Why We Ride. Mark Barnes, PhD
that attitude set the tone among the attendees, too. I detected no pressure, no condescension; there were no pissing contests for me to lose.Whatever the reason, I was the most relaxed I’ve ever been on a racetrack.
In the past, I’ve often found myself unable to resist the temptation to go as fast as possible down the straights, not so much for the sake of speed itself but to save what little face might be possible. It’s a racetrack, after all! But now I treated each one as merely a period of downtime that allowed me to review my plan for entering the next corner. This approach kept me from having the all-too-familiar experience of getting into corner after corner too hot (too hot for my abilities, certainly not too hot for the bike or track) and then having to struggle to remember—and execute—the proper sequence of turn-in procedures while frantically fighting off the distractions of panic and trying to slow down to a speed I could manage, only to then flee the disappointment of my botched corner by blasting out of it with the most violent acceleration possible, as far down the following straight as possible, and starting the whole process over again.
Regardless of what I knew, regardless of what I made up my mind to do differently the next time out, the racetrack atmosphere simply overwhelmed me again and again with my own adrenaline and testosterone, which prevented me from making the best use of all of the learning opportunities that the racetrack provides. Luckily for me, the racetrack is such a perfect learning environment that, almost in spite of myself, I always came away with a wealth of new knowledge. My gains, though limited and inefficiently made, were always more than I could hope for from a year’s worth of street riding. I can’t recommend the track enough as an educational institution.
So what happened when I stopped trying to go fast and concentrated instead on proper cornering technique? The most unremarkable thing possible: I went faster. No surprise, right? Obviously. And yet it was the first time I’d ever consistently done the thing I’d been told to do, believed was best, and preached to others. What’s up with that?
Did I not actually understand or believe in this principle before? Was I just too caught up in the fabrication of a certain self-image to heed such wisdom, even if I knew it was true? Had my personal physiology made me too excitable a lad for the task at hand? No doubt all these factors contributed to my behavior to different degrees at different times. But the thing I was most consciously aware of, what stood out to me as different from other track days, was my decision at the beginning of the day to simply have fun. I made a deliberate choice to abandon any pretense, slough off any pressure, and eliminate any habit that might interfere with my enjoyment of the day. And I made good on that decision many times over while out on the track.
I’ll close with an analogy from what I’m sure the majority who’ve been there consider the most memorable part of Road Atlanta. Turn Eleven is the most intimidating corner I’ve had the “pleasure” of experiencing at any track. The approach is a fairly steep incline; you pass under a bridge at the crest and then descend down what feels like an elevator shaft on the hill’s other side. Waiting for you waaaaaay down there at the bottom is Twelve, a flat, high-speed sweeper that spits you out next to a wall that hugs most of the front straight. Turn Eleven isn’t sharp, but it is completely blind. And when you finally can see through it, the image before you is extremely alarming—not to mention the visceral sensation of suddenly losing a hell of a lot of altitude!
A brush with greatness. Coverage of the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School in 2001 yielded not only excellent instruction on the wondrous Road Atlanta racetrack but also a handshake from The Man himself at graduation.
Anyway, even more than with most corners, the key to getting through Eleven well is to have a series of reference points to aim at long before you can see anything like the big picture of where you’re going. You start with a point on the track at the base of the incline, point yourself toward the second “U” in SUZUKI painted on the bridge, hunt for the curving dashed line that appears in the middle of the track just beyond the bridge and clip its arc, and then hurl yourself down the hill toward a spot on the outside of Twelve, where there happened to be an orange cone on the day I was there. Those more familiar with Road Atlanta may actually experience Eleven as a turn, some sort of organic whole, but for me it was always this set of reference points, none of which were the turn itself. I could do OK through the corner if I kept my sights set on these other goals, but I’d be instantly lost whenever I watched the contours of the track. The only way to navigate that corner was to aim for those other points.
In the past, I might have felt that aiming for fun was tantamount to lowering my standards, wimping out on learning how to go fast. Now I see it as the reference point that makes all those other things possible.
Making Music
August 2010
As a hobbyist bass player, I was recently bewildered by a song I was trying to learn by ear. Although I can read music, I’m usually able to pick out bass lines without written assistance. On this particular song, though, I was confounded again and again by a rhythm pattern, or what seemed to be the lack thereof. A sequence was established during one section of the song, and I expected to repeat it. But as the sequence cycled again, it was as though the notes had been shifted to different beats. This threw me off every time.
I finally determined that the bass line was cycling through its sequence at a different pace than the drums were cycling through their sequence. I’m used to keeping time with the drums, and I expect my own notes to “stay in place” on top of the drum pattern. My expectation was perpetually confounded on this song. It was as though the bass and drum lines had been written in different time signatures. Indeed, they were: I’d encountered polyrhythms.
Here’s a brief explanation for those without a musical background: a time signature dictates how many beats there are in a basic song unit, called a measure. Rock songs, for instance, typically have four beats per measure. When you tap your foot to such a song (assuming you’ve “got rhythm”), you’ll find that patterns in the song repeat themselves over some fixed number of four-beat measures.
In one example of a polyrhythm, one element of the song repeats after so many three-beat measures while another element repeats after so many four-beat measures. This is different from something like the “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” round wherein two elements cycle on different schedules, but do so over the same number of beats. Imagine singing “row, row, row your boat” while someone else sings “row, row your boat” (with one of the “rows” missing); that’s a polyrhythm. You can see how easy it would be to get confused. Polyrhythms are for advanced musicians!
What does all this have to do with motorcycling?
As I was struggling to learn that song, I kept thinking of my very first track day, which was, in one way, my very best. It took place at Talladega Grand Prix Raceway (TGPR). TGPR is a compact, 1.4-mile track with about ten corners, depending on how you count the bends. The lightly modified little Honda Hawk GT I’d borrowed for the event was a perfect fit for the combination of a tight, relatively slow track and a rider of meager ability. Years later, when I returned on a bigger, faster bike, I had less fun, partly because the machine was too brawny for the course (and my still-meager abilities) and partly because I felt I had more to prove after bringing the extra power. That ended up being a step backward for me.
Back at my first track day, I could manage both the bike and the track (eventually). This allowed me to achieve something unique in my experience. By the middle of the afternoon, I’d truly settled into a rhythm. I had my braking, turning, and throttle-opening markers memorized such that I didn’t have to think them out at each corner. Instead, I found myself “playing” the bike’s controls very much like a musical instrument. That didn’t mean I was setting any lap records, but I was having a blast.
When playing familiar music, I don’t count the beats, look at my fingers to see if they’re in the right places, think about the names of the notes, and so forth. Instead, I just make sounds that match the ones “in my head.” Everything is orderly and predictable, and I’m on autopilot. There may be periods of improvisation when I deliberately deviate from the established pattern, but then I