Trackdays

Who Am I? Where Am I?

| Richard

Well life’s a tad hectic just now. Let’s have a quick recap on the last week or so, shall we?

Wednesday 27th.

After work, I headed to the Southbank to meet up with GT for House of Burlesque’s show at the Priceless London Wonderground. We had front row tickets as usual, and, also as usual, I got dragged up on stage for one of the acts. Enough said…

Once I’d escorted GT to Waterloo, I headed back to the car – passing people being overheard saying “Wasn’t that Richard?” from the show – and drove off to Slough. Tricky when the M4 is closed. So a late arrival at the Holiday Inn then.

Thursday 28th

Up bright and early for a day spent training a group of project managers at a Client’s office. Good fun, but hard work. Then a rush to Heathrow for my flight to Vienna, getting in quite late by the time I’d grabbed a cab to the Hotel de France.

Friday 29th

After breakfast, it was off to the University to listen to a talk on Chinese Law from a Beijing-based lawyer, who then sat patiently whilst I delivered a talk on the use of visualisations to explain claims, prefaced by my saying that this was the history module as I incorporated Charles Minard’s “Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813” into it…

It was low 30s and the lecture room had no air conditioning so a tad uncomfortable. Then back to the hotel to work until midnight on something for a Client.

Saturday 30th

After breakfast it was back to the University for a whole morning lecturing.

I’d checked out of my hotel, but couldn’t fly home, so after lunch I headed on to check into my favourite hotel in Vienna, the Steigenberger Hotel Herrenhof: a really luxurious hotel whose staff can’t do enough to help you. GT then flew out from Gatwick to meet me for an afternoon’s exploration and meal, as well as guided tour of Vienna in a horse-drawn open cart.

Hofburg Palace
Orson Carte

Sunday 1st

After a leisurely breakfast, it was time for more shopping, sightseeing and a bit of culture: the Albertina where they had some expressionist work plus a great photographic exhibition of work by Joel Sternfeld which really put me in the mood for the Route 66 trip later this month. After lunch, we headed off to the airport and tea in the lounge there before boarding our evening flights to Gatwick and Heathrow.  Due to a change of plan as I was flying out on the Thursday, I then headed straight up to Manchester and the Holiday Inn MediaCityUK.  Just in time to catch the last half hour of the Euro2012 final with a club sandwich and cider! Slightly embarrassing, though, as they’d checked me into a room that was already occupied by a couple … who were fortunately not there when I walked on in!

Monday 2nd

I drove to my home-from-home in Manchester, the Mercure Manchester Piccadilly where they take very good care of me. A long day at our Manchester office followed but a nice meal was the pay-off later.

Tuesday 3rd

A very long day at the office, finishing at 7.30pm before heading back down to London, popping into the office at midnight to drop off my laptop and some papers.

Wednesday 4th

A day off, so I headed over to GT’s to pick her up en route to Everyman Racing in Leicestershire for a few soggy laps at the wheel of a Ferrari and an Ariel Atom before driving back home.

 

Thursday 5th

A day in the office, and confirmation that I’ll be going to Paris in July and August to train some more clients on their contractual obligations and how to best cover themselves. Finished quite late and changed at the office, because I was meeting GT at the O2 Brixton Academy for the Lacuna Coil/Marilyn Manson gig which was superb! Good to see future-wife Cristina Scabbia rocking it. 🙂

Phew!

Rockingham Trackday

| Richard

Well it was time for me and the Blade to play properly on track and break in my new leathers and n00bish virgin kneesliders.

So off we went to the Motorcycle Folly‘s Rockingham trackday on 19 July 2010. The weather was just right despite the Sunday before and the Tuesday after being wet and miserable; indeed I even got a bit sunburnt.

First session out there having led the Novice group round for the first session and I started pushing it a little faster each time until I was getting my knee down on both left and right handers. Indeed in most of the photos of the day of me – taken by the ever-fabulous EDP Photo News – I seem to have my knee down lap after lap.

Anyway, here are some photos:

Ready to head out

Look at these 'sliders!

Portly Blue with Virgin Kneesliders

Kneedown

Onboard Footage Fail

| Richard

Damn!

I took a Sony DCRSR57E Handycam Camcorder With Built-in 80GB Hard Disc Drive (61hrs) – Silverwith me to a recent trackday at Rockingham last month, through the Motorcycle Folly as usual, and set out to record a session following two mates on ZRXes. I came in after the session eager to see the footage as I’d followed them for a few laps before buggering off to chase down some sport bikes.

Sadly there was no footage and the camcorder was reporting a hard disk drive error. The vibrations had been too much for it and although it did sort itself out, it seems like I need to go to flash memory on the bike.

Video Camera Mount

| Richard

I’ve successfully used a Sportbikecam camera mount for my Kawasaki ZRX1200R for some years now, using a large Sony DV camcorder. I’d recently bought a much smaller Sony DCRSR57E Handycam Camcorder With Built-in 80GB Hard Disc Drive (61hrs) – Silver from Amazon – it was far cheaper from there than from anywhere else, online or on the high street.

So with another trackday looming at Rockingham next month, through the Motorcycle Folly as usual, and a three day special at Jerez in September with Tracksense (not sure whether to use Wilf or the ZRX for this one), I thought I’d better get myself sorted with another mount.

I’ve therefore ordered an SBC24 through Camera-Mount.com who are the UK distributors. I’ll post how it goes in terms of fitting, etc. when it arrives.

Introductions

| Richard

Welcome to my shiny new blog set up especially for my fun and games with a 2004 Suzuki GSX-R750 K4.

I’ve bought it mainly for trackdays, both in the UK and abroad, but also for the occasional hoon.

The deal has been done and I am collecting it on Bank Holiday Monday, May 4th from the Midlands and then riding it the long way home to London via Grimsby and Lincolnshire Wolds for a quick hoon with my mate Wazza and his Rizla Replica GSX-R750 K2.

The bike’s present owner is an Instructor for the Motorcycle Folly and I made the mistake of saying that I really liked the 750 Gixxers as an all round package, especially for the track. Roger said it was for sale and suggested I take it out for a session on the recent Folly trackday at Castle Combe. It was sooooooo easy to ride fast and was so controllable, that it practically sold itself to me.

I’m intending to use my new TomTom Rider v2 satnav to guide me home, so that should be fun setting it to work. If not, I’ll have to rely on a small map book, Google Maps on my Nokia and signposts!

visordown.com – Alternatives?

| Richard

So then, given it is abundantly clear that the new Visordown is how it’s going to stay, I decided to do something about it. The alternatives were to put up and shut up, start a new message board or join another one and effectively leave Visordown behind.

Now, what makes a decent message board are first and foremost the people who post on it and secondly the software that runs it.

So I posted this suggestion on visordown.com:

“The old visordown.com was running vBulletin software which is just about to have a major upgrade released: see this thread over on vBulletin.

Now, although I can see why this change has taken place from the owners’ perspective, from the users’ perspective it’s not been a complete success, shall we say, with lots of folk asking for the old visordown.com back.

So what if something the same only new, starting from scratch was to be offered?

I have a spare licence for vBulletin that I am happy to pay to upgrade and install on a server somewhere. I have a couple of domain names regsitered that might be suitable:

TrackDayHero.com (currently pointing at my blog); or

BikeChatBoard.com (ditto).

I’d start by running Google Ads and a supporter scheme with benefits for supporters, so just like the old VD really. No publishing house looking over our shoulders, so perhaps more relaxed?

So, would anyone be interested?”

There was a lot of interest, but I was also reminded about the Revcounter which is shortly to be ported over to vBulletin and already has some of the old Visordown members on there. So to avoid duplication, my suggestion is on the back-burner and can be set up if needs be. In the meantime, I’ve changed the redirect for www.bikechatboard.com to the Revcounter.

Are Friends Electric?

| Richard

Not a good start to my day.

I’m heading off to Mallory Park this afternoon – well, the Royal Arms for a few drinks, dinner and an overnight stay – for a trackday with the Motorcycle Folly tomorrow. The car’s already packed; I just have to load the ZRX1200R onto the trailer and head off.

Knowing it’ll be a late night tonight, it was important I got a good night’s sleep last night, so staying up until 1.30am wasn’t a good idea especially as I knew I would be taking my daughter to the station this morning at 8.45am.

So imagine my joy at being woken at 6.30am by the phone beeping to say it couldn’t communicate with the base station and the UPS in the office beeping to say that the power was off. Yes, with a busy morning in prospect, the power was off which meant no PC, no Internet and no work. Oh and the possibility that all the food in the three freezers would go off…

Good old EDF Energy letting the side down yet again.

Now I well remember the “winter of discontent” and before that the strikes of the early 70s when we would see the occasional power cut. Fast forward to the noughties and here we are with power cuts every so often regardless of the time of year or weather conditions, and far more than I recall from my youth.

How pants is that?