Dale Walker's Drag Racing Academy

DALE WALKER’S DRAG RACING ACADEMY

So, you want to cut a fast quarter-mile....

STEVE ANDERSON

DRAG RACING IS EASY. SURE. You JUST HOLD THE THROT-

tie on and shift gears. Easy. Anyone can do it.

If you find someone who believes that, you can be

sure he's never made a half-decent pass down a drag

strip. In practice, drag racing can be the most frustrating of all motorcycle sports, punishing the smallest imperfections of technique.

Drag racing’s secret has always been locked in the first 60 feet of a run, the launch away from the line. Make one mistake there and lose speed to tire spin or wheelieing or simply not twisting the throttle far enough, and you'll pay for it in lost time all the remaining 1260 feet of the run. Perfecting the launch, finding those lost fractions of a second, can take weeks or months or even years of practice.

But now there's a way to get a head start on the process. Professional drag racer Dale Walker has started a school specifically designed to teach drag-racing technique. We recently attended one of Walker’s classes, and can report that, while a day of his instruction won’t turn you into a Jay Gleason replica, it will point you in the right direction.

Walker’s school, conducted at Fremont Raceway near San Jose, California, normally involves one long day. Class begins early in the morning when Walker is introduced to the students (usually just four to six attendees), then quickly moves into the viewing of a videotape that highlights the proper technique for a particular aspect of drag racing. After a discussion of the tape. Walker then presents you the opportunity to try the technique yourself.

That opportunity also introduces you to the other essential part of Walker’s classroom equipment: two specially modified Kawasaki Eliminator 900s that the students get to ride. Set up with 4-into-l pipes, smooth-bore earbs, electric shift kits and stock tires, the Eliminators are powerful enough to teach lessons about drag racing while offering the type of ruggedness required for a class of this type. And the low traction of the stock tires encourages the development of rider finesse.

You’re allowed two passes for each specific technique presented in the elass, but Walker does occasionally permit an extra run if you’ve really missed the point. All passes are videotaped, and although Walker immediately analyzes and comments on each run. the most in-depth eritique takes place minutes later when the videotapes are reviewed in the classroom. This is a powerful tool that forces you to recognize even the most minor of errors.

In the first sessions. Walker takes you through a run. He covers it in reverse; you start just riding the bike off the line, work on the launch, and then add complexity as he shows you how to do a pre-launch chirp (a brief snap of the clutch and throttle that spins the rear tire, important in gauging clutch feel and traction, and in cleaning the tire), followed by a burnout. By the end of the dav. you are doing everything a professional drag racer would do for a run. if not yet at quite the same level of skill.

After a day at Walker's drag-race academy, you'll find that the 1 2 or so passes you’ve made aren't nearly enough to burn the right drag-race techniques into your reflexes; you may have to invest thousands of runs before you achieve that. But you will have learned the essentials needed to practice and refine those teehniques.

Several pieces of Walker's advice are worth the price of admission on their own. First is the suggestion that you take all slack from the driveline by holding the clutch just on the edge of engagement while sitting on the starting line: put that in practiee and you’ll add controllability to your launches. The other invaluable tip seems initially obscure: Keep the clutch ahead of the engine. What Walker means is that, as you roll off the starting line, you should engage the clutch first, before applying any more throttle. Then, only as the clutch engagement pulls engine rpm down do you roll the throttle further open to compensate. This is easier said than done; but when you succeed, you end up with a much better-controlled, harder launch. And until then, you'll at least know what you're doing wrong.

The cost of Walker’s school is $270 for one day of instruction. At the class we attended, two people were there for the second time, and both were enthusiastic about what they had learned. Reservations can be made by contacting Dale Walker’s Holeshot Performance, 31 1 Chestnut St., Santa Cruz, CA 95060; (408) 427-3625. There is nothing else quite like it—nor is there a quicker entry into the secrets of drag racing. E8