George McConnel's Motorcycle Racing Blog

Dates:	June 6-8, 2014
Track:	Road Atlanta (Braselton, GA)
Bikes:	2001 Suzuki SV650
Weather:	Mostly hot with some clouds.
Sponsor:	LearnToRide.Org
Conducted By:	WERA
Track Diagram	Road Atlanta is a 2.5 mile track with many elevation changes. The highest point on the track is turn 11, which is 75 feet above the start/finish line. The lowest point is at the end of the "Esses", right about that last kink before turn 5. That point is 40 feet below the start/finish line. The back straight (which has two minor bends in it labeled 8 and 9) is almost 3/4 of a mile long, and it is not uncommon for race vehicles to approach 180 or more MPH on that section. From turn 9 to turn 10a you are going downhill. This makes for a challenging situation as racers must judge how to brake without running off the track while maintaining enough speed to keep other racers from passing them at that point. The good thing is there is a long runoff on the other side of turn 10 with lots of soft gravel in case you make a mistake.

Pete Readey road with me once again

During practice I power out of turn 5.

and we had a great road trip together. This time around there was no endurance racing at Road Atlanta in June (or any other time on the schedule for that matter), so I was only going down to ride a solo and a sprint.

The next morning I had to fly out to Charlotte on business, so getting back early on Sunday was a must.

We ended up sharing pit space with Stephen and Karl (although Karl was only there for spectating and wrenching this time. Hopefully it won't be too much longer until he'll be able to get out and play again.

This was the annual Cycle Jam, a four day event at Road Atlanta, which included a genuine trackday on Thursday, some practice and vintage racing on Friday, combined Nationals / Regionals on Saturday, and a doubleheader on Sunday with idential classes from Saturday. I only rode on Saturday so I could enjoy relaxing on Sunday and leave early enough to be rested for my flight out the next morning.

My laptimes were pretty much standard fare for me, mid 1:50's on the SV650. John MacDonald came out to play though, and took a pretty cool video of the sprint race we ran together.

The weekend's festivities were sullied by the death of a rider resulting from a crash in turn 6. Andy White's death in the race immediately preceeding mine was a terrible tragedy. They didn't let us know that a fatality had occurred until the end of the day, but everyone could tell that something major was up because of the very long delay between races. The rest of the races were shortened to only 4 laps each.

Here is the video John took of our race:

Check out some video from an onboard camera taken by John MacDonald!