I first attended Freddie Spencer's school in Las Vegas in early 2001, and wound up going out there five times in '01-'03 for levels 1-3 plus two pro schools. While no one will ever confuse my riding skills with those of Spencer, Nick Ienatsch, Jeff Haney, Dale Kieffer or Ken Hill, I've certainly heard and been exposed to all the main points of what the school teaches multiple times - yet I just got back from Las Vegas after attending another pro school. Why did I go back, after attending five previous schools along with several CSS classes, a Schwantz school in Atlanta, and many Star schools, knowing full well by now that if I can't ride like the top guys it's all me, and not any lack of knowledge and training?
Two major reasons.
One, I felt like I needed a tune-up. I basically hit a floor on lap times in '05, making small improvements here and there but not dropping my times like I want and like I feel I should be able to do. Part of this was mechanical hassles that limited my track time, but much of it was me - I wasn't changing things or doing anything differently, I was fine-tuning a flawed strategy. But I didn't understand how that strategy differed from what I should be doing - what, exactly, should I be doing differently? Frustration led to me take a breather this year - street riding, a handful of track days, and just one race weekend (the last, at Wolliwnottub). But the breather helped, and I approached the last race weekend very differently, without the baggage of lots of past laps running the same times and with new energy and focus on how to approach a new track. This gave me Saturday practice times good enough for a trophy on Sunday in OT, though mechanical hassles associated with an exploding exhaust canister pretty much made Sunday a non-event. It was time to re-examine what I do when I ride around a racetrack, and how I might change my approach next year.
Two, I wanted to have some fun riding a motorcycle around a race track.
Attending Spencer's school for three days is a great bonding experience with more than a dozen other riders who are a lot like you - folks who love to ride bikes, and want to learn how to ride them better - and with some of the best and most knowledgeable riders in the country teaching the class. It's a helluva lot of fun, and all the riding is on nice bikes you don't have to maintain or buy tires for.
It was awesome on both counts.
If you've never been to a Spencer school, I'll wager that every single person who has ever attended will vouch for the huge improvement it will make in your riding. There have been multiple threads on this, here and on other boards, so I won't belabor how valuable the skills you will learn there are to riding faster and more safely - past attendees include many or most of the top AFM riders, and just in the classes I've attended I've ridden with fellow students like Nicky Hayden, John Haner, Clint McBain, and Chris Peris, along with a number of national-level riders from other clubs in the U.S. and Canada. The first school is an epiphany.
But later schools are fantastic as well, because while you'll get all the major points after a few schools, you'll always learn something new and valuable - on the track, from watching videos of yourself and other riders, and from talking in the classroom. In my particular case I was shown several small but significant errors in my body position that limited my ability to steer and load up the front tire, and perhaps most significantly I learned that the strategy I'd been pursuing of increasing my midcorner speeds was starting to work against me by compromising my exit drives. When some of the best and most experienced racers in the country tell you to slow down mid-corner, you listen - and it might have taken me a year of getting smoked out of corners and maybe a couple crashes before I could have sorted that out on my own, if at all.
I also learned some valuable wisdom about front tire tucks and why they happen that I'd never heard before, and of course I was reminded of many important things that I'd heard before but need to keep my attention on - including the need to push it and screw up sometimes, make mistakes so I know where perfection really is. This may well be my single biggest obstacle to going faster. The great thing here is, if you have the skills and approach "screwing up" gently enough, you'll almost certainly save it and just loose some time rather than wad up yourself and your bike without ever knowing why.
My 2 cents: There's so much to learn at the school than you'll never get it all in one class (for instance, this week's class barely touched on "body steering", and focused more on lines and cornering philosophy, braking skills, body positioning, smoothness, causes of crashes, and other topics), but if you can only go to one and your focus is racing, go to a Pro School. You'll get a broad overview of many specific techniques that add up to an epiphany about riding around a racetrack.
If you plan to take two or more, and you definitely should if you can find the time and money, and especially if you aren't already a fairly experienced racer, I'd suggest going to Level 1 first because you'll get more depth on fewer fundamental topics. There won't be so many fast riders in a Level 1 class, and the focus is more on street applications, but the classes are small enough that you'll get plenty of individual attention and it all carries over to track riding if that's your main interest. But either way, you can't go wrong.
And if you've been to a class before but aren't making the progress you want to make, go back and find out why. You will, and you'll come back with a whole new attitude.
Two major reasons.
One, I felt like I needed a tune-up. I basically hit a floor on lap times in '05, making small improvements here and there but not dropping my times like I want and like I feel I should be able to do. Part of this was mechanical hassles that limited my track time, but much of it was me - I wasn't changing things or doing anything differently, I was fine-tuning a flawed strategy. But I didn't understand how that strategy differed from what I should be doing - what, exactly, should I be doing differently? Frustration led to me take a breather this year - street riding, a handful of track days, and just one race weekend (the last, at Wolliwnottub). But the breather helped, and I approached the last race weekend very differently, without the baggage of lots of past laps running the same times and with new energy and focus on how to approach a new track. This gave me Saturday practice times good enough for a trophy on Sunday in OT, though mechanical hassles associated with an exploding exhaust canister pretty much made Sunday a non-event. It was time to re-examine what I do when I ride around a racetrack, and how I might change my approach next year.
Two, I wanted to have some fun riding a motorcycle around a race track.
Attending Spencer's school for three days is a great bonding experience with more than a dozen other riders who are a lot like you - folks who love to ride bikes, and want to learn how to ride them better - and with some of the best and most knowledgeable riders in the country teaching the class. It's a helluva lot of fun, and all the riding is on nice bikes you don't have to maintain or buy tires for.It was awesome on both counts.
If you've never been to a Spencer school, I'll wager that every single person who has ever attended will vouch for the huge improvement it will make in your riding. There have been multiple threads on this, here and on other boards, so I won't belabor how valuable the skills you will learn there are to riding faster and more safely - past attendees include many or most of the top AFM riders, and just in the classes I've attended I've ridden with fellow students like Nicky Hayden, John Haner, Clint McBain, and Chris Peris, along with a number of national-level riders from other clubs in the U.S. and Canada. The first school is an epiphany.
But later schools are fantastic as well, because while you'll get all the major points after a few schools, you'll always learn something new and valuable - on the track, from watching videos of yourself and other riders, and from talking in the classroom. In my particular case I was shown several small but significant errors in my body position that limited my ability to steer and load up the front tire, and perhaps most significantly I learned that the strategy I'd been pursuing of increasing my midcorner speeds was starting to work against me by compromising my exit drives. When some of the best and most experienced racers in the country tell you to slow down mid-corner, you listen - and it might have taken me a year of getting smoked out of corners and maybe a couple crashes before I could have sorted that out on my own, if at all.
I also learned some valuable wisdom about front tire tucks and why they happen that I'd never heard before, and of course I was reminded of many important things that I'd heard before but need to keep my attention on - including the need to push it and screw up sometimes, make mistakes so I know where perfection really is. This may well be my single biggest obstacle to going faster. The great thing here is, if you have the skills and approach "screwing up" gently enough, you'll almost certainly save it and just loose some time rather than wad up yourself and your bike without ever knowing why.
My 2 cents: There's so much to learn at the school than you'll never get it all in one class (for instance, this week's class barely touched on "body steering", and focused more on lines and cornering philosophy, braking skills, body positioning, smoothness, causes of crashes, and other topics), but if you can only go to one and your focus is racing, go to a Pro School. You'll get a broad overview of many specific techniques that add up to an epiphany about riding around a racetrack.
If you plan to take two or more, and you definitely should if you can find the time and money, and especially if you aren't already a fairly experienced racer, I'd suggest going to Level 1 first because you'll get more depth on fewer fundamental topics. There won't be so many fast riders in a Level 1 class, and the focus is more on street applications, but the classes are small enough that you'll get plenty of individual attention and it all carries over to track riding if that's your main interest. But either way, you can't go wrong.
And if you've been to a class before but aren't making the progress you want to make, go back and find out why. You will, and you'll come back with a whole new attitude.
Last edited:
:shh
