Track Report
By Pete Hitzeman
for R6Live.com
A few years ago, I had reached a very frustrating point in my track riding. I had worked my way up to running a solid “A-group” pace at my local track days, but I was stuck. Despite studying hard and working harder, I just wasn’t going any faster. Worse, I didn’t know what I needed to do to go any faster. It was almost to the point where I wasn’t having fun anymore. Going to the track had started to seem like work, instead of the fantasy-land it once was. Even my wife started to ask me if I was having any fun, wondering why I looked so serious all the time at the track.
I had asked for help. At a few track days run by some very reputable organizations, I had asked the control riders to follow me and tell me where I was going wrong, what I needed to work on. But the feedback I got was, well, not feedback. “Yeah, you look really smooth, your lines are good, just keep at it,” was the essence of what I was told. Not exactly useful, substantive advice. So I went nowhere with my riding, and continued to try to do the same things, but faster, which yielded exactly nothing in terms of lap times.
Then the best possible thing happened, and I was forced to take a break. A knee injury and subsequent surgery sidelined me for the 2010 season, and an extended training tour for the Air National Guard kept the bike on stands for all of 2011. I missed riding on the track, but realized through the break that when I came back, I needed to do it right, do something entirely different, or I would quickly run right back into the same stone wall I had reached before.
Enter Jason Pridmore’s STAR Motorcycle School. Through his partnership with the Michael Jordan Motorsports Suzuki team, Pridmore had gotten involved with the National Guard a few years ago, and started running school dates throughout the year, free of charge to Guard members. The Guard, and the military as a whole, have become painfully aware of the accident and fatality statistics for military riders, and asked Jason what he could do to help turn the tide. The STAR school’s emphasis on conscious control has turned out to be just the thing, and their National Guard Rider Training dates have received universal acclaim for enhancing rider skill, preventing the losses of control that are so central to most motorcycle accidents.
