The Daytona 675, dressed for the track.
OK, if I really knew how to make motorcycle tires last forever, I could earn motorcycle sainthood. For those of us who ride a lot, especially on high-performance bikes, tires are our biggest expense.
I admit: I can’t make tires last forever.
But, after riding a track day at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course this week, I’m pretty sure I left with more rubber on my tires than when I arrived. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but here’s how it happened.
My track day was on Tuesday. On Sunday, the Indycars raced at Mid-Ohio, with local boy Graham Rahal taking a popular win. The track was quiet on the Monday in between. Little to no rain.
The weather was perfect for a day at the track: dry and warm but not the kind of heat and humidity August is capable of in central Ohio. Best of all, through some quirk, very few riders signed up, so the track was uncrowded.
Watching the Indycar race on TV on Sunday, I couldn’t help think of all the rubber being thrown onto the track. I’ve been to a few Indycar races at Mid-Ohio dating back to the 1980s (I was there to witness Porsche’s one win in the series in 1989, when Teo Fabi won the race and some in the local press thought his first name must be “Ted” and wrote it that way). I actually walked on the track after one of those Indycar races and saw the “marbles” left behind — the chunks of rubber that shear off those big, soft, wide slicks. On Monday, I definitely spent some time thinking about what it would be like if I got off the racing line and into those “marbles.” Probably not good, I decided.
Once on the track on Tuesday, I realized the marbles off the racing line were not as bad as I feared but the amount of rubber everywhere was more than I’d imagined. Every time I came in from a session, it looked like my tires had picked up more rubber than had been worn off.
This is rubber my tires picked up from the track, left behind by those massive Indycar slicks that were circulating at much higher speeds just two days before.
Though traction didn’t feel that bad, I’m blaming that rubber for the fact that I was about five seconds a lap slower than I was last fall, the last time I rode at Mid-Ohio. That’s my excuse. It’ll hold up at least until the next time I go to the track, which will hopefully be in September. If I’m still slower then, I’ll need a new excuse.
But no worries. When youth and skill fade, age and treachery compensate with greater creativity in the excuse department.
