Back at it and with Glamour Shots!

Hello fans! If any of you are still around, the news of my demise has been greatly exaggerated. After nearly a month since my last post, I managed to scrape enough material together to get a post out. Of course that post is a day later than planned, but hey I am back at it. I got back from Japan a couple of weeks ago, but getting caught up at work and the July 4th holiday kept me from getting online and getting info out. If you want to stay current with My Motorbike Obsessions in real time, head on over to my Instagram page and hit the "follow" button. Enough with the hard sell advertising, lets get to it! 

While in Japan, I tried to do as many motorbike related things as I could squeeze into the family trip. Unfortunately with Japan in the midst of its rainy season and a couple of kids with nothing to do, kept me away from too many two wheeled adventures. I went to a couple of cool shops and even rented an MT-07 again for a few hours. I picked up a couple of key chains to add to my ever growing collection as can be seen above. Since I have a bunch of key chains and only one set of keys, I think I need to get some more bikes. 

Since I had a tiny bit of cash left over from the trip that didn't get spent on sushi and Hello Kitty merchandise, I picked up this cheap generator from my number one race gear supplier, Harbor Freight. This will be to power some lights and my phone charger while out at the race track. This thing won't power too much, but I can keep my phone and cameras charged and power a couple of LED lights attached to the 10'x10' pop-up canopy. I will also use it for camping when I finally get out and do some overnight track events. This pretty much completes all the basics for my track paddock gear list. Now I need to save some money for more directly bike related stuff like Supermoto wheels and tires, tire warmers and track day entry fees. 

After getting back I also got out to the track to get in some much needed flat track practice. After over a month without going fast and turning left I was a bit nervous. I was especially nervous to tackle the track with the heat wave we have been having this week. With temps firmly in the triple digits, the water truck needed to come after every session to keep any moisture in the track. Of course they only come around one every hour if I am lucky. I did get some good sessions where I had a nice, moist groove somewhere in the lower third of the track where I could hold my speed through the corners. As soon as I got off the groove into the dry stuff it got hairy really quick. I had a couple of close calls that almost ended up in high sides, but managed to get home with all my bones intact.

On my last day at the track I was all alone. Since it was the day after the Independence Day Holiday, I figured I would have the track to myself. I decided to try and get a cool shot of my turn 4 slide. The pic above is blurry, but actual evidence that I actually might be able to do this flat track thing. I also practiced my race starts while the track was holding some water. I got out my Track Addict app and created a custom setting for the Milestone Flat Track. Once I had that working, I did some 6 lap race simulations from starts to cool down laps. The app did a good job of counting my laps using the GPS of my phone. Sometimes the app doesn't count a lap because the track is so small that the GPS signal gets confused. I got three race practice sessions in and I averaged somewhere around 18.3 to 18.5 seconds per lap. I have no idea how that stacks up to the rest of the SCFTA competition, but (foreshadowing) we may find out soon! 

Well friends, I will leave you with this last glamour shot and my promise to do better at getting out posts. I have a few things that I'm working on and there are a large number of events going on in SoCal during the summer. As long as both me and my bikes keep our cool that is. Thanks for sticking around while I took the summer off. Ride safe friends!

Blue