 |
| | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| | Thread Tools | Search this Thread | Display Modes |
| #41  12-Dec-2006, 02:25 | ||||
| ||||
| The same day as the E.T house, we decided to take a stroll around Hollywood. If you ever get the chance to go, don't bother, it's an utter s h i t hole. It reminded me of skegness, what with all of the tacky stores and tattoo parlours etc.  There were a couple of cool things to see, but nothing that really warranted the drive, despite it not being that far.  I noticed something on this pic that had us in tears when we downloaded it..can you spot it? One thing that was worth the effort, was the fact that we got to watcha couple of really good breakdancing crews. I could watch that stuff all day long. i've been a hip hop and b' boying fan since I was about 14, and was pretty handy in thebreakdancing stakes when i was a youth. These guys were incredible though.     |
| #42 12-Dec-2006, 02:33 | ||||
| ||||
| We rolled past Manns Cinese theatre, and quite how they make the whole thing look as glitzy on T.V as they do, is totally beyond me. Don'tget me wrong, the Theatre itself is very impressive,I just can't understand how they can make the turgid surroundings sem glamorous at all. There was plenty of weirdness to be had though, and one guy dressed as Michael jackson stood rock still until you gave him some dough. Then he broke into some superfly MJ moves. This could be a good vocation for someone I used to work with, called Rob Wilkinson.   Shammmoooon!  Hollyweird  Only Dom will get this one! |
| #43 14-Dec-2006, 02:39 | ||||
| ||||
| You remember the first day I was here I told you all about that crazy dude that was going to ride his bike of a cliff. Well it turns out that he did it. Not only did he ride it of a cliff...he rode it of THE cliff to beat all cliffs. The Grand Canyon! Turns out that he's a very experienced skydiver who designs his own high performance canopies (I think that means something to do with parachuting, not a go faster sun shade for the garden!). It was only going to be his 7th ever base jump though, so he needed to get it right. Things went well to start with, but what he hadn't reckoned on was the effect of the bike pulling him down as he tried to make enough space between it and himself to safely open his parachute. He fell 1200 feet before the bike went on its side, started to float from side to side like a feather and he made enough distance on it to deploy his big handkerchief! Below are the pics of the wreckage that's in the local bike shop I was in when the crazy Hispanic dude was planning his stunt. There is literally nothing salvagable from it...not a single useful item.    If you look carefully, you can just see the remains of his ear sticking out of the mush...  |
| #44 14-Dec-2006, 02:50 | ||||
| ||||
| Spent today mainly prepping the bikes for this weekend at Willow Springs. It'll be my 36th birthday on the First practice day, which is the Friday 15th. Happy boithdaaaay tooo meeeeeee! I'm such a good lad, I even brought a pack of sponsors stickers with me to put on the bike, which is, incidentally, a 2003 R6 with 50,000 miles on it!. Uprated front forks, and an Ohlins rear shock. Braided lines and that's about it. It has a full arrow system, but isn't fitted with a power commander, so i don't know how much difference that'll make.      |
| #45 14-Dec-2006, 21:21 | ||||
| ||||
| Quote:
dude, i could have told you that meself! spent an entire day shooting (although mostly it was sitting around being brought food and drink...) to shoot what equated to around 20 seconds worth of on screen. AHA!!! its your birthday tomorrow! er, our time... happy birthday Timbo!  |
| #46 18-Dec-2006, 04:51 | ||||
| ||||
| Holy Shizzle! Just got back from Willow Springs, and when they say it's the fastest road in the west, they really aren't kidding! It is totally unlike any circuit in the Uk. I'll knock up a report over the next day or so, and I have plenty of pics to go with it. Met some very, very cool people, and yanks can most certainly ride motorcycles in circles, not just straight lines. Nicky Hayden isn't a fluke and neither are the others. Today I raced against top AMA supersport 600 riders Jason perez, Jeff tigert, Jeremy Toye (Just back from macau GP) etc and finished in some half decent spots. Woot for the UK!  More later. Otei |
| #48 18-Dec-2006, 21:09 | ||||
| ||||
| Got some interesting pics from the weekend, but thought that you peeps might like to see this. It's a 900 Monster, named "frankenstein". It's ridden by a nice Argentinian lad called Mauro, who incidentally, had heard of the Ducati sporting Club, and the desmodue series. He said that he bought the engine from a guy called Domsk...oh no, wait...he he! He's not been racing long, but seems to be going pretty quickly already, and was telling me all about the intricacies of riding a 160 MPH Ducati monster. Sounded like fun. I'm not too sure of any of the finer details about the bike as I was always running around somewhere or other, but took a few snaps anyway.    |
| #49 18-Dec-2006, 22:18 | ||||
| ||||
| So then, the racing. We set off to do a practice day on the Friday and I must confess that I was bricking it. I was wondering just what I had let myself in for, with tales of modern 600's and AMA riders frequenting the grids, I just didn't want to look a tit. When we arrived we unloaded the pick up and set up the garage. Now the yanks don't have vans to transport stuff like we do (Shandra referred to them as "kidnapper vans", which cracked me up). They either have a pick up truck of varying largeness, or a large pick up and a cool trailer. If they've got plenty of cash, they have a bloody great big wagon that wouldn't look out of place in a BSB paddock. Having signed on and gotten ready for the first practice, it was announced that one of the new riders had spilled oil all the way down the straight and through turn 1. This was exactly what I didn't need for learning the circuit on my first day, that awful feeling of going across the white cement line at speed and hoping the track workers have done their job right!  quite a few racers got out of their leathers and mucked in. I wasn't one of them, lazy git that I am I had been introduced to one of the racers by Amy, called Ken Kramer. Ken also does the new racer school, so I tagged along for a few laps behind him to see what I could learn. The first impression I got was of just how fast and open it is, with little or no reference points to speak of. turn one is down from 6th to 4th, then up to 5th for a long 180 degree right hander. This leads into a nasty little up and downhill section with terrible tarmac and weird cambers. Then it zings onto the back straight that leads into turn 8. Turn 8 is taken flat in 6th and then turns back in on itself, requiring you to go down a couple of gears as you're cranked over and try to aim it in the right direction so that you don't end up running off the track. I came back in slightly intimidated, but hopeful I could learn it quickly. Next session I followed Amy on her CBR 400 and was having a real hard time keeping up with her, even though I was on her R6. She doesn't hang around! After a few sessions though, I started to get the hang of the place and was beginning to enjoy myself. The wind started to get quite blustery, and the place is notorious for catching out the unwary when it starts to get like that.Turn 8 and 9 weren't the sort of corners that you needed to have your front wheel blown from under you either!  Team topanga on Friday practice By the end of the day, I'd managed to get my times down to a 1:35.5, which I was told is very respectable for your first day at the track, so I was pretty happy with that. It was my birthday that day, and as I walked back to the garage later, I strolled in and they were there with a bunch of iced muffins with " happy 36th birthday Tim" written on them. It was a really nice surprise. I got a cool book from Amy about Black holes and time warps, by Kip S thorne. Shandra, Amy's friend had also made me a T shirt. I'd commented to Amy that I'd seen a really cool logo on some webite, and wished I could get a T shirt with the logo on. It turned out that you couldn't. Shandra however, had used her considerable talents to recrate one just from a tiny little logo grabbed from a site. Thanks for that Shandra, you're a legend. Shandra had also been to the Freddie Spencer riding school recently, and brought me and Amy some cool signed gear. Very nice indeed.  We weren't finished yet though apparently, and scooted off to a local Mexican restaurant for a bite to eat. After we'd eaten and partaken of more margeritas (I'll really need to hit the gym when i get back!) the waiters came out, plonked a big Sombrero on my swede and sang happy birthday to me again.   With our faces glowing from the combination of the desert winds and the booze,we then trotted over to the hotel and got some shuteye. Last edited by Otei : 18-Dec-2006 at 22:21. |
| #50 18-Dec-2006, 22:49 | ||||
| ||||
| Saturday official practice. Today I would get to practice with the guys I'd be racing against, which would either be a very good, or a very bad thing, depending on how quick they were. I was reassured that my progress was fine and that I'd be ok. The weather was very, very different to the day before though, and we could actually see some snow on the upper mountains in the distance, such was the reduction in temperature.  Even Wyatt the dog had to wrap up warm. After my first session, I was freezng my ass off, and couldn't get my head around riding the bike. It was clearly ok for riding though, and AMA superhero, Jason Perez proved it to me by coming around the outside of me in the flat out turn 8, with his knee kissing the deck in a chilly display of barely controlled lunacy. I was now extremely demoralised. The chilly conditions didn't get any better, and at one point i went for a pee and nearly had a heart attack as I saw the size of my todger. I also thought I'd lost a knacker, such was the malteseresque nature of them at this freezing point in time. I couldn't lose my balls, I'd be needing them for the next day! I had decided to wait until later in the day to fit a new set of tyres for the race and scrub them in. Sure enough, just as I was getting them swapped over (we only took one set of wheels) the heavens opened and it lashed it down.  After a while it became pretty obvious that there was no way I would be able to scrub the new tyres in and that the morning practice would be my only chance.  I had met a really nice bloke called Dave Moss at the track. dave's an ex pat, originally from Manchester. He now runs his own suspensionn tuning company, called Catalyst Reaction. He's gained alot of respect on the various race paddocks in the U.S, and works bloody hard, driving 60,000 miles a year to track days and race meetings. I wish him all the success in the world, he definitely deserves it.  Dave Moss, hardest working man in the paddock, and the only one in shorts! We scooted off to another Mexican restaurant, but as we were sat down to order, Shandra got a phone call from a young lad that had fallen off and broken his collarbone earlier in the day whilst she was instructing him on his new racer school. (Just to be clear, she didn't instruct him to fall off, he managed that on his own) He had been fixed up by the hospital sooner than she thought, and downed tools and went off to pick him up without a second thought. Me, Amy and Shandra's parner, Chris ordered some nibbles and waited for them to return. Kyle came back sporting a lovely little sling. It turned out that he was in the Marines, and at just over 20 years old, had already been to Fallujah for 7 months, right in the thick of it. Brave lad, never made anything of it either. I hadn't managed to lap as quickly as I had the day before, but then neither had anyone else, such were the conditions. It had been useful just to keep learning the track, but not for much else. Oh yeah, i forgot to add that when we got to the hotel on the Friday night, we thought it was on fire as the L.A fire dept were there in force!  We never found out what was going on, but there was a prom night or something going on, so we figured that one of the girls had broken a nail or had a false eyelash trauma. Last edited by Otei : 18-Dec-2006 at 22:51. |
Linear Mode
