Miller Time!
RIDE CRAFT Be a better rider #8
MILLER TIME!
A little father/son bonding at the all-new Yamaha Champions Riding School
JOHN BURNS
WHEN EXECUTIVE EDITOR HOYER asked did I want to attend the new Yamaha Champions Riding
School led by the intrepid Nick Ienatsch (a fellow CW contributor), well of course I did. At the same time, I realized that I've already been schooled by the world's greatest riders and none of them have made me any faster, so why burn up tires and fuel? Hail me the next ice floe, will you? Then I read the press release:
"The Yamaha Champions Riding School combines small classes with top-level instruction to improve the riding of every type of street rider. We 11 have kids look ing to begin a roadracing career and older riders returning to motorcycling after put ting the kids through college; our group of instructors will be able to help everyone who walks through the door" Well, there's the hook I was looking for right there, an excuse to bring my 15-yearold boy along-who shortly came to be referred to as "the luckiest kid in Salt Lake City." The boy had never ridden anything bigger than a Moriwaki 250 (for one day). But since he's an inch taller than me all of a sudden, I figured he'd be fine on a 600.
And God knows I could use the ego boost myself. Ienatsch is a man who never loses track of which side of his bread is buttered, and I knew I would be in for a serious mas sage. NI got right to work, softening me up with a flurry of quick Peter Egan compari sons, then connecting solidly with a series of riding-skill flatteries, including right after the first session: "Didn't I tell you John Burns had skills, guys, didn't I?!" Yes, the instructors all bowed and scraped, yes he does. Sometimes you just want to be lied to, am I right, ladies?
Well, it's all relative. This being the inau gural Yamaha Champions Riding School, and hastily assembled, there weren't many of us to battle it out for top honors-an attor ney named Doug, a guy named Michel, me and my boy Ryan, another Ryan (who's a district manager for Yamaha), fel low motojournalist Todd, and ahh, oh yeah, Bryan Miller, whose dad built Miller Motorsports Park, on track on a bike for the first time. (If you didn't
know Miller owned the place, you'd never guess; a genu
inely nice guy who picked the bike thing right up, authentically enthusiastic about bike racing and clamhappy at the turnout for the just-wrapped-up World Superbike weekend.) And though this is the first Yamaha Champions Riding School, it is far from the first rodeo for this group of instructors. Nick, you might already know, was head instructor at the Freddie Spencer School in Las Vegas for its entire 11-year run (a run that ended suddenly last year amid rumors of an ugly and expensive divorce for Fast
Fred). I can't remember if I ever attended the actual Freddie School, but I do remember Honda trotting FF out at all kinds of bike launches in Vegas. A favorite moto memory is rid ing along behind The Fred as his knee sliced a little piece of turf from the infield, which flew sb-mo over my helmet and reminded me of a Great Gatsby line. . .a divot from a green golf links had come sailing in at the office window.. When Nick got the go-ahead to do the Yamaha school at Miller, he got on the phone to the Freddie faculty imme diately: Ken Hill, Dale Kieffer and Mark Schellinger have the championships to prove their prowess, but beyond that, their years of riding and instructing under Freddie seem to have given them a more cerebral approach to going fast. And at Miller, they brought in local track record-holder Shane Turpin, too.
One thing Freddie used to do that I didn't really get the point of at the time was to come howling into a corner and just brake smoothly to a stop at the apex, where we'd all be standing. Ahhh, that was cool. What does it mean? It means that I, JB, am slow on the uptake. For as long as I can remember, people have been telling me it's a
bad thing to use the brakes when the bike's leaned over any significant amount. The front tire can't turn and brake at the same time! says the conventional wisdom. Baloney, says Nick Ienatsch and crew (and by extension, Freddie). The most important component of fast laps is to connect proper apexes lap after lap, and if you need to use your brakes right
up to the apex (and sometimes beyond it) to stay on line, that's what you should do. Bad things happen when riders blow their line through a cor ner, then try to make up for it with more throttle, more brake or more lean angle. Adhering to your line avoids all that. "Don't be a victim of your speed," is a YCRS creed. This flies in the face of all I've been taught and instinctively thought. I always thought you should crack the throttle back on as soon as possible in the corner to get the bike to a "neutral" state, relieving some of the front tire's burden and transferring
it onto the bigger rear contact patch. I mean, I've braked and turned in at the same time a little, but never held onto the brake once the bike was really leaned into the corner. Well, there's your problem, says Nick.
True, asking the front contact patch to steer and brake at once is asking it to do more-but keeping a bit more of the bike's weight on its front tire (which is just a big balloon) with the front brake also makes that front contact patch big ger and more stuck to the pavement. And another crucial thing: Keeping the front brake on a little keeps the rake steep and the bike carving into the apex. The front brake, says the YCRS curriculum, doesn't just control speed, it also controls geometry (and geometry controls how willing or unwilling your bike is to turn). I think I knew that. But I was afraid to put it into practice until somebody gave me permission to do so. On their bike...
Smoothness is key, and a big part of the instruc tion is how little pressure your braking system needs. "Don't be cutting the • J~ with a meat cleaver!" says Nick. Within a few smooth millimeters of lever travel, there's a world of control-and releasing the brakes smoothly is just as important; nice and gently allows the fork to extend and the bike to begin sniffing for the exit on the fat part of the rear tire.
Guess what? It all works, and soon it felt more normal and in control than ever to be knee-down and carving toward apexes with two fingers of light pressure still on the front lever. Instead of missing apexes by my usual two or three feet, berating myself and wondering how the fast guys are always so dang precise, I kept knocking the apex cones off the inside of the curbing with my knee. Damn, so that ’s how they do
Sure, it’s great if you can set your corner speed perfectly at the beginning of the corner like some schools teach, but who’s that good? Nobody. Using the brake to fine-tune your speed all the way up to the apex is easier than it sounds and highly effective. And what is “neutral throttle” other than another word for coasting? By trailing the brake in deep, then getting back on the gas, you decrease the time spent neither accelerating nor decelerating, which should result in lower lap times. It’s also how the other kids at trackdays pass you so easily on the brakes. Who knew? Freddie Spencer did.
Need more proof? At lunch the first day, we watched video of a MotoGP from Donington Park, the slow-motion camera zooming
in to see riders’ brake hands ease off the brakes not until way after turn-in. In the rain. I knew better than to be worried about my brave little toaster of a kid. Though he never had any real training (unless you count my advice), a childhood of sporadic moto crossing and mini-motoing has built up a solid base of skills. The YCRS
crew's calm, professional and friendly instructors took it from there, getting the kid up to speed gradually but surely. For him, there were no bad habits to undo. Now and then I'd come up behind the kid into a corner and think, NOOooo!!! You're in too deep, lad!!! BRAKES!!!
Then he'd draw away from me a few bikelengths before his brakelight would come on, quite a bit deeper than I would've thought optimal, and it would stay on longer into the corner. Sure enough, he'd be a few more bikelengths ahead of me at the exit. (Luckily, I am still a little more confident twisting the R6's throttle or I would never have heard the end of it.) And when I asked him repeatedly throughout the day and afterward if he'd scared himself, the answer was always a sort of blank look like, Why would I do that, Dad? No. And that's worth the price of admission right there. Even if the boy never rides on a track again, the YCRS stress on having full confidence in your ability to brake while upright, leaned over, in the rain, whatever, is a potential life-saver. Nick stresses it so much, in fact, he eventually reminded me of Chris Farley's Down by the River in a Van sketch from
"Saturday Night Live." Don't wanna use your brakes? Fine! There you'll be someday, lying in a DITCH at the bottom of a DECREASING RADIUS right-hander UNDER A BUS! At one point, Nick actually did use the phrase "rip your crotch in two."
But my hat's off to Ienatsch: Extremism in defense of safe motorcycling is no vice, particularly when you're schooling my kid.
At the conclusion of the school, I hopped on one of the school's new Ris just because NI is a cool guy and it was there, and to see if what I'd learned on a 600 worked as well on a bigger bike. Why, yes it does, and even more so since there's more speed to dispose of at every corner and a little more mass to turn. ("More speed, more brakes" is another school motto.) On my second lap on the Ri, there I was... braking it like Beckham into Turn 1 and downshifting from what I thought was third but was, in fact, second gear, right into neutral. For the old JB, this would've been wide-eyeball drama. For the newly schooled JB, it was really no problem at all. Just a tad more brakey, a bit more bodily lean-in, and all was well... I've been to a bunch of riding schools. I have to say, at the end of the day (two days, actually), I learned the most est-and wound up going the fastest, easiest-at this one. Two braking fingers up!
