September 10, 2008

Heading for the Track

Well, I finally decided to work on my skills and head for the race track. So I sheepishly, signed up to join a private track day group for us industry types. I prepped my little RZ350 and off we went down to Shannonville Motorsport Park.

I was so nervous that first day that I didn’t start having fun until about 4pm. I was being shown the proper lines by my friends Paul & John and extensively schooled on the dos & don’ts of track riding. Both of these guys have extensive knowledge of the race track and racing in general and were able to give me a good foundation to start from.

By the end of my first year at the track I had successfully crashed my friends bike (funny enough it was the exact bike in my previous blog), a failed oil pump and the motor was down on power requiring a rebuild. But that was okay because I was now officially hooked on the track.

So what next you ask…well get a dedicated track bike of course. There are many good reasons behind this decision if one can get over the costs associated with this purchase. You can crash this bike hard and still go for a ride on your street bike later that evening as well you don’t really need to care on appearances because after all it’s a track bike.

As the winter season was slowly approaching I was traveling from scrap yard to scrap when I can across Zdeno Cycle Salvage in Kitchener. They had a ton of sport bikes with more crashed ones coming daily. Al, one of the owners and I came to an agreement over a relatively decent 2000 YZFR6. It was a little risky as the bike didn’t run when I got it and had no oil due to a cracked stator cover. But over all, the bike looked straight with no apparent crack in the frame or bent forks.

After getting the bike home it was time to get it running and than start a parts list of items that I needed to pull it together and make it track ready. All in all I got pretty lucky and besides a few hard parts like clip-ons, covers and a stator, the carbs just needed a really good cleaning and we were up and running.

The rest of the winter was spent acquiring a few other goodies like fiberglass body work, gearing and jet kit to go with the full exhaust system that came with the bike.

Once everything was together I transported the bike down to my brother-in-laws house just outside of Tillsonburg, Ont. For an impromptu test session on some very back country roads and to pick-up the painted body work that he painted for me.

The bike was finally ready to go to the track to have some fun. She looked almost a little to pretty to be punished the way a track bike can be punished. But after all that was it is was meant to be a Track Bike first and foremost.

Bryan Fil

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