn to do it.

Speaking of the coaches, Josh and Mike were awesome. The questions they asked, their feed back about my riding, everything helped me enormously. I’m certain that the other coaches were great too; I just didn’t get to spend time with them.

Keith and Dylan delivered most of the lectures. Besides the actual material I also learned a fair amount from the presentation style. I plan to adopt a few of their mannerism in to my stuff. What made them so effective was their easy going nature. They were humorous, but the humor only served to get their point across, not to be funny alone. Another thing that I had not really thought much about was that the focus of the school isn’t so much about going fast. It is about doing it right. They want you to learn to turn your motorcycle properly. Speed will be the result of doing it right. Initially I was being passed like I was standing still. By the end of the first day I had to learn to pass because I was going faster than many of the people in my group. By the second day I got to do a fair amount of passing and was occasionally passed.

BTW – don’t even bother trying to chase the instructors. They’ll blow you away like you’re in reverse. Oh and they cheat. They use the pull offs so they can sit and wait for the student to come around again. You pass by them; they take off and follow you awhile to see how you are doing. Then they pass you and signal for you to follow them. They’ll use a hand signal for whatever exercise you are doing when they want you to do it. Once they are satisfied that you are doing it right they wave bye-bye and either tell you to pass them or they just disappear ahead of you. The on track coaching is effective and seeing how well the coaches handle their bikes is inspiring. Seeing somebody going around a corner at speed with one hand off the bar signaling you is something to behold.

At this point I plan to go back to school for their level 3 and 4 classes. By then I plan to have a new bike. I’m now pretty well set on getting a ZX6. I road Will’s ZX6 (Will is Keith’s mechanic and Keith says the bikes belong to Will, so….). The magazine reviews of the ZX6 are crap. That bike is a rocket ship if you know how to ride. It leans forever, accelerates like it is late for something important and the brakes will pop your eyes out of their sockets if you aren’t careful. Kawasaki ought to have a sales person at the school to take orders.

Unfortunately, I can’t do the next levels until next year so between now and then I plan to do as many track days as I can. I’m also reading “The Soft Art of Road Racing”. I sort of wish I had read it before class too. It has some really good stuff. I also plan to get a transponder so I can collect lap times. My goal isn’t necessarily to get my times down. First I want them to be consistent. In my opinion without accurate lap times I can’t really improve. How do you know if that new turn point really worked? Did it matter that you at an extra 1000 rpm down the back straight? You can’t know without a transponder and lap times.

I can’t say enough complimentary stuff about CSS. They run an excellent program that definitely gets results. If you ride and want to ride better this is the place to go.

Mid-Ohio is a great track. The scenery is beautiful, the facilities aren’t bad. But most importantly it is a great track. You have to do the esses at the back of the track. All of the turns are fun, but there is something about screaming down that back straight and having to do all those turns one after another.

You come up out of the bits in second gear turning left around turn 1. There is yellow curbing to your right and a bridge passing overhead as the first straight opens up ahead of you. You accelerate up through third and fourth gear. The track is going uphill now. In the distance you can see the keyhole. To the left are timing markers. You begin looking for your turn point. I found a spot on the side of the track that was painted yellow. Once I spotted it I would look for the red rubble strip for my apex on turn two. In my peripheral I would see the paint come up, once it was close to my front tire I would flick the bike into turn two. At the end of the red rumble strip there is a skid mark, I know that if I go between it and the strip I’ll have a good line in to turn three.

Turn three has two sets of red rumble strips. Skip the first one and try to get close to the second one. This sets you up for turn four, the keyhole. The keyhole is on the side of a raise so you enter it going uphill and exit going down. It is also a decreasing radius turn. As you leave turn three you see a rumble strip at the entrance to four. Shoot for it, as your front tire crosses the line flick the bike right. Because of the shape you’ll run wide, but that is ok, turn four has tons of pavement to use. As you run out you’ll come to a black square that looks wavy. This is your signal to dive back in toward the rumble strip. You’ll also be able to see the yellow rumble strip on the outside. This is your target, once you see the yellow strip roll on! You’re coming up on the long straight down the back of the track. I’d let my bike drift as much as it wanted toward the yellow and would stand up as quick as possible. The throttle should be pinned now and you’ll be up shifting in a second.

I would get the bike up to 13KRpm down the back straight in fourth gear. No idea how fast that is but you are hauling ass at that point. As you come up over the rise you’ll see the cones marking turn five. To the right is a control tower, wave at the corner worker. There is also a white line painted across the track. When you see this stuff you know it is almost time. Looking ahead you’ll see 5 timing markers. At 5 I let go of the throttle. At three I down shift to 3^rd. The turn point in the esses is a skid mark, the school put yellow tape over it to high light it. As I approach it I’ll check the tach. I want about 7500RPM, if I’m above that I’ll feather the brake a little to bring the speed down. Once I know where the turn point is I’ll look for the red rumble strip of turn 6. Once the front tire enters the turn point I dive for the red rumble strip. I want it to pass below my shoulder. My body will be out over the grass if I do it right. As soon as the bike is leaned over I look for the turn point for turn 7. Turn 7 is uphill from me. The red rumble strip flashes under me and I stand the bike up and drive for the turn point on 7. Again, I want to get the red rumble strip under me but I usually run wide here. The track disappears going down hill so you have to look to the inside of turn 7 to see where you want to go. There is a telephone pole there with a gray utility box missing its lid. You come around turn 7 and start back down hill. You move to the left to setup for turn 8. At the bottom of the hill is a black square of pavement. The outside corner on the uphill side is your turn point. Again, I want to get in as close to the red rumble strip as I can. Unfortunately I usually ran wide. I think that turn is actually off camber and that might be why.

As soon as you get to the red rumble strip you are going to flick the bike back and head straight up over the hill for turn 9. just straighten it out. You can’t see where the road goes but if you hold straight you’ll crest the hill in the middle of the track. Turn 10 goes right and you can get right up on the red rumble strip. You’ll still be flat out. After 10 go wide for the yellow rumble strip. You want to flick right at the end of the rumble strip and head for the red again going around turn 11. It drops down hill and you can be flat out. You’ll see a bridge going over the track. Over on the outside there is a hay bale. No idea what it is doing there. There is also a dashed line painted across the track. You should be flat out here (actually as soon as you pass the turn 11 you should be flat out). The track bends to your right. The wall is right there on the outside of the track and it has these red plastic things. I would shoot up along this, I almost put it in the grass once I got over so far, and then dive left for turn 12 which enters you in to turn 13 going to the right – the carousel. The carousel is just a long constant radius turn that has a little camber to help you keep your speed. As you exit the turn you have to flick to the left. Turn 14 is also banked so you can hit it really hard. This brings you in for the drive down the start finish straight. Go fast, you want to look good for your coaches. As you tear down the start finish straight you see the bridge going in to the infield. There are also braking markers on the outside. I stay out there as long as possible. Once you are under the bridge you’ll see a long triangular shape strip of black pavement. Stay on the outside. Dive left (I can’t recall my turn point so I must have had tunnel vision here). If you turn to early here you’ll find yourself humping the yellow curbing that separates pit lane from the track. If you wait you’ll just barely clip the end of it as you setup to do the whole show all over again.

I'm getting packed up to head to Ohio this weekend.  Sunday we watch the AMA race at Mid-Ohio.  Gots us pit and grandstand passes so we can go pretty much everywhere.  Then Monday and Tuesday are California Superbike School time.  I'm going to get training from one of the best performance riding schools in the world.

I'm seriously excited about this.  I've never be to a professional race before and this type of school is unlike anything I've ever done.  To me this is one of those lifetime oportunities that must not be missed out on.  I plan to attend more  races and schools in the future, but this is the first.  So I'm going to get every last bit of experience out of it that I can.

I'm working on a service that uses a fair amount of configuration.  I'm choosing to use XML as my primary storage mechanism because I don't want to deal with a database connection.  Just write an XML file and throw it where it needs to go.  The build Configuration namespace in .NET does a great job of making this really easy.

To make it even easier though I use the XSD tool to generate class files for my XML.  It isn't necassarily the best way to get things done, but it get it done.  The benefit is that if I find out that I need to add something I just add it and the regenerate.  My code just loads the XML via XMLSerializer and then talks to the classes.

Making it even easier is to wrap the XSD tool in a batch file so that I can regenerate without having to remember any of the switches I used.  in this case:

xsd /c /l:cs /n:GuerillaProgrammer.SomeProduct.Settings /nologo Configuration.xsd

each time I make a change I just rerun the batch.  Takes an entire 5 seconds.  if that. 

Being able to work with XML in this fashion is really nice.  Give it a try.

It never ceases to amaze how little awareness people have regarding the world around them.  Driving is a great place to see this in action.  This morning I rode in to work as usual and I got to watch people trying (and happily mostly failing) to kill eachother with their cars.  Sitting on a bike as I do I can see inside cars very well and again - the wonders never end.  I see people reading magazines and books, sending and reading emails on their black berries, using both hands to eat.  I wish it was just that people were talking on cell phones.  Cell phones are bad enough, but do you really need to send email while you are driving?

What brought this to mind though is some of the other stuff I saw the was completely missed by the people around me.  A rat, about eight inches long, fell out from under this lady's Land Rover.  It wasn't on the road before, it fell out from under the car, landed on the road, rolled a few times and then made a run for the side of the road.  It made it unharmed.  I looked around at the other drivers.  Nobody noticed.  A freaking rat fell out of a car and nobody else noticed.

I've also seen snakes moving along the side of the road next to the curb.  Some pretty big ones.  Foxes and Cayotes don't even phase me anymore.  They are all over the place if you pay attention.

The thing is - these are pretty small things that people are missing.  But they miss them because their attention is elsewhere.  Based on what I see their attention isn't on their driving either.  Where is their attention?  No clue.  But the results of their distraction are easy enough to see, just listen to the traffic reports  everyday.  People drive the same roads over and over.  You would think they would be able to do it without hitting other cars or obstacles along the way.  Nope.  Why?  In my opinion it is pretty easy to answer.  If you don't notice something as odd as a rat falling off a person's car how the hell are you supposed to notice their Fing brake lights?

Seeing that rat though was pretty cool.  I'm glad it made it off the road.