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From the Couch to My First Flat Track Race, Part 1
From the Couch to My First Flat Track Race, Part 1
As I sit here sore, tired, achy and in general pain while writing this, I think back over my weekend. I know tomorrow will be worse, as today I’m still moving on the adrenaline of my 700-mile return trip.
By the last main race, I could feel the exhaustion beginning to consume me. I was succumbing to the pain that caused my early exit from the lead position.
I entered in two races, meaning I had three practice sessions: two heat races and two mains. All of this was after 12 hours of flat track instruction the previous day. In that short amount of time, I packed my head with information and techniques, like learning how to crash...many times.
The morning of the race, however, I hid my pain in order to simply make the starting grid. I was determined. I still am. The moment I left that race, I wanted so badly to line back up and race again. I still do. As I write this, I’m jumping back and forth between my Word document and the open tab to Craigslist, searching for keywords like “small dirt bike,” “race,” and “flat track”.
This is my two-day journey from the couch to my first flat track race.
[To back up a bit here, this story is being published many months after the schooling. I had actually attended this the day before the Hell on Wheels race at Perris Speedway. Read that story here: https://rideapart.com/articles/first-flat-track-race-hell-on-wheels-racing.]
Couch to the Track, Day 1:
The idea was simple. I had lazed around on my couch and in my lonely garage for long enough. It was time to finally get onto a dirt track, something I dreamt of for a long time. I grew up auto racing, running in a small division of NASCAR, but I was forbidden from racing motorcycles due to a family tragedy.
One morning, Brian Bartlow called me after his email went unanswered for a few days. I told him my idea of following a journey to my first flat track race. I could feel his excitement through the phone as he told me about his program.
READ MORE: The Best Dual-Sport Motorcycles | RideApart
You may recognize the name, but not from dirt. Bartlow started a track-bike rental program, known as Feel Like a Pro, renting Ninja 250/300s at local track days around Southern California. A former road racer, Bartlow originally began helping some friends work on their riding technique by lending out a couple Ninjas. It eventually evolved into the operation it is today.
It was the perfect plan. They were able to keep overhead low enough that even riders who had their own bikes couldn’t pass up the opportunity to thrash on someone else’s. He has since sold that program to his head mechanic and moved his family to Northern California, opening up Feel Like a Pro Dirt—a program targeted to teach dirt riding, along with a simultaneous track-bike rental program.
He offers a variety of different training sessions from half days to half-week long training for pros. Bartlow occasionally schedules one-day Saturday classes the day before a local Sunday race. He convinced the local track/sanctioning body to offer a beginner’s class for 150cc and under that was targeted towards his bikes—show up, rent a bike from Brian, and compete. This, again, was a pretty sweet deal like his original Ninja program. A typical race would cost you a couple hundred bucks, including rental and track fees. So it was perfect: school Saturday morning, racing Sunday morning, and back to work on Monday. I was in.
Only problem was his class was two days away when he called me and I had planned to attend The Quail Motorcycle Gathering. Located in Monterey Bay, it was 5.5 hours (the boring way), but still another 5 hours south of Bartlow’s compound.
Well, I could spend a weekend looking at museum pieces while sipping champagne with my pinkie out and talking to millionaires about shit I’ll never own, or get filthy, sweaty, and sore during a weekend of dirt riding. Yeah...
I was to visit Greg Anthony at Treasure Island, which is made up of old Navy barracks and is located off the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. His plan was to leave the next morning for a cross country trip to North Carolina. I was to ride a KTM 1190 to his place then switch for his Triumph Speed Triple. This would make his return trip easier as the KTM belonged to KTM, which is located outside of LA so his drop-off would be smoother.
Remember Greg’s trip? Read here:
https://rideapart.com/articles/adventure-ride-sea-shining-sea
https://rideapart.com/articles/2015-ktm-1190-adventure-review
On Friday, I arrived much later than planned (naturally). After a Super Mission St. Burrito and riding around for hours looking for a late-night auto parts store that carried jumper cables to start Greg’s dead Triumph, I left the next morning with only a few hours of sleep.
Day 1
I jammed north up the 101 at 6 am after spending an hour getting the bike running. The 10-year-old Speed Triple was fitted with Viking Bags universal saddle bags, which housed a Napier tent, my camera gear and clothes along with my full Alpinestars ADV suit.
Up until this point I’d only ridden Hwy 1/Hwy 101 south of San Francisco, but I had heard the northern route was the best part. The highway jumped into a series of fast curves as it entered the South Cow mountain range. Bartlow’s town, Kelseyville, was on the other side of the mountains, making it hard to reach. I turned off the highway onto a small two-lane road that eventually went up and over the mountain with some of the best, most remote twisties I’d encountered. I hoped this was alluding to a fun weekend of riding.
Down a country road in Kelseyville is a white picket fence in the front yard of a blue house hidden behind a row of trees. Bartlow’s property was up the shared driveway behind that house. The trees opened up to a field a few acres in size. The main compound is a mowed grassy area with a large, ornate doublewide trailer and tall, steel pop-up garage building with a paved entrance, which was to be my home for the night.
Bartlow came screeching up on a little golf cart, exiting it with a smile that rivaled the size of his property. “Park over there and get yourself unloaded. There’s plenty of water over there too. I’ll be right with you.” I was the first to arrive.
East of the garage and house is a small standing shed against the border of trees that marks the property line to another empty field. On the other side of the shed was the track.
This was a complicated and technical track, which is made up of tight turns, switchbacks and long straights, all housed inside of a 1/8-mile oval, with scattered bails of hay and sprinklers throughout.
It was hard to tell when we first arrived, but this wasn’t the only track. In the next field on the far side, hidden inside 4-foot tall weeds, was a track made up of loose silt. Even further east, on the edge of the woods, was the adventure section. You entered that via a small wooden bridge over a dried-up creek bed. Then it was up a small jump and into the woods, where the track zig-zagged up steep hills and around piles of basketball-sized rocks.
Bartlow’s wife and two toddlers were inside the house making lunch for the day, along with the junior racer, his teenage son. Far removed from the world, with acres of riding area and a tight knit family, I envied Bartlow’s life.
The compound was like a dream.
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The Bikes
Our Kawasaki’s were lined up on the edge of the track, similar to a meet-and-greet session with racers before a race. Mostly Kawasaki KLX140L’s (140cc dirt bikes) with a couple 250s, at least one dual-sport bike and finally Bartlow’s personal race bike on a stand center stage.
The clouds overhead opened up as sun shined down on Bartlow’s KX450. Suddenly, I could hear his bike as it were far off in the distance, flying around the track-then I realized that was just Bartlow sliding through the gravel in the golf cart behind me, rushing to come welcome me to his class, who had now all arrived.
The Class
After introductions, we began to stretch. A practice that has become one of the biggest improvements to my own riding. I now stretch the night before, in the pits, and even the staging area. I look like a complete jackass squatting beside racers lined up in the staging area, but I don’t care.
We started with basic body position, probably the second most important lesson. Seeing the sexy pictures of riders sliding with their tongue out may throw you off. Some bikes appear to have a body position similar to road racing , but that’s the exact opposite of what we were learning today. Well, body position depends on several factors: the bike, the track, corner exit, corner entrance, etc.
How to Ride: Body Position
In the simplest form, you want to throw the bike away from you and into the corner. This was for our style, which involved short track riding on Kawasaki KLX 140s. You don’t want the front tire to actually steer like a car, but instead make the bike turn from its lean angle. Unlike the road racing body position where you lean off the bike, in an attempt to center out the tire and steer, here you want the most amount of lean angle as possible. Your body needs to remain on top of the bike, on the outside of the corner. The rear tire will step out. As the tire steps out, find the perfect time to add throttle input as you lean back into the seat, and pull the bike out of the corner.
Now many of the body position photos I’ve seen have been blue groove and short track photos, two seemingly opposite ways of riding in the same sport. These can confuse you. See, a short track you want that slide in a corner. But on a large, hard packed blue groove (and if you’re reading this, than you probably won’t be riding a blue groove track anytime soon, neither will I), you want a more sportbike style riding, because you have the grip there to handle it. With short track, loose dirt riding, you don’t have said grip.
READ MORE: 10 Things You Need To Know About Motorcycle Body Position | RideApart
Get your outside elbow up, inside arm almost straight. Imagine a very drastic way of holding a pool cue. This can only really be achieved when the bike is laid over into the corner. “Holding the grip like a screw driver,” said Bartlow. “Head over the handlebar.” In this instance, your body is positioned onto the outside corner, up onto the tank. Outside toe on the edge of the peg, knee into the tank, with inside foot out and into the dirt.
In simple terms, and how I interpreted it, your body wants to load the front tire entering the turn, similar to trail braking in road racing, BUT! You want to do this with your body, not the brakes, because you don’t have brakes. Oh, did I forget something? Flat track bikes don’t have front brakes (for our class session we had front brakes, but during the racing, they were removed).
Exiting the corner, you want the bike to hook. Get that power to the ground, by loading the rear tire, leaning your body backward. Keep your butt on the seat, don’t shift around too much, but lean back and twist it...just not too hard. Exiting the corner, “you can start to come around, you can start to let off lean angle,” said Bartlow. “As the bike starts to stand up, you’ll come up onto the [center of the] seat.”
I laid the bike down about oh, I don’t know, maybe 12 or 352 damn times that day. Mostly due to too much throttle exiting the corner. The first time I jumped to my feet, to watch a cloud of dust I threw onto Brian’s feet, as he stood on the edge of the track. I looked at him for a quick and firm lesson as to the mistake I just made. Instead, I received a loud, enthusiast shout of excitement.
“But I laid it down…”
“That’s good, it shows you’re aggressive. So use it! Get back up and let’s go!” He screamed.
There was little time for phrases like, “see what your classmate did here was...” or “let’s take a moment to run some more scenarios on the dry erase board over there.”
Instead it was about riding. And riding. And then some more riding. Brian spent special one-on-one time with the students who needed it, but for guys like myself and the motocross riders, our lessons were shrunk into shouts from the inside of a corner.
“That’s it, now get on the gas! Yeah!”
“Stay off that brake!”
“Get your elbow up!” he’d shout while slapping his elbow.
READ MORE: 9 Best Ways To Make Your Motorcycle Faster | RideApart
It was a lot to take in, but there was little time to sit, reflect and overthink what you were doing. Brian would give you some basics and send you out. This shook some of the fear out of many of the riders, including myself. No time to think about what not to do, but to simply attempt to build the muscle memory of it all. Thinking isn’t as important as simply feeling the bike’s rights and wrongs. The sensation of sliding, entering a corner too slow or more importantly, what it feels like to slide too much or enter a corner too fast.
One thing no one did that day was enter a corner too fast and that’s the key. That moment, which hasn’t happened for me yet, is when you charge into a corner at speed you thought was too fast...but it sticks and you make it out of the corner. That’s when it’ll click.
“First timers, they do pretty good, it’s just getting them to get confident enough,” said Brian about his less experienced students. “It takes them all day to realize the tires will stick. If they have good body position the bike will stick.”
Stay tuned for Part 2 next week!
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