Coming To Grips

Coming to Grips

Final thoughts: Man vs. Speed

CERNICKY DID MOST OF WHAT PASSES for actual work once we were on-site, learning the track and zeroing in bikes on Day One, then riding all nine (10 including the Bazzaz-equipped GSX-R1000) for times on Day Two— including riding the five heavy hitters with and without traction control. That’s 45 hard laps, about 85.5 minutes, or four intense 20-minute sessions. And he came so very close to making it, so very close—maintaining the man/motorcycle interface right up until the fateful comer of the final session.

“Why,” I asked Cergimpy, who said he’d “crashed” three times that lap before actually falling off, “when it became obvious that sliding the fork tubes up in the Aprilia’s clamps and cranking more preload into the rear was not the way to go, didn’t you pull in and undo those changes?”

“The fuse was lit,” said he, crackling, pinging and smoldering slightly in the pits after his long slide into home, “and I’m pretty sure that was going to be the fastest lap of the test.”

If it had been, that would’ve been two Open-classers that were faster with TC switched off, and two that went faster with TC on, which tells us what we pretty much knew going in: If you’re an Expert, TC’s a nice security blanket that lets you run more laps faster and with a bigger margin of safety, but it can also get caught in your spokes and slow you down. (The Kawasaki

system is the smoothest and best, but in TC2, its best time was 0.7-second slower than the BMW’s. TCI next time?)

At Inde, twice as much time is spent in slow Split 2 vs. Split 1, and the slow section is really slow—a 600 track, we called it when we weren’t calling it a gokart track. And, in fact, the ZX-6R beat all three “Big Mids” easily in tight Split 2, in spite of outweighing a couple of them. Less crankshaft inertia, sure, but good design doesn’t hurt, and neither does 112 hp.

It stands to reason, then, that the ZX6R should spank the Open-class bikes even more resoundingly in the tight split. Okay, it did beat the Ducati 1198 and the ZX-1 OR by about 3/4-second in there, but the little ZX-6R was a mere 0.12-second ahead of the Aprilia, and a gnat gluteus 0.06-second quicker than the BMW in the tight split—both of which then blew the Little Green Destroyer out of the water in overall lap time.

How can the big bikes stay so close in little-bike terrain? Traction control. Riding each Open-class bike first with TC on let Cergnarly instantly gauge, without need to gradually feel his way to their limits, just how hard he could prod the less-tactile big beasts—which I hereby postulate made it easier for him to go back there with TC switched off on ensuing laps.

For those of us who aren’t Professional Grade Racers, the results are less conjectural.

If Off-Road Editor Dudek didn’t fear the ZX-10R, he certainly (wisely) showed it the respect it deserves—before proceeding to lap more than 4 seconds quicker on it than he had on the ZX-6R, with a 2:00.1. As for me, in this crowd I smell the place up, but I’ll have you know every time I do a track day with the general public, I wind up in the fast group, dammit! On the GSX-R600, my transponder said 2:23 and I thought it must be broken. On the ZX-6R, it said 2:20 and I thought I must be broken.

All hope gone, trying to outrun the voices in my head and maybe trying to end it all, I began grabbing handfuls of throttle on the ZX-10R coming off the corners, and a funny thing started happening: Instead of sailing off into eternity, I just drifted nicely to the edges of the exits, just like I’d always wished I could do, building a little more confidence each time it happened. And when I got back to the straight, I looked down to see, through the tears, 2:10! And on the BMW, 2:08.7! Can’t remember the last time I picked up 11 seconds by changing bikes. Probably because it’s never happened. Not even close.

Turns out there is something better than too much horsepower: too much horsepower you’re not afraid to use.

I’m going to walk out on a limb and say that TC may be the best thing to happen to closed-circuit riding since asphalt. And the more mediocre you are, the more miraculous it is. —John Burns