2025 - What I'm Working On
I have the default set of expectations for myself but there are some more granular things I'm paying attention to this season
2025 hasn’t gone entirely to plan with falling off a couple of times and the latest requiring some recovery. All the same, these are the things that I’m broadly trying to keep in mind this season. These items aren’t for everyone and the importance will depend on where someone is with his or her riding. If you’re struggling to hit apexes consistently, work on precision first. Here are the themes for my 2025 riding (not track specific):
Get weight off the inside arm as early as possible - during heavy braking, there is a lot of weight on both of your arms, that weight and force is pushed into the handlebars. In order to get the bike to turn by allowing the fork to move in the steering head, we have to get our weight off the bars as soon as practically possible. There are different ways of thinking about this, including getting to a screwdriver grip, consciously tightening the abdominal muscles (as Ken would say, ‘tighten your core!’), dropping your upper body, thinking of keeping the inside elbow up and bent, etc.
Front-end geometry - in most 90°+ corners, optimal fork travel should be ~100 mm or more at turn-in. With 130 mm of front travel on my bike, my target is close to 110 mm (or more). The reason for this is layered and has multiple benefits. In order to get to the 100 mm + of travel, you have to save a good portion of your braking for the area closest to your turn-in. The immediate advantage is that you’ll be carrying speed longer and condensing your deceleration zone, and hence improving lap time. When the front end has good brake pressure on it near turn in, you’re increasing your grip by putting more pressure on the front tire, pushing it into the asphalt. Last is that with the front end pushed down, the wheelbase of the bike is shorter and rake and trail are optimized for turning, improving the bike’s turning. Fortunately I have suspension potentiometers so I can verify my progress on this.
Throttle builds - I’m wanting to improve my first 40% of throttle usage and making it more linear. This may mean slowing my first bit of throttle application so that I can confidently build to 100%. The new tune on the BMW is something I’m still working to familiarize myself with.
Further familiarization with my A bike - I still have a lot to learn with the BMW. The power is amazing and consequently I find myself rolling out of the throttle somewhat as the front end lifts slightly. Yes, it has electronics, including wheelie control, that prevents anything too outrageous from happening, however the front still comes up with even small bumps while on the throttle. It’s not a lot and I need to get more comfortable with it. I’m still experimenting with ABS and engine braking settings to see what I like. I feel like I’m getting a handle on the TC and making adjustments for tire wear but the ABS and engine braking are things I’m curious about. I’m also trying things out with ergonomics. The bike came with Alpha rear sets which were just too aggressive for my liking even in the most relaxed setting. I tried some Gilles rear sets and now I’ve recently installed some Evol Tech rear sets. The bike is amazingly stable in high speed acceleration corners, such as Laguna Turn 1 and Thunderhill East Turn 7. I have lots of potential to build speed in those corners.
Earlier downshifts - this isn’t cemented yet but it’s improving, and it’s something I can practice on street and dirt rides. At the Ridge in June, I was working on this for braking into the chicane and was getting some rear wheel skipping. I was using the intermediate of the 3 engine braking levels on the BMW so I want to try with the lowest of the EB settings.
At the Ridge Ken and Mark both rode the BMW and while they liked it mid-corner and the power, they both remarked that the front end lacked feel under hard braking. Further research showed that the previous owner installed a larger bore master cylinder than what is recommended for the stock calipers. I since replaced the master cylinder with the correct size (17 mm instead of the 19 mm) but haven’t ridden it enough to build a feel for it.
Turning, then braking - A broader skill that I want to work on is turning, then braking and turning on throttle. There aren’t a lot of corners where this is applicable on a superbike but there are a few at Buttonwillow (Riverside in particular, degree of rolloff in several corners) and Laguna (T3, T10, T9 to a lesser degree). I watched the MA Superbike and Supersport races in great detail to confirm the entry procedure on these Laguna corners. It’s a counter-intuitive process but I’m thinking I want to do some deliberate practice with the 400 to work on this as a lower horsepower bike can force you into the scenario sooner than a bigger horsepower bike will. I do practice this at the kart track with the 400 so it’s not an entirely foreign concept but doing it at higher speeds on a big bike at a big track is a rarity for me.
Earlier direction - Last year I was working on getting direction (getting the bike pointed) earlier and that’s still on my mind for this year.
I really like riding other bikes at the track, when done deliberately, it helps me with riding my own bikes and vice versa. For instance, if I know I can safely slow for a corner with bike X and bike Y isn’t as fast, I can extend my throttle/brake usage with bike Y. In other words, riding the Tuono (~175 bhp) after riding the BMW (200 bhp), I know I can safely push my throttle and braking further with the Tuono.
One of my highlights for this year was a new PB on my street/coaching bike, the Aprilia Tuono V4, at Thunderhill East. In that lap I was reasonably happy with my direction, control usage, and the data. I did have slightly late slow points, likely as a result of being particularly cautious with initial throttle at lean due to the street-oriented suspension.
Accompanying video
Here’s another fun data set. This is on the BMW at Thunderhill East. Following the new OpenFlash tune, the bike is producing 200 bhp on the dyno. Consequently, I was getting wheelie control intervention at 149.6 mph. Wheelie control is in the 2nd graph in blue and is labeled ‘LiftOff'.’ Unfortunately my video failed to record on this session.
Wow. That is some serious detail. I have to say--as a numbers geek, I'm loving the data you have here.