INTRODUCTION:

I'm constantly meeting people at the track who are really good riders, in an effort to ride faster they are constantly attending track days, practice and test days.

From my perspective and frustratingly I notice that there improvements are or have plateaued, in other words there progression via the lap times has stopped reducing yet they have a way to go before they can reach the leaders of the pack.

In many instances they ask themselves. Why are the leaders of the pack that much faster? and they just keep on pushing harder, often resulting with crashes that dents confidence, injures riders and breaks bikes.

Often when I ask what adjustments they are testing the answer that comes back is " nothing, I bought a new shock but haven't changed anything since I've had the bike". "Not even the clickers" I ask. "Nope same settings that arrived with the shock"

In this case the shock came built for the specific bike/rider and from a fantastic supplier so he was lucky.

So I'm going to write a few articles via this web site and hopefully help some keen racers and maybe raise my own service work.

I need to state that in some instances or all instances, you may not agree with me, that's fine but just go and do your own thing,

The topic is so intense, to the extent that at the higher levels of competition riders have race engineers who have mastered the complexities and can avoid getting bogged down with progression. If you spoke with these engineers I imagine they would admit to sometimes still losing there way a little but experience has taught them how to return to base camp.

However at our levels we just go to the track and blast around, having fun, We must be competitive and progressive people or we wouldn't do it. We travel on our bikes at speeds that make calculations of all the parameters immediate, which in turn accelerates our confidence and competitive nature.

Many will trawl the internet for bike information and riding techniques, some will attend rider race training, a huge benefit to all racers. I have known many hugely successful racers who constantly have rider training. If you like it is like a professional golfers swing, the golfers are constantly monitoring the process from A-Z.

However there are many that don't, they often don't know where to start, it is these people that I hope will benefit from my writings.

CAUTION:

Always stay focused on the fact that as your speed increases or lap times decrease, so will the need to adjust bike settings, suspension and rider position. If when you go to the track day you are not trying changes to set up but simply putting fuel in the bike, checking tyre pressures and maintaining things like brakes and tyres then you are never going to improve or catch those front runners, An inadequacy in your suspension set up may (when compared to a faster rider) presently not be an inadequacy. So learn not to jump from pillar to post, dont change something simply because Joe has and he is faster than me. Go to the track day with a plan, don't go with the intention of lowering lap times, these will come down as you improve the setup which in turn will give you later braking points, easier turn in under braking, faster mid corner speed, getting on the gas earlier through better traction and steering and higher straight line speeds.

We love to race, and I think we all would love to race at the front.

It is my intention to write articles that give conclusions without leaving the reader wondering what to do next, as mentioned the process is complex and one is constantly making trade-offs between the front of the bike (STEERING) and the rear of the bike, ACCELERATION.

So in conclusion hopefully I can write is such a way and with progression that the reader will gain an understanding and master some of the complexities.

First thing the rider (Racer) needs is a note book, there are some simple headings you can include and these I will cover and give examples with my first article. At first you may find this notebook a waste of time, please persevere, it will give great reward and often when you become lost in the myriad of settings you will have a reference of which you can return to.

Try to avoid simply scribbling notes as these a month later can lose there meaning or be lost in translation.

Regards Leigh Paulin.

FIRST ARTICLE STILL TO COME: we will include the following.

1) Starting a note book.

2) Simple headings or records.

3) A short and simple overview of possible handling scenarios with suggestions of symptoms and corrections. The intention is to give you a quick reference page for the track and to lay the foundation for better understanding of dynamics..