After such an exciting start to my year at Daytona I was beyond pumped for the first round of the USGPRU Championship at JenningsGP. It’s one of my favorite tracks and I was excited to ride the 250 again after such a long time. When I found out that the Factory Yamaha team was going to rent the track the Wednesday before the race weekend, I was even more excited. I knew it would be a great opportunity to watch and get some ideas before it was my turn to ride. So of course you can imagine I was DOUBLY excited when Josh told me that Yamaha was going to let ME ride too! Saaaahhhh-weeeeet!
But, as luck would have it, we showed up Wednesday morning and it was raining. There was standing water on the track everywhere and there was no sign of it letting up. Josh and Ben Bostrom still headed out to spash around and see what they could sort out with their Superbikes. Mark and I decided that it would probably be worthwhile to get a rain setup in case we encountered any “liquid sunshine” during the race weekend. So we rolled the R6 out and mounted up some Pirelli rain tires. My first impression was, “WOW! There is so much grip!” the Pirelli rains are really phenomenal… I turned lap after lap trying to get the hang of it. I will never get over what an odd feeling it is to drag a knee in the rain. The frustrating thing is trying to get a feel. You just don’t get many warnings in the wet, so you have to be extra smooth. In the end, I always feel like I could have gone faster. I even said to Josh at one point, “I know I could do better on the brakes… I haven’t had a single scary moment”. Josh just laughed and told me that in the rain you don’t usually get “scary moments” you usually just fall. I thought it was pretty cool that my lap times weren’t very far off of theirs.
Thursday morning our new race rig showed up… That was really exciting! We had an RV last year, but sold it because it wasn’t very practical. This one has a garage built right into the back of it! It’s so cool… We spent most of the day trying to get it sorted out, but it was hard because it was POURING rain!
Josh left Thursday afternoon to head up to Road Atlanta for the AMA round. That was kind of bittersweet, because I really wished I could be racing there too. Unfortunately we just don’t have the budget to do the whole AMA schedule this year.
Mark and I had to run into town that afternoon to get a bunch of stuff for the new rig and then the rain really started coming down. Seriously, to my friends back in CA… you just cannot understand the way it rains in the South. Holy cow, I was outside the car for less than 10 seconds and was drenched to the core. Crazy… On the highway on the way back to the track I couldn’t see a THING. Luckily Mark was driving because I had my hands over my eyes! We were in this funny little rental car called a Nissan Versa (actually a pretty cool little thing) but its approximately the size of a shoebox. So when at the last minute we saw a tree down across the road there was nothing we could do but jump it. It was like Dukes of Hazard, but with supplemental insurance. Not good. Hubcaps when flying, I screamed for dear life… Not a good sight. We totally taco’d the wheels on the thing, but surprisingly it still drove pretty straight!
Lucky for me, Friday morning the rain was done and the track was drying. I spent the first half of the day getting going on my R6. The times were coming kinda slowly which was frustrating. Finally we put a new rear tire on and I was really feeling ready to push. If you’ve never been to Jennings, it’s a really cool track with some really fast stuff and some really technical stuff too. There is this one turn, turn 8, that is a tight left. There are a ton of scape marks in the pavement from people crashing there. Well, Friday afternoon I figured out why. It was the weirdest thing… I didn’t do anything different than any other lap but before I knew it I was crashing. The front went away so quick that I sorta forgot to let go of the handlebar which sent me into an awkward tumble. Who woulda thought such a slow crash could hurt so much. I landed so hard on my butt that it gave me a dead leg. ouch! I was able to pick it up the bike and sheepishly ride it in. The damage was really minimal, so it wasn’t a big deal. I was just frustrated because I didn’t really know what I had done wrong.
On the flip side, it was my first crash in my new Pilot leathers and they did their job perfectly. Other than getting scuffed up they were totally fine. I was able to come in and hop right on my 250 and ride it the rest of the day.
