Billy Ray’s day at the track

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I finally bought a GoPro after many years of avoiding it. I figured that if I’m going to try and get better on the track then it was time to have a look at myself from the outside, and what better bike to do it on than Billy Ray, aka the Victorian Parts Bike, named after Billy Ray Cyrus who was also a big deal back in ’92.

Here’s the video in all it’s unedited glory.

There’s a few things that stuck out like sore thumbs from watching myself like this.

  1. My head isn’t getting anywhere near enough inside the corner, even if I’m trying to get my butt out there and hang off;
  2. At 3:55 it shows how I’m still thinking about using the back brake like I’m on the road, making the whole rear end jump around;
  3. At 4:57 and 6:37 it shows just how stuffed the clutch is as it slips under hard acceleration;
  4. At 6:18 it shows how late I’m setting up for the corner, really only getting myself into position as I’m about to enter the corner;
  5. At 7:22 for one example how early I’m upshifting, partly because I’m nervous about thrashing the already struggling clutch;
  6. At 7:44 it shows the risks of bringing your shiny Ducati out to the track rather than using a cheap, ratty track bike – felt sorry for the poor kid, would have been an expensive day out for the young lad;
  7. At 11:47 as one example it shows how much coasting I’m doing on the brakes, rather than hard acceleration into hard braking like it should be;
  8. Throughout the whole thing the bike barely gets into fifth gear, let alone sixth – the straights at Mallala just aren’t long enough for any bike to stretch its legs in standard road gearing (even this old clunker is geared for around 240kmh top speed, and I’m not going north of 170 even at the end of the long straight here); and
  9. At 6:34, 9:00 and 13:30 you can see the bike lose stability as the exhaust touches down, making for some quite terrifying cornering.

So what to make of it all?

Plenty of technique work to do, which was reinforced when I did a coaching session a couple of weeks after this one at The Bend, two main things – getting my head far more outside the line of the bike well in advance of corners to minimise the lean on the bike and let me carry more corner speed and get what power this bike has to the rear wheel earlier, and not coasting as much – focusing on going full throttle to hard braking at the appropriate braking marker rather than slowly rolling off the throttle, coasting a bit and then braking.

The bike needs three clear changes as well. First up, the clutch needs fixing, which has hopefully now been sorted by replacing the springs (probably the originals) with brand new OEM ones (clutch feels stiffer already just riding it up and down the driveway), raising the ride height to give myself some more ground clearance, which should be pretty easily done by swapping over some suspension linkages (called dog bones) and finally to change the gearing, which I’ve done since this video, changing the sprockets from 15 teeth up front and 45 at the back to 14/46 setup, which should drop the top speed by around 9% (still North of 200kmh) and increase the acceleration by the same amount.

With the chance of one last track day before winter arrives proper, we’ll see if two of the three changes above make a difference, and after that it will be waiting for the suspension bits to arrive to install over winter, ready for some Spring action.