Race Report - WERA Grand National Finals: Road Atlanta

Miles traveled: 5800
Days spent: 14
Hours ridden: 13
Races entered: 4
Top-ten finishes: 2






"Y'all c'n sit wherever y'like," beamed the charming, southern-belle waitress. Her slow accent only added drool to the pile of jaws we had just dropped on the floor. We all looked at each other, and everyone had the same expression: We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Of course, we had only actually been in Kansas for about thirty minutes of the fifty-five-and-a-half hours we'd been on the road. The drive from Kirkland, Washington to Braselton, Georgia is about 2900 miles, give or take a hundred depending on the route you choose. Make that trip hauling six racebikes, a whole lotta equipment and one big Harley, and it takes a while. Corey Baum and I, along with rig owner Doug and crew chief Kevin, did just that a few weeks ago for the 2008 WERA Grand National Finals at Road Atlanta.

The Grand National Finals are the culmination of the various WERA regional and national series. They are held in conjunction with the Suzuki Cup, and are "invite only" - in order to compete, you must earn an invitation to do so by scoring high enough in one of the WERA Regional championships, or by competing in either the National Challenge or National Endurance championships. I had earned my invitation with my June finishes in the Las Vegas and Miller National Challenge rounds, and Corey had earned his through both the same National Challenge rounds and also his points total in the WERA West regional championship.

We arrived a full three days before the GNFs began, in order to recover from the drive and to meet Corey's uncle Walt, who lives not far from the track. Walt welcomed us with the epitome of southern hospitality and showed us all around town, but his first order of business was to insist that we get some "good home-style Joeja' cookin'" for breakfast. So we did, and after smiling bemusedly at our reaction to her greeting, that waitress brought us such a breakfast as I had never seen before in my life: Eggs, bacon, sausage, omelettes, toast, french toast, pancakes piled high as a juice glass, and grits, a food which previously I had only heard stories about. I tell you, I can count the number of times I've eaten so well on one hand and still have fingers left over. Little did we know at the time that the hospitality and kindness demonstrated by Walt, that waitress and that breakfast would be echoed by everyone we met throughout the entire week.



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Monday morning found us up bright (well, dark, really) and early, already at the track and setting up our pits for the main reason we arrived prior to the races: Kevin Schwantz' Suzuki School. Corey and I met our instructors and the other riders, and were placed into the "A" group along with two other racers and the more advanced trackday riders. Our group was up on the track first and after a brief classroom introduction to the school, off we went to see the track for ourselves.

Road Atlanta is the perfect medium between an all out, pin-it-to-the-limit brass-balls power track and an intricate, technical rider's track where sophisticated local knowledge is paramount. It has fast wide-open sweepers and tight dance-on-your-toes chicanes, positive and negative camber turns, and enough blind corners to elicit near-constant prayers to whatever god you believe in. Corey and I were assigned together to an instructor who led us around and showed us the lines one by one, switching between us every other lap or so. By lunch, we had a good grasp of the lines and were working on driving our brake markers deeper and carrying more and more speed through the corners.

The Schwantz School has an excellent video portion to its instruction: One of its instructors (in our case Trey Batey) follows students around the racetrack with a camera mounted on his bike, so that when those students come in for their classroom session, both they and their instructors get to review and comment on what was going on out on the track. Their video feedback was instrumental in how quickly Corey and I initially got up to speed - we could immediately see where we were running a little too wide, or not setting up correctly for a series of corners, anything. The next session out we could correct those problems and know precisely where we needed to be and what we needed to be doing. With its help, we both had all our lines and reference points nailed down in the afternoon of the first day and were extremely comfortable exploring what we expected to be the most important passing zones.





On Tuesday, the second day of the school, the instructors led the students for only the warmup laps, and then instead followed us so they could watch and give in-person feedback. Corey and I both immediately jumped on the opportunity, as by the end of the day prior we had been nipping on our instructor's heels and trying to push them deeper and deeper into the braking zones without breaking the rules and actually passing them. Once unleashed, I immediately drove harder and faster into each corner than I had the day before, but also reverted back to the hard-braking point-and-shoot cornering style I'd learned at Pacific Raceway instead of the flowing, higher-corner-speed style needed to keep up at Road Atlanta. It took a couple sessions of confidence-building and some prodding from our instructor Brad, but eventually I kept myself off the brake and instead trusted on my tires and sheer faith to pull me through in one piece. Lo and behold, I flew through turn one faster and lower to the ground than I'd ever imagined, my Bridgestone BT-003Rs holding solid with nary even a wiggle (on their street compound no less).

By the end of the second day, Corey and I were flying around the track, diving hard and deep into corners, lofting the front over turns five and twelve, and dicing back and forth making our instructor really work to stay with us. At the end of our final session, even he came in with an enormous grin on his face, shouting "HOT D***, that was fun!!" Finally, as the light waned and day became night, Will Grenier and Brian Trudeau flew in like the rock stars they are and we all moved our bikes to the infield pits used by WERA and the AMA.



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Wednesday morning: Day 1 of the 2008 WERA Grand National Finals. Overnight, the empty pits had turned into a bustling jungle of double-decker race trailers, brightly colored tents, growling, snarling racebikes, mountains of tires, and... rain.

Torrential, downpouring rain.

Our initial disappointment at the weather quickly turned to buzzed excitement as we realized that, being from "The Great Northwet", these were extremely favorable conditions for us. The 600 Superbike qualifying session that afternoon was virtually guaranteed to be wet, and we would likely be the fastest people on the track. As it turned out... we were.

Most of the paddock chose to sit the day out and hope for better weather during the actual races. Those that did venture out onto the track did so timidly, afraid of the rain and the potential to wreck out before their actual races. Corey and I, on the other hand, had the circuit as our playground, and did our best to both lead Will and Brian around to show them lines and also to study a new section of track that would be used in the races. The Bridgestone rains that I brought along, on "the off chance that it'll rain", did a phenomenal job of keeping my pavement-magnet bike and leathers upright and gave me rock-solid grip and confidence-inspiring feedback everywhere. The more I rode, the more excited I was for qualifying that afternoon - I would be on pole without so much as a contest.





Fortune would not have it so, however. As the day went on, it became apparent that it was going to rain harder, not less, and pools began to form in certain sections of the track. Most of the riders that had been out in the morning retired due to the harder rain, and although I did not, I definitely switched from "practice" to "play" mode, just going out to have some fun. It was becoming extremely easy to hydroplane through the esses and there was a stream cutting across the track at turn 7, an area which is already a off-camber and a highside hot spot. Eventually WERA ended up cancelling the afternoon qualifying sessions, and although I was extremely disappointed, I think they ultimately made the right decision: Simply circulating the track was becoming a hairy affair. A qualifying session would not have proved at all who was fastest; it would have only proved was who was lucky enough not to become or get taken out by a sliding missile. So, with qualifying cancelled and inches of water in some places on the track, we called it a day and wrapped up.



Thursday morning it rained again... so we went back to sleep.


Continue to pt. 2 at http://pnwriders.com/blogs/tophyr/40...anta-pt-2.html