Round 1: The Race Is Only 1% of Racing
May 19, 2024 Adam Miller
Life is so much different now than it was a few short years ago. I’m completely immersed in fatherhood and, though my passion for racing hasn’t waned in the slightest, my ability to wage battle on the racetrack is not what it used to be. The nature of this struggle boils down to 2 things: time and priorities. Every consistent contender in the MRA is, for the most part, a privateer. We scrape together our own money and pay for 99.99% of racing expenses out of pocket. We prep our own bikes either personally, or we pay shops out of pocket to do it. We do our own prep work for race weekends and EVERYTHING that said prep work entails, which can be extensive. We get our stuff to the track. We unload our own gear and set up our own pits. We perform our own repairs in the pits when things inevitably break. Hopefully, at the end of all this effort, you get to the start line of your race and, if you have a good day sprinkled with the odds of good fortune, you have the possibility of getting a good result. Sustaining all this effort while working a full time job and performing a very large chunk of parenting responsibilities is extremely difficult. In the position of a working parent, it’s very hard to find the time to work on the bike, stay in good physical shape, and get in enough track time to remain competitive. It’s also impossible to prioritize maintaining a competitive race program over being a good parent. Faced with the choice of supporting my race program in some way vs. giving my boys the best version of a father that I can be, my boys get the fair end of that bargain every time.
All that being said, life still has to have balance and, in terms of personal interests, racing my motorcycle is still damn near the top of my list. So what’s the direction from here? I’m still a firm believer in the mind, body, machine approach to racing. It works. I still want to win a championship before I hang up my racing leathers; that desire is still as strong as ever. However, my approach now must involve a longer view of racing, and a true adjustment of my mindset. In 2023, I’d already decided that being maniacally goal oriented on winning a championship was untenable. There’s too much that can go wrong to derail that effort to allow it to dominate one’s motivation for racing, not to mention the fact that such a mentality will stifle your growth as a rider. My current goal is to enjoy hard work and continuous growth as a rider both on and off the track. Any success that manifests by working my ass off and continually striving to be better will simply be a biproduct of hard work rather than the goal itself. Ironically, I fully expect this new mindset to make me a better, faster, safer rider, and one who can take more joy in any success that might come about. Enough with the self reflection, there is actually a story to round 1.
I had my sights set on round 1 this year since the end of 2023 and got to work in January by commencing my physical conditioning. I also took stock of everything that needed to be done to the bike to arrive at round 1 ready to ride. The training was and is always fun because physical activity always makes me feel good. I did find, however, that my trajectory from couch potato to something resembling fitness was harder than it’s ever been. I’m getting older. I’m learning that even if I’m not training with high intensity in the off season, I still need to train to maintain. Taking 3 months off isn’t worth the enjoyment of being lazy when you get back to it and have to stop a run after 2 minutes of running up a mild grade.
2024 Lesson 1 : At my current state in life, the best thing to do with fitness is to maintain it year round.
Turning an eye toward the bike, there was a collection of things that needed to be addressed. Each individual item was not big but, added all together and combined with the rest of my life, it was a lot of hard work. I didn’t have the budget to pay a shop for bike work, as much as I’d loved to. My engineering workload meant I wasn’t able to start on the bike until early March. My family responsibilities relegated my work windows to the late hours of the night when I was tired and simply wanted to go to bed. Suffice to say that bike prep was not the center of my world, it was time I had to forcefully carve out and effort I had to push through fatigue to complete. The biggest, most important task was a valve job, so that’s where I started. Every single valve on the engine was out of spec and adjustment was desperately needed. It’s a tedious job with lots of measurement and, I must say, Ducati has the dumbest valve keeper design I’ve ever seen which makes the job 10x harder than it should be. They need to go look at a Japanese valvetrain to see how to poke yoke a valve keeper. It’s not a complicated thing to do. The way the keepers are designed on the Testastretta makes inverted assembly completely possible. Unless you take extreme care during removal to know which way is up or unless, like me, you’re told by the friendly folks at Boulder Motorsports what wear patterns to look for and you meticulously inspect all 32 keepers in the engine to get installation right, you can expect the valves to fall back out of spec within a couple hundred miles. Once again, Boulder Motorsports saved my ass with some very friendly advise and, after taking a month longer than I’d intended, the valves were finally all in spec. I’m still not officially sponsored by Boulder Motorsports, but those guys are the Ducati gurus, maybe in whole country. They regularly point me in the right direction purely out of good will, they lend me tools when they can see that I’m struggling with what I have on hand, they’re extremely friendly folks and, my goodness, they know their way around Ducatis! Top marks as always.
A Tedious Valve Job, Miller Garage, March 2024
Logically, the thing to do in tandem with a valve job is replace the belts. I have a shadetree mechanic trick for swapping timing belts that allows me to do it in a short amount with no special equipment, so that was pretty easy. The tricky part of the belt swap on a Ducati is getting the tension right. It’s literally like tuning a guitar string. You get the engine in the right position, pluck the belt in the right spot, measure the frequency of the sound it makes, adjust the tensioner, and keep doing that until the belt is “in tune”. It’s such a ridiculous process, I can’t help but have a little fun with it.
New Belts, Miller Garage, April 2024
While I was poking around in the valvetrain, I noticed that the airbox was caked full of debris from one of my off-track excursions. Although the debris was effectively glued to a layer of grime, it made no sense for me to risk some coming loose and taking a trip through my engine. I accepted a little scope creep for this task, tore down the airbox and throttle assemblies, and gave everything a very thorough cleaning. By the time it was all done I could have served Lasagne alla Bolognese off the airbox and throttle assemblies.
Clean Intake Is a Happy Intake, Miller Garage, April 2024
For anyone who’s ever heard a Ducati engine, I’m sure it’s not hard to imagine that they vibrate a lot. All this vibration leads to fatigue failure of random brackets throughout the entire bike. I’m lucky enough to be a functionally decent welder and took some time to fix a handful of brackets on the bike.
Welding Broken Brackets, Miller Garage, April 2024
At this point, it was about mid April and the mechanicals of the bike were starting to look pretty good. Given that I have sponsors who are willing to put their company logo on my machine in exchange for some assistance with the overhead expenses of racing, I’ve come to take the aesthetics of my machine a little more seriously than I used to. My bike will never be a show pony, but I feel obliged to make it look decent for my sponsors. With that in mind, I set to work on my fairings. I had to repair numerous cracks, do some filling, sanding and priming and, finally, lay down some paint. This year I chose a single color paint scheme to make blemish coverups a hell of a lot easier than my old 3 tone paint job.
Making the Fairings Look Good, Miller Garage, April 2024
Finally, in the days leading up to round 1 Friday practice, it was on to the finishing touches: header wrap where the exhaust gets close to the belly pan, trimming back the superbike tubes to eliminate interference with the upper fairings, installing fresh EPDM pads for my full tuck chin rest along with some fresh tank grips, applying numbers and decals and, lastly, putting in a motivational cross hair on my windscreen to get me in the spirit of hunting people down.
Finishing Touches, Miller Garage, May 2024
After a home stretch once over involving fresh fluids in every system on the bike, a safety check of critical fasteners, and getting all the important bits safety-wired and secured, the bike was finally ready to go.
2024 Duc Prime Unveiling, Miller Garage, May 2024
The problem was that I’d, once again, taken care of all the prep work while running the clock completely out. I’d done all the right things: my body was as ready as it could be from a few months of training, my childcare situation was sorted, my truck and trailer were roadworthy, I had all the supplies I needed packed and ready, but I’d once again failed to account for the inevitable extenuating circumstances of life. More times than I care to admit, I’ve failed to plan in adequate sleep as part of my overall preparation. Much to my dismay, here I was again contemplating dusting off the cobwebs on a 140 hp animal after nearly 2 years off on a measly 5 hours of sleep on the heels of working 4 consecutive, 18-hour days to take care of the boys, do my job, and get the bike and all supporting gear ready to go. Not great.
In project management there’s an idiom called the “law of pi” which has nothing to do with circles. It loosely asserts that you should take whatever your assumption is about any aspect of project execution: time, budget, complexity, etc., and multiply it by pi to get a more realistic estimate of the true quantity. Most often, it can be applied reasonably well to time estimates. Since even the most conservative project managers tend to be overly optimistic in their assumptions about timelines, it’s a rule that ends up being true more often than not. Given my desperate need to get out of the house and throw a leg over the bike, I was willing to execute my preparation down to the wire in order to go racing during round 1. Moving forward, though, I’m completely tired of this last minute routine. From now on, barring special circumstances, if I’m not completely ready to go several days before I’m going to be riding a motorcycle in anger, I’m not going to ride. I will be following the law of pi religiously to ensure I don’t have to do this crap anymore. The late night grind is not gritty or cool and it doesn’t make me tough or hard, it’s immature and stupid and I’m done doing things that way.
2024 Lesson 2: Barring extenuating circumstances, good, restful sleep must be included in the planning of a race weekend.
After months of work and a final hard push toward the end, I finally knew that I’d be racing in round 1. I packed up the trailer in the late hours of Thursday night, got an indecent amount of sleep, handed our boys off to their favorite caregiver, and headed to High Plains Raceway (HPR) with the Ducati in tow for the first time since 2022. In spite of my fatigue, I was ecstatic to be there and was greeted upon arrival by a mixture of old and new faces. I made it just in time for the rider’s meeting and got some token shit from Glen about something or another. At this point, getting shit from Glen is part of a good trip to HPR. It doesn’t bother me at all and I’m glad he’s the guy in charge keeping people in line. We had a laugh about it and I told him, honestly, that it was good to see him. I’ll never forget that Glen was one of the first responders to my nastiest crash of ‘22 and I’ll summarize by saying that he’s a standup guy and he’s very much in my good graces.
After getting the bike ready to go and getting myself as ready as I was gonna be, it was finally time to ride. My first 2 sessions were about as awful as I expected them to be. I felt extremely uncomfortable in every measure of riding. After lunch, I literally fell asleep in my trailer during the slow group session which was actually a blessing in disguise. After some much needed rest, the end of the day concluded with slowly regaining some feeling for the bike and for going fast in general. I called the day a session early feeling like I was nowhere near where I used to be, but I could probably survive round 1 in Amateur Unlimited (AmU) without embarassing myself. I loaded up my trailer, locked it up, unhitched it, and drove home to be a family man again.
Saturday was a nice break. I needed to show my wife some appreciation on her impromptu Mother’s Day. It ended up being both a nice day to connect with my wife and also gave me the benefit of resting my body and mind. Unfortunately for my race weekend, the shitshow resumed as soon as the boys were in bed that night and I started migrating back toward HPR. A critical lesson I’ve learned is that sleeping at the track the night before a race pays big dividends. It’s a dogmatic, must do practice for me. I had a list of quick-grab items I needed to get from the house and I’d commissioned the assistance of my buddy Ryan to ensure that my fresh race tires were next to my trailer. The intent was to grab the handful of things I’d forgotten on Friday, head to the track as soon as the boys were in bed, swap on the tires so the bike would be 100% ready in the morning, then get 7-8 hours of sleep at the track and be up in time for the rider’s meeting. That was the plan. What actually happened is that I took 3.14 times as long as I’d planned grabbing my “quick” items, drove at 75% of my normal speed toward HPR due to the night time rain, and then realized I’d left my damn trailer keys back at the house when I was about 10 miles away from my exit for HPR. After some choice language at full volume in the privacy of my own vehicle, I reluctantly found the next exit, turned around, and slogged back home to get my keys. About 2-1/2 hours after my senior citizen moment, I was finally parked at carport 6 of HPR. Unfortunately at this point, everything was deathly silent and wrenching on the bike was out of the question. I promptly rolled out my mattress and called it a night. Prioritizing rest, I consciously chose to cut things a little close during morning prep work so that I could get a reasonable amount of sleep. I woke up before the rider’s meeting and hit the ground running, decided to only prep for dry racing, and shuffled tools and parts around while bouncing between my carport and the main canopy for the rider’s meeting. Somehow, I got everything cobbled together in time to eat, hydrate, and gear up before my first practice session. During practice, I could tell that my riding was not good. I wasn’t comfortable, I had no confidence in myself, and I was not using good fundamentals. Assessing the situation for what it was, I knew that my only realistic ambitions should be to keep it wheels down, ride as clean as possible, and if I could find some speed along the way, that would be a nice bonus.
My race schedule was pretty packed. I’d registered for AmU, Middleweight Superbike, and Thunderbike. It resulted in a race-rest-race-rest-race timeline, all before the lunch break. Beyond AmU, I had no expectations about how many races I’d be able to do. To keep my options open, though, after every race I came in, got the tires on the warmers, added fuel, and cooled off. While I was resting I ate, hydrated, and decided if I had the energy for the next race. Both fortunately and unfortunately, I couldn’t help myself. Every time calls for my next race went out, like a dog responding to a whistle, I geared up and got out to pre-grid.
High Plains Raceway North Layout, May 2024
When the AmU race rolled around, I was so out of focus that I gridded up in no man’s land and was shuffled back to the rear of the second wave. It was a fitting start to the season given everything leading up to that point. I was able to get a good launch and checked out from the second wave crowd within two turns. I gave chase to the front pack and reeled in a few riders on the back of it. I think within 1-2 laps I’d passed a small handful of riders on the back of the first wave and could see the midpack but, for whatever reason, even though I’d closed down on them for the first few laps, I never could get close enough to join that fight. Thus, AmU was spent mostly in a lonely P14, which is exactly where I finished. By the laptimes, I was within 4% of podium pace, an average of about 0.3s per turn. Obviously there was room for improvement. My biggest disappointment in the AmU race is that my buddy Ryan and I were supposed to start from the same row and we ended up running really similar laptimes. I’d have quite enjoyed a friendly battle with him. Maybe next time.
Next up was Middleweight Superbike. I had very low expectations of myself for this race. It’s an expert only class and I’m currently at the bottom of the expert license totem pole. It was surprising how close everyone stayed to one another for the first couple of laps. I also surprised myself by holding on to the back of a fast pack for a few laps. Eventually I trailed off that pack, though, and ran my own race. On the plus side, I was starting to get more relaxed on the bike and was also doing a much better job of looking for my markers which resulted in nice, consistent laptimes. This time, I was able to break into the top ten and crossed the checkered flag in P9. Still not fantastic, but it was an improvement.
When Thunderbike was up, I was really starting to feel the fatigue set in, but I had to get out there one last time. I love racing and I wanted to squeeze every ounce of track time out of the weekend that I could. With clouds looming, a thin collection of riders gridded up. I was right next to Dennis Stowers and reasoned that if I could stay in touch with him for just a little while, I could learn a few things. Ofcourse, as soon as the lights went out, he took off and was gone in 3 corners, so that plan didn’t last. What did last, though, was my chase of a podium position. I was absolutely determined to stay in the hunt as long as possible and kept P2 and P3 reasonably close for about 3 laps. I was gaining gobs of time on the brakes into turns 1 and 4, especially 4, but I was losing it back and then some in 2 and 11 where I was painfully slow. Eventually they got far enough in front of me that I lost my carrot and couldn’t maintain the chase. As soon as I realized the podium was probably out of reach, I noticed the sound of some pipes behind me. At first it was just a hint, but at about half race distance, they were starting to sound menacing. I turned the wick back up to maintain position. I could tell by where I was hearing them that I had a power advantage. With a big tankslapper over the crest of 12, though, I knew that my advantage was thinning fast because the rear grip was fading. I maintained a decent pace for 2-3 laps after half race distance in order to conserve some energy without giving up my spot. When I heard the pipes again near the entry of 2 on the penultimate lap, I knew I had to push to defend P4. I unbolted the kitchen sink and threw it at the wall. Fighting through my fatigue and riding my bucking bronco of a bike on worn tires, I turned one of my best laps of the weekend on the last lap of that race and beat Dylan Conner to P4 by 0.6s. It was by far my best race of the weekend and I thoroughly enjoyed the battle with Dylan. I also beat my best lap in AmU by nearly a full second, got to within 2.5% of AmU podium pace (about 0.2s per turn), and I’d done that with a completely worn out body and a fried rear tire. Further, I was 3.5% faster on my last lap of the weekend than my fastest lap of Friday practice. In the end, I don’t feel bad about my progression over 3 short races after being on hiatus for 2 years.
2024 Lesson 3: Don’t forget to enjoy the act of racing.
MRA Round 1, High Plains Raceway, May 2024
On the cool down lap, I was hosed. Even if I’d registered for more races that day, my body was done. I got the tires back on warmers for a controlled cool down, peeled off my leathers, and sat down in my trailer with a huge grin on my face for about 30 minutes before moving a muscle. It had been a great weekend. Not only had I made some solid progression in my riding, I’d done so without crashing, I’d gotten to fully enjoy all the hard work I put in to getting to round 1 at all and, most importantly, I got to catch up with my paddock family. I now have a solid and expansive network of friends and acquaintances in the MRA community. I enjoy racing and I’m competitive, sometimes to a fault, but I keep doing this stuff mainly because I enjoy having fun with my friends. You folks make this sport as enjoyable as it is. I’m planning on doing 2 more rounds this year in hopes of rebuilding myself as a rider so that I can once again be a challenging presence on a raceday, but the motivation to get out to the track and go racing will be primed by a desire to dice it up with my friends on the track and kick it in the paddock afterward. Cheers and, as always, NEVER LIFT!!!!!!
2024 Supporters
