Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Drifting on Four Wheels is Fine but How About on Two

Until I saw this video featuring Mark Marquez, I really didn't grok how much of a slide is happening in GP racing because the racing is incredibly fast and the riders are necessarily unbelievably smooth.  From the video, I see he's drifting hard and so eloquently.




Lotho said once after some GP work on a track that he was ok with sliding one wheel but not both of them so that was when he decided, ok, no GP racing for me and that was it; he walked away from it.  I'm not willing to voluntarily let either wheel slide so he was already way ahead of my race.

This is all out there in a world of such immediate and unbelievable danger but ... wtf ... live fast and die young.  I'm glad I didn't but it is exciting, isn't it.

Wind in the face.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was never at even club level racing. The Sweeney kids became quite avid club racers in the 600cc Superstock AMA class.
I threw my FZR away lowsiding twice trying to slide that bike.

Unknown said...

That's interesting about the Sweeney kids since I didn't have much contact in that time as that was most likely during the Army period.

I didn't know you had ever dropped the FZR and kind of thought of it as a charmed bike which never goes down.

Anonymous said...

It was a beast. I never hurt it lowsiding but did have to replace the body panels.

Unknown said...

It seemed like it must have been close to the perfect high-speed motorcycle and that must have been some prime riding

Anonymous said...

At the time I thought it was.
Now they have track ready bikes that are street legal

Unknown said...

That seems like it makes things too easy. When Doc built his Edgewater car, I don't even know how long it took him but he did that rather than buying it somewhere and that I see as much cooler.