I did my first ever track day at Auto Club Speedway back in February. It was awesome but I was slow. My best lap time of the day was a really very slow 2:18. (New best time: 1:53.) One good thing about starting out slow is it's easy to make improvements, because you're slow everywhere.
In order to go faster I needed a bike that I was less afraid to drop. For safety I needed a leather onesie. (They are technically called 'one piece' suits, but I think it's funnier to call it a onesie.)
So: new to me bike (CBR600RR), some custom parts, and a new leather onesie later, I hit the track again. Things were much better and there's still lots of room for improvement, stuff to work on. So that's good.
22 May was officially a Southern CA Ducati dealer track day. I had to email a guy that works at Ducati to get on the list. There is always a wide range of speeds on manufacturer-sponsored days, because they will bring lots of guys out that wouldn't normally track their fancy 'high performance' import. As such, almost everyone I passed was on an overpriced Italian sportbike. My first track day I think I passed maybe one person, which was humbling.
One issue with the wide range of speeds, especially in the slow group, is the huge disparity in lap times. The range of times in the next faster group was about 10 seconds, so people were running very close lap times and wouldn't hit much traffic. In the slow group, where I live, the range was 25 seconds. That is a big disparity, and it means that the faster guys were sooooo much faster than the slow people that you were always dealing with traffic.
Overall it was a good day.
Link to more pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/casey.farley/FontanaTrackDay22May2011?feat=directlink
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