Thanks!
It's quite strange how you grab that front lever with all four fingers when you let off the gas after a hard run.
It's funny. I two finger brake on my trail bike and on my supermoto, but use the whole mitt for my street bikes. Not sure why - perhaps it's the MSF lessons that were drilled into me all those years ago? Maybe if I sprang for some nice Pazzos, you wouldn't see me flapping my whole hand at the lever...
You are a pretty good rider man! I need to go to the track so I can start scraping some pegs.
Well thanks. But there's two reasons you see me making passes in that video - The first is that Gateway's road course (inside the oval) is astoundingly dangerous - very little usable runoff, and plain old *walls* around big chunks of it. Riders who either haven't raced there, or have never raced flat track ride very conservatively there. The second reason is plain old track knowledge - there's only 8 turns and 7 of them have a "trick" to them that maximizes exit speed for some very short "chutes". If you only know 5 of the tricks you can fly around there passing people at will, no matter what you or they are riding.
The Speed Four in the video? Used to be mine - my brother badgered me to sell it to him. It has almost 30 less hp than the Z, just a tick over 80. I lap that track just about 2 seconds faster on the Speed Four than the Z for three reasons: Weight advantage to the Triumph. The high bars on the Z cause me to make excessive inadvertent steering inputs when I shift my body from one side of the bike to the other. And cornering clearance - My entry speed for turn 2 is limited by the fact that the Z drags the left peg for 40 feet before I get it pointed at the apex. That, incidentally, is where you see my brother gapping me big time - I have to use up three of my tricks just to catch him again.
