April 12, 2003
What a great way to open the riding season - Putnam Park is an awesome racetrack, and 70 degree weather on April 12th was more than perfect. Adam and I met Chad at the track for a day of thrashing the track bikes around this 1.76 mile roadcourse - that means both left and right hand turns for you Nascar fans. :-)
Jack Beaudry from www.sliderphoto.com was onsite that day, and you can find more pictures of the day on his web site. If you go to the main Slider Photo page, you can see pictures of Chad (bike 3004) and Adam on the VFR800 (bike 3058). As you can see from the pictures, they are quite good. If you're at a track day and Jack from Slider Photo shows up, throw him some business - he's a great guy and a great photographer. I purchased the CD of the pictures he took, and they turned out great! I'll put links to a couple of my favorites here, and a link to all of them below:
Tad through turn 4...fuckin Ducatis...
Here's all of the Sliderphoto shots of me. Note that some pics of me going through a turn are in sequence.
A quick note about Adam. He had been riding/coaxing/wrestling the VFR800 around the track for the morning and never really felt comfortable on the bike. In the afternoon, I reminded him that the FZR400 was sitting there and he was welcome to take it out for a session. He almost passed on the opportunity, and after one more push, he said "Yeah, it should be fun." That was the understatement of the day. Immediately, he was transformed to a completely different rider, and he looked 100 times more comfortable out there on the Fizzer than he did while riding the Viffer. In fact, after that, he refused to take the VFR back out on the track, and as of now, he's not planning to even bring the VFR to the next track day. It will be interesting to see what he does long-term....Ammena - I apologize in advance.
Short term, we're gonna share the FZR on track days...which works out fine for both of us. Tires are costing me a lot of money!! :-)
The pictures below are mostly of Adam and Chad, although the video clips are from all three of us.
Adam on the pig..I mean VFR...in the pits
Adam mid-corner, turn 10, on the VFR
Adam heading down the front straight on the VFR
Now on the FZR, Adam through turn 10
Adam exiting turn 10 on the Fizzer
Sidebar: Adam immediately took 10 seconds off his lap times the first time he went out on the Fizzer, running a 1:45. The next session, he followed that up with a 1:39 and a 1:38. Pretty damned good.
Chad...aka Mr. Consistency...through turn 10
Another shot through turn 10 - bike in same position lap after lap
Sidebar: Chad was running some really consistent laps. He was hitting the 1:35 mark on the nose nearly every time around the track, as long as he had clean track ahead of him. The pictures above through turn 10 tell the story - he was doing very well at hitting his marks each time around.
Chad through turn 9 - good body position
And, here's some short video clips taken through turns 9 and 10. These are all about 20 seconds long. I'm seeing some strange problem with downloading these and viewing them with Windows Media Player. If it only shows the first 7 or 11 seconds of the video, close it up, and click on the link again. It will grab it from your temporary folder, and you'll see the entire video:
Adam on the VFR
Chad on the YZF600 - he's the lead bike in the pack of three
Finally, here's a link to Chad's pictures.
