I just spent a great weekend at Arroyo Seco Race Track!

I had a great mini vacation at the track last weekend. I took off last Thursday and Friday and headed out to the Arroyo Seco Race track. I use a 2017 KTM RC390 as a track/race bike. On Thursday I spent the day getting private training from Roger Heemsbergen. Roger is a racer and also owns the track. It's amazing how much of a difference a great coach can make. We started out just getting me to ride the race line better, then doing some general building from there on the entire track. After that Roger mainly concentrated on one corner, getting me to carry more speed going in and not use any brakes. It took a bit to get through that mental wall, but once I did the corner felt great and really brought the entire track together for me. I managed one really nice lap, it felt fantastic, I decided to call it a day after that. It was late afternoon, and I didn't think I had better in me that day. I still need a lot of work, but it was amazing how 'right' everything feels now. Friday I took it kind of easy continuing to work the lessons and trying to get the race line into muscle memory. Saturday, was an open track day, I continued to work on everything, and pushing a bit harder. I started timing my laps also. We were going clockwise, and my prior best time had been a 1:35. On Saturday my best time was a 1:28, and I was pretty consistently in the 1:30's or better. Those times are not fast around that track, but I think dropping 7 seconds off a lap is pretty incredible, especially since it felt so much easier than the 1:35. On Sunday there was a private track day with 3 or 4 other riders going CCW. I tried to incorporate what I had learned over the weekend into riding the track the opposite direction. One of the other riders and club members noticed what I was doing, carrying more corner speed using less brakes etc. He normally rides a 600, but had recently picked up a Ninja 300 and was working on that. We talked about what I was working on and he ended up following me around for several sessions and we managed to knock several seconds off his previous lap times. It felt really cool to have maybe passed on a bit of what I had learned. I also found out one of the other guys on a new GSXR 1000 happened to notice our corner speed, and decided to follow us for a session to see what we were up to. Again, I thought that was pretty cool. Anyway, it was a fantastic weekend at a great track, with an amazing coach. I don't think I could find a better way to spend vacation days. The track days and the coaching are also extremely reasonable compared to anything else I've looked into. If you're in the South West definitely check it out. If you're further away, take a few days off to spend there and make the trip worthwhile. Rogers also a pretty good guy to just hang out with and shoot the breeze. As a side note if you go, I find it hard to believe there's a corner in the world that feels better than getting Yucca right going clockwise :). via /r/Trackdays https://www.reddit.com/r/Trackdays/comments/8jnjae/i_just_spent_a_great_weekend_at_arroyo_seco_race/?utm_source=ifttt