Round 7: Disappointment and Gratitude

September 30, 2022 Adam Miller

Now that we have Franklin home from the NICU our lives are in new baby mode. A typical night: We do our best to fit Franklin’s diaper change/feeding/swaddling/bassinet/bottle washing routine before Emerson’s bedtime. Luckily, Franklin is a team effort. After that it’s Emerson’s turn to go through his own extended bedtime routine for which I’m solely responsible. There’s a 50/50 shot I have to go back to Franklin a second time and rock him back to sleep. Then, I do some rounds through the house to pick up some clutter and start performing what I like to call “fairy tasks”; all those little things that magically get done around the house after everyone is asleep. Before heading to bed, I see on the baby monitor that Emerson is standing up in his crib. What’s one more diaper change before I get to sleep, right? Finally, it’s time for bed. I drag my feet across the house one more time on my way to sweet rest. No sooner does my head touch the pillow than do I hear Franklin fussing for another meal. Sleep denied, here we go again.

The Miller Crew Gettin’ By, September 2022

The preparation for Round 7 has been one of attrition. Balancing the care of Franklin and Emerson has come to dominate our lives. It’s a time of gratitude in our family, but one not conducive at all to club racing. Sleeping in 2-3 hour bursts on a 24 hour schedule that revolves around feeding, washing bottles, and changing diapers saw my physical training, mental focus, and machine preparation go out the window almost immediately following Round 6. To be honest, until about a week before Round 7, I wasn’t even sure that I’d be racing at all. When the time for registration started to approach, I strategically mentioned it to Kori in passing and let it sit for a few days. Like the supportive partner she is, she came around and figured that we’d be able to come up with a way to make it all work logistically, difficult though it was.

Well aware that I was out of championship contention, I decided to take a gamble on a few minor setup changes to the bike. I swapped in some stiffer front springs to address constantly bottoming out my front forks under braking in spite of maxing out preload and dialing in a healthy amount of compression damping. I also looked at data from Round 6, drafted up a gearing chart in excel, and made a sprocket change to help me optimize my drive on the exit of turn 6 where I was losing a chunk of time to Ben and Rick the last time out. For physical preparation, I relied heavily on being in pretty good physical shape from the previous 10 months of exercise routines and focused on trying to get as much sleep as possible. In hindsight that was a fool’s errand as the responsibilities of parenting did not magically absolve the night before the race. I was tired all the time no matter what and was going to have to practice and race that way.

High Plains Raceway Full Course, September 2022

I knew from the first out laps on Friday that it was going to be a tough round. I wasn’t fast on scrub tires and I was really struggling to break under the 2:00.00 barrier even when it felt like I was pushing. It was slightly confusing because Rick and I had done a trackday a few weeks earlier and were happily turning 1:58’s for fun. I figured I was being soft and just needed to dig in and keep pushing. In the pursuit of some confidence I broke one of my rules and swapped on fresh tires for Friday practice. With the change in tires some consistent 1:59’s starting showing up on the lap timer. Using my observed 97% rule, that implied I should have been able to turn 1:55’s during a race so I left well enough alone and went home in time to help out with the kids that evening. Once again, Rick stepped up and helped me get through tech so that I could get home and perform Mr. Mom duties. I owe that guy a lot, he’s been very helpful this year.

After another night of slogging through feeding sessions, bottle washing, and diaper changes, I arrived Saturday morning with a general fatigue that Kori and I have both become accustomed to at this point. My racing mojo had phoned it in but, damnit, I was going to try anyway. In order to save tires and avoid the mistake of cooking my rear as I did in Round 6, I only did one warmup session for just a few fast laps on the previous day’s rear. During the second warmup I swapped on a completely fresh rear for the race and let my body and bike simmer in the pits. When we all gridded up, I was completely Zhen (or maybe just tired?). No nerves at all, not even through red lights staging and then going off to start the race. Unfortunately, I bogged pretty badly off the line and lost 2-3 positions into turn 1. I used a little wisdom from Round 1 and maintained my position through turns 2 and 3 rather than trying to immediately make up lost ground. Duc Prime pointed true on the exit of 3 and drove hard down the straight. Oddly, it took a little longer than usual to close up on Ryan’s Triumph. More on that later. I went deep and hard on the brakes for a late double pass on the entry to 4. Ryan later remarked that he was sure I was going to crash. I took that as a big compliment because, although the bike was dancing all over the place, the situation was under control and the pass felt great from my seat. Even through a full season of racing with other fast Novice riders, all of whom have developed considerably this year, I could still drop an anchor on corner entry when I needed to. That made me feel good. With a little clear track in front of me on the exit of 5, I could see Jesse in front of me and tried to give chase as best I could. Unfortunately I’d lost too much ground in the first 4 turns and I really needed a tow this time out to stay with the front group. True to the theme of this season, I didn’t let up, but it just wasn’t enough; gained a tenth here and there, lost more than that in other places, and watched the gap slowly open up. The race came and went as I ran a nice consistent pace and finished in a lonely P5 from lap 1 until the finish. Although I wasn’t able to fight for the win, I still crossed the line at wide open throttle.

Never Lift, MRA Round 7, High Plains Raceway, September 2022. Photo by Kelly Vernell

I was a little confounded by my lap times in this round until I checked the data after the race. I had decided to make a sprocket change to fix my drive out of turn 6 after struggling in that sector during Round 6. I did improve quite a bit through 6 but inadvertently lopped 5 MPH off my straightaway speed on the big straight and a comparable percentage on every other straight section of race track as well. It was a penny wise dollar foolish change. Racing is always a little like baking a cake. You throw the pilot, machine, mentality, and race prep together as ingredients and hopefully your cake is the best one on race day. As I recall saying to Mike after the race, “I just didn’t have it today”. Aside from a fantastic double pass on lap 1, I didn’t do anything tremendous. I still ended in P5 which is respectable but, obviously, I wanted more and, unfortunately, couldn’t achieve a better result this time out. My mental state (exhausted) and my race prep (objectively incorrect) made for a crappy cake. As the chef, I have to own that.

After the best ride I could muster I finished P5 in the race and fell 2 points shy of completing the championship in 5th. I had a good time chatting with competitors after the race about the year, the race, and the excitement about what happens next. However, after packing everything up and hitting the road, I had a very silent drive back. I couldn’t help but mull over my disappointment.

The Novice GTU class this year was brutal. We had two aliens splash onto the scene in Ben Reichenberger and Rick Guzenski, both of whom remind me alot of Nicholas Koken with their immediate speed from the get go. With Steven Racz and Jesse Kurk we had not one, but two dark horses who blitzed through the field for strong late season challenges. There was the painfully consistent Ryan Gajewski, who leveraged said consistency to deny me 5th in the championship by just 2 points (I’ll never forgive you, Ryan!!!!). We also had Conrad Oliver who, in spite of his final championship standing, showed some serious potential in a few rounds with very fast lap times and strong finishing positions. Then there are Joseph Boone, Jeremy Cox, Dylan Unger, Justin Pacheco, Timothy David, and Matthew Meyer, who are all a stone’s throw away from taking that next step to riding at podium pace.

From Left to Right: The Guzenski Brothers Alex and Rick, Ben Reichenberger, Adam Miller, HPR Round 7, 2022

Fun Fact: The 3 us on the right won every NovU race this year

Some 2022 NovU stats to consider:

• The 4th place NovU championship rider won AmU this year!!!!?!?!? What’s that all about? Congrats, Jesse!

• Lap records have been under threat by this class for the final two rounds

• The top 3 finishers in Round 7 ALL broke a 13 year old lap record

• In Round 7, 9 riders turned lap times under the 2:00.00 barrier

• Normalized to 7 laps, compared to 2021 Round 7, the 2022 P5 finisher would have put it on the box and the top 3 2022 finishers would have beaten last year’s race winner by about 23 seconds

• The top 6 finishers in the championship all completed the season with more than 100 championship points

There’s simply no way this is not one of the most competitive NovU classes the MRA has ever had. We make predictions to embarrass ourselves, but I’ll go for it anyway: someone from this NovU class (I’ll go ahead and lump Koken into this prediction as well since he didn’t really race this year) will win AmU next year and will go on to either seriously challenge or outright win RORU. I won’t flatter myself by including my name in this prediction, but I’ll sure as hell be trying to win as I rise through the ranks as well. Given the phenomenal speed of the top 3 finishers in Round 7, I think it goes without saying that I’ll need to step up my game once again when I put on the white plate next year to stay competitive. A few guys I know also keep telling me I need to get an R6… we’ll see. I’m literally in debt right now because I wanted, desperately, to finish a full season, so I need to take stock of my inventory before any big moves.

At the settling of the dust, my season stats are like this:

• 4 top 5 finishes

• 1 race win

• 6th/44 in the championship

• Top Ducati NovU rider

• Top finisher among riders who completely missed atleast one round

These results in spite of the fact that I missed one round completely due to COVID, I had mechanical issues in another round, and I was riding with a pretty gnarly injury in yet another round. Beyond those misfortunes, I own anywhere else I wasn’t able to perform as well as I’d have liked. Even without the mechanical, or the crash, or the missed round, by Round 7 the 4 riders who crossed the finish line in front of me were riding faster. To include Ryan in the end of year standings, everyone who beat me in the championship was also more consistent. So, yes, I’m disappointed with finishing 6th in the championship, but those results are fair and I can’t complain about them or explain away with bike performance issues or whatever other BS riders normally come up with. This just wasn’t my year to bring home the big prize. As soon as I can find the time and money to mount another serious challenge I will try again. It will be several years before I can attempt a championship run again and, at that time, I’ll have to do it in a class with even faster riders. I’ll also be several years older with reflexes continuing to slow and risk aversion continuing to rise because that’s just how human biology works. Falling short of winning a championship pours fuel on the fire for me, but there exists an inflection point in everyone’s sporting lives when natural abilities fall off enough to drive a death nail into staying at the pointy end of a field of competitors who, relative to the aging among us, get younger and faster every year. I couldn’t help but turn that thought over and over in my head on the way home from Round 7. How many more chances will I get to try this before I’m just not competitive anymore? With a load of bills to pay, a pair of young boys at home in need of some fatherly attention, and a wife who deserves some appreciation and a turn in the extracurricular driver’s seat, the answer is “I really don’t know”.

To bring this all full circle, at the beginning of this season it was my goal to win the championship in the Novice GTU class of the MRA. It was a goal I really poured myself into and, for the first 3 rounds of the season, which included a race win, I was firmly in the hunt to do just that. In spite of some bad luck here and there, and the certainty at the end of the year that the championship was out of reach, I never gave up. With the occasional tempering of reality, I gave it everything I had every lap of every race this year. In that way, the phrase “never lift”, borrowed from the late Micah Harbour and used as the rallying cry for this year’s season, was applied appropriately and fully.

It’s been a long season and I’m tired. I’m looking forward to some downtime with my family, to being able to drill down at work a little, to reading some good books, and to hitting the slopes a few times during the snowy months. I’ll be glad for some rest, but the time off will be a little tainted with restlessness. I’m goal oriented to a fault and I fell shy of my target by a fair margin; I didn’t win the championship, I didn’t even finish in the top 3, I finished in 6th. In spite of all the training, the bike prep, and dabbling in club racing part time for several years to build myself up, it wasn’t enough. That will simultaneously eat at me and compel me forward.

See you next year, folks!

Cheers,

Adam Miller