Now Sandia has open lapping days on Mondays for bikes. Great idea for them, not so good for the people who come out there who don’t have any idea about how to be safer on the track.
There were 5 of us who have been riding on tracks for awhile, we all know that you don’t do anything that could get someone else hurt, you signal when you are exiting, where to properly exit, and enter the track.
These two, show up and come down to see me, now I have know idea why they were coming up to me. Just to keep the two straight, one I’m refering to as uncle and the other is kid. Uncle comes up to me and says I was told to talk to you. I’m thinking okay, great. I tell him we are running the standard config, that we are entering onto the front straight, and exiting in turn 7. This is when I notice that Uncle doesn’t have any gloves on and they both are in jeans and tennis shoes. They’ve got nice helmets and jackets on, but jeans on the track. Okay, not my place, I don’t make the rules here.. but wow. I’m thinking okay maybe they will put on the rest of their gear before they head onto the track. Both had backpacks and a tank bag.
So here’s where I start to have a melt down and I’m not the only one. Both of them head out the wrong way onto the track!!!!! One of our guys is out there going the other way. I start after them yelling, so does two of the others… then the track guy who let them in shows up and tells me they are new, and don’t know anything.. How is this something I need to deal with??? So while one of the guys is pulling them off the track, I ask about what the track has for rules for this lapping day, the answer is none…. This will be the last time I show up there on a Monday.
At this point Uncle starts in with attitude toward the guy pulling them off the track, I walk up our guys walks away and I start trying to explain about the dangers of a track. He cops attitude with me, tells me, “bikes are dangerous and if I have a problem with that I shouldn’t be riding.” I laughed at him… I continued to explain, that I was well aware of that, knew I knew about what dangers there are out there and that the track was actually safer then the street if you followed some universal rules about riding on one. First you exit and enter the track in the same locations as everyone else. At this point, one of our guys shows up on his bike and offers to show them around the track. We also tried to give Uncle some gloves to use, but he declined, “I don’t like the them, they interfered with my tactile feel”
OMG.
So they get a tour of the track and are shown the lines for about 3 laps, then they come off and I ask Uncle and Kid if that helped. The Kid goes on about how cool that was and how did we learn that stuff. I give him a trifold for the SMRI trackdays and tell him to come out to one, we can teach him how to go faster but safely, that it is a great place to get help with your skills. I’m hoping he was impressed enough by what he saw to come out and learn. Uncle I’m not going to hold my breath for, cause after I finished talking with the kid he came up and told me how he just wants to ride the Ovals and doesn’t see how doing that while we were riding the rest of the track was a problem.
Again, OMG he just didn’t get it at all. So we came off the track for a bit and let them go out stop on the track take pictures and play on the oval, with the understanding that when we went back out that they would have to ride the whole track if they wanted to stay out there. So having dealt with him the most I went back out first just to see what they’d do. They decided to exit, which is fine, but they decided to exit in the wrong spot, again@!#@#$# If they’d come across the track I’d have T boned them. Not really since that’s kinda what I expected the fool to do and I was watching for it, but come on.
They did pack it in and leave after riding for a while and they even tried riding on the full track with us, but Uncle wasn’t keen on us going around him, but there wasn’t much choice he was going so slow, and watching behind us behind him, even after I explained how experienced we all were and that he didn’t need to worry we would be very polite and give him lots of room as we went around. I talked with the Kid some more before he left he’d been riding with Uncle to learn from him. Scary! He was really in awe of us.. it was kinda funny, but cool, in a way. I never would have dreamed that someone would be in awe of my skills. I told him if he came out and learned that he could do the same things. I’m really hoping that the Kid comes and does a track day,