Scorpion Helmets

I am very excited to announce that I’ll be wearing Scorpion helmets this season. I never even considered them until I tried them on last week. Wow, that is a nice helmet, at any price. It is, by far, the most plush, most comfortable helmet I’ve ever had on my head. When I looked at it more closely, I only became more impressed.

The graphics are great, the shields are not only optically excellent, but fog-free (!), the vents have an expensive feel to them…and they retail from $129-$199. I promise you I’m not just spouting off because I managed to get some sponsorship, it’s the other way around. I was so impressed by how nice the helmets were, and the low price was so…unexpected, that I immediately went home and emailed them.

Don’t take my word for it by any means. All I’m saying is that if you’re going to be buying a helmet, find a local Scorpion dealer and try one on. I think you’ll agree that there isn’t another helmet for under $400 (at least…maybe more) that’s as nice as these are. Or, you can come by my pits at any WERA Mid-central round (and a few others too…email me if you want to know where I’ll be next) and check the helmets out for yourself. I’ll be pretty surprised if you aren’t impressed.

I’ll be back on the track on April 8th at the Sportbike TrackTime track day at Putnam Park, and I’ll have at least one of the helmets there. If it so happens that you’ll be there, come by and say hi.

Miscellany...

A few misc. notes…

Stickboy Racing has a new website up. The site itself isn't much (I can say that because I created it), but it does have a link to the new Ebay store, and to the forums. The Ebay store has all of the inventory that you can buy from Stick at the track…tires, generators, knee sliders, etc. The forums are just getting started, but Stick is a super cool guy…so is Honey. Wait, not a guy, but super cool…never mind. The point is that you should stop by the forum, register, and post. I think it's already on its way to being a thriving hangout!

Ok, 'thriving' is a strong word, but it's getting there.



I'm signed up to do the Sportbike Tracktime day on 4/8 at Putnam Park, so if anyone wants to come hang out, go along for the ride, etc. let me know. I will need the day to get myself back on the bike, and to make sure the bike is a-ok (I think I already posted about this, but tough shnikies). Also, I will be taking the Ed Bargy racing school at Nashville on Friday 4/28, along with Gil Cutchen and Doug Sheets. Look us up if you're at the track that weekend.


I am giving some serious consideration to renting Talladega out at some point this summer for a very low population track day for street riders. I think there are lots of folks who would try a track day, but they are intimidated by (or simply don't like) the idea of lots of youngster adrenaline junkies flying around. Yes, the grouping of like-skilled riders mitigates this to some extent, but not enough for some folks. I'm talking about having a total of 10 people there, with groups of 3 on the track at once (I'd be the floater). If you know someone who might like this type of environment, let me know. I plan on having some expert tutoring available, but aside from general encouragement and orientation, this is not a school per se. More on this as details emerge.

Here is a sort of picto-diary of my debut weekend on the R6. These are courtesy of VHS Photography , and are from the weekend at Talladega I wrote about previously.

Practice, in Theory and in Practice

Ok, so I still haven’t found my camera, and the bike is now stripped of its crashed-up bits. I know I said I’d take pictures, but being banged up kinda takes the wind out of me ‘tear the house apart, it’s here somewhere’ sails, I admit. I will have the actual parts around for a while, so if I come up with the camera, I’ll substitute bent/rashed parts pics for the afore-promised bent/rashed bike pics.

This will be my second year of racing, and I feel like I spent the whole first year so wide-eyed and stunned at how great it was to be racing after 20 years of dreaming that I regularly forgot to focus on any specifics while riding, and spent way too much time just riding around with a big goofy smile on my face. Many times I sat in my pit, race face on, thinking intently on what precise aspect of a turn or a section of track I was going to work at…sometimes I’d even take notes to help me define what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. I’d strap on my helmet and gloves in preparation for a practice session, running over these ideas again and again in my head. I’d get on the bike, and slowly roll over to pit-out, a paragon of focus and determination. I’d sit patiently waiting for Chuck to point at me and wave me out on the track, and when he did so, I was ready to go to work.

However, as I’d work up to speed, a strange thing happened, and two direct relationships conspired against my efforts. First, the faster I went, the more fun I’d have, and second, the more fun I’d have, the less ability I had to think about anything specific. Those of you who know me probably see the issue at hand…I’m a pretty fun-loving guy, and by the time I made it back to start/finish, I was, as Matthew Sweet would attest, 100% Fun. This is not exactly the recipe for technical skills development on the race track.

While there is definitely something to be said for enjoying myself (after all, that is the point), I also want to learn how to go faster, and become a better rider. Simple seat time accumulation will certainly aid this cause, but I also need to focus on specific aspects of riding, and my big goal this year is to spend less time riding around, and more time learning to go faster. How I will tame this fun v. diligence problem is yet to be determined, but I choose to be optimistic. The question is, what will I work on first?

I’ve had people tell me that I’m pretty good on the brakes. I think they really mean that I’m pretty good on the brakes for an old fat novice, but hey, I’ll take encouragement where I can get it. In a nutshell, my braking technique isn’t to wait ultra-late to brake, because I feel that this leads to wide eyes and far too many pucker moments. Rather, I find it much easier to brake as late as I feel comfortable, but work to brake less hard (softer?) and for less time. Being a complete n00b, I have no idea if this is good or terrible, but it’s what I do. This all sounds good, but it turns out that I’m about 96% on the ‘softer’ and 4% on the less time. I seem to trail brake all the time, everywhere. This might be good for passing, but it ruins my drives, and it’s no way to be riding a bike w. 115hp (or whatever the R6 has).

What does this information tell me? It tells me that Focus #1 this season will be to get off the brakes earlier and on the gas earlier, and harder. If I feel that I make significant progress in this area, I may then try to move my braking points closer to turn-in. But for now, I must work on gassin’ it, end of story. I suck at corner exits, and being a fat guy greatly exacerbates this problem. Let’s take a look at what it means to me to have poor corner exits.

If everything about me and Rider X (let’s call him…Harry) is equal in a given corner (brake point, brake duration, turn-in, throttle-on, bike hp, etc), I will still lose ground because I weigh more than Harry, and therefore my drive won’t be as good. This means that I’ve gotta be better than Harry at my exit, just to, well…not be worse. You can start to see now just how serious a problem it is that my drives are, at the moment, terrible compared to other riders.

I will be taking the Ed Bargy Racing School at Nashville at the end of April, so Ed may very well turn all of the above on its head (figuratively please, Ed…I’ve been on my head enough this season) by giving me an entirely different priority to work on. Lord knows, there’s plenty of possibilities. I ride almost entirely by the seat of my pants, so perhaps developing reference points will be tops on the list. Perhaps I’ll discover that my crash has sapped some confidence, and I’ll simply be working to get back my previously existing comfort level. Who knows? In theory, all I need to do is to get on the gas earlier. Easy, right?

This reminds me of one of my favorite platitudes: In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is.

Hmm…

In theory, there is no difference between racing and practice, but in practice there is.

Better.