Well the day dawned slightly overcast and fairly nippy, but Kickaha was on time to pick me up at 6am. We were off to Levels Raceway (Timaru) for my track debut. There was a motorcycling canterbury race meeting and I was goin to race in the Social class, for riders without a race licence. Kickaha had lined me up a 1987 TZR250, affectionately known as "Shitbox." His mate picked it up for $600 for spare parts for his bucket, but decided it had to go on the track a few times before he dismantle's it.
By now it was beautiful and sunny, turning out to be one of the best days for a month or so, I even think I got sunburnt. After scrutineeing and waiting for the other classes to go through (F1, F2 etc) it was time for the social class to go out. The first surprise was how abrubt the powerband was, nearly fell off the back when I hit it in first coming out of the pits. It turns out the the owner got a little carried away when taking the lights etc off and ended up cutting the power valve curcuit. So he ended up just screwing them open full time, which makes the power very peaky with a very small power band. Anyway, Levels is a very nice track, with a long straight down the back and a few twisties either end. After 4 or 5 laps in the first session I was starting to get he hang of the track and even managed to scraped the pegs a few times.
About an hour later I was off for my 2nd session. Now I had a better feel for the track and was getting into the groove of things. Started scraping the pegs in virtually every corner, and the gear lever was scraping on the last left hander coming onto the back straight. Which made it quite hard to change up from 2nd coming out of the corner. On the last lap the gear linkage broke from the lever coming out of this corner, so I had to keep it in 3rd getting back to the pits. Kickaha managed to fix it up with a cable tie and some lockwire in the lunch break.
After lunch was the 3rd session, I was getting alot more confident now and was trying to lean off more so that I could try and increase the ground clearance. I was still scraping the pegs, but wasn't as much, felt like I was going faster aswell. I managed to catch up to a FZR400. He was smashing me on the straight but I managed to pass him 2 or 3 times in the twisties. That was fun, specially riding round the outside. Not sure if he was too impressed.
The 4th and 5th session went well. In the 5th I found another guy on a 1989 RGV250 which I was fairly evenly matched with. He definately had around 20kph or so on me down the straight, but I had him in the twisties. We had a good battle passing each other numerous amounts of times, this was great fun. At one stage I ran a little wide on the entry to the back straight, just after passing the RGV and had a little "motorcross" experience, only for a split second though, nothing major. I also got Kickaha to do some timing of me in these sessions. Managed to get consistently around 1:26 to 1:28, with a best of 1:24. The best of the RG150's were doing consistent 1:26's, so I was probably a bit slow, but can definately improve.
All in all it was an awesome day. Thanks heaps and heaps to Kichaha, you are a legendEven though he wasn't racing he organised the bike for me and drove me down. Thanks so much man.
Hopefully I'll be making another appearance in the coming months, not sure if it will be on "shitbox" or not.
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Originally Posted by scracha
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