The race from BikesZone Racing’s perspective in Abhi’s first ever expert class race. Official results and notes will follow.
The whole week even before the race had been a tough running one, running around trying to figure out the transport, what with all the means of getting to Coimbatore booked out due to the long weekend. I just wanted to be there, as it would be my first expert class race. Though Libra Racing and TVS Racing are leagues ahead, I wanted to be there and participate in the race. As it is, getting a ticket to Coimbatore and back on weekends, is a Herculean task, but this time is was just impossible.
So, after asking a few friends about how this could be done and if anyone could suggest anything, Poncho (thanks dude!) got me in touch with Praveen, who got me a driver with a Tata Sumo who would be willing to take off the rear seat and come along. Soup’s gypsy had been the last option if nothing else had panned out, as I didn’t want to put a bike into anyone’s car and make it a “maal gaadi“, if that was possible.
So, once everything was planned, and set to go, Boom called to inform that he’d join in for the weekend. So, after the usual drama of the bike not being ready, and sitting on Yousuf’s head to get it done, I got the bike home and loaded it onto the Sumo. We left the rear seat at home while we headed out. Had an event free drive to Coimbatore, listening to some Kannada film music cassettes that the driver had. Little did we know at the time, that we would have heard the same cassettes some 50 times by the time we came back to Bangalore. Reached Coimbatore late at about 1.30 a.m.
Practice
Next morning, we headed out to the track and after just soaking it in for a while, kitted up for the practice session. For this session, my plan was to go out and scrub the new tyres (got a tyre known as Dunlop Mystery, never tried before) on the bike and see how they performed on track depending on which I would decide to either keep it or change the tyres. I didn’t find the tyre I needed in Bangalore, so I had decided not to take along the tyres from here. It was an open track as the only bikes running were the 111-160cc 4 strokes, both Experts and Novice. But the problem was that it was jetted and tuned for a normally dry and hot Coimbatore. But when we reached the track what we got was cold and cloudy weather. I decided to ignore this and just go out and scrub the tyres not bothering about the tune till the later sessions.
First bunch of laps went fine and I just logged in about 13 laps and came back inside to give the bike a break and went out again. I had a onboard timer, to keep track of the lap times and I was lapping just in the 1 min 29 secs range and had done about 11 laps or so when all hell broke loose, so to speak. Coming out of turn 2 into turn 3, I crashed. Next thing I remember is just waking up in the Sumo in the pits. After asking some dumb questions to Boom I just kind of figured out what happened. I had no immediate memory of the crash.
Luckily for me, the qualifying was postponed to Sunday morning due to rain and that was for me a saving grace. We headed out to Coimbatore and Prashi who happened to call in between spoke to Boom and coordinated with Fabian from Coimbatore to help us out with the best hospital to visit and so on. At the hospital it was a couple of rounds of checkups and a few X-rays. I got to see for the first time, that I looked like Schwarznegger in Terminator 2 (of course without the skin on his robotic head). The doctor (no, I am not referring to Rossi) told me that I was fine and that if I was in town, I should drop in next week again for the follow-up. I was really lucky that Boom came along for the weekend and was really helpful. Else, probably I’d have packed shop and left immediately!
Qualifying
When I landed back at the track in the morning with Boom and the taxi guys, I spoke to quite a few of the guys, who were kind enough to enquire as to how I was. Karthik who is an expert rider with the factory, TVS Racing team, told me what happened, as he was also on track at the time and one of the first at the scene. How I fell is for another time (over a beer), and no I am not going into the gory details about how my bitten tongue bled, the pattern the blood clots on the face made, the black eye or the painful shoulder. We quickly changed the handle bar with the one that we’d picked up from a shop near the hospital and I decided to take it easy in both the qualifying and the race. The qualifying was the only thing that went off incident free all weekend. I came back to the pits and watched the second batch of riders go out and qualify. I finally qualified in 12th of a total of 19 riders with a lap time of 1.30.2 secs.
Race
My target for the race was to just circulate at a comfortable pace and finish it rather than trying to push for results. But, once you are on the bike, I guess all such strategies go out the window. After a normal start, nothing too great, I settled in some place after the start by about the 3rd lap. By lap 4 I was catching another rider and by lap 5 I was on his tail. We were 3 bikes a TVS Apache, Bajaj Pulsar and my Hero Honda CBZ. By lap 5 I was feeling more confident and then going into turn one, I braked really late and just clipped the silencer of the Apache riding guy. I went down and hard. Luckily we’d put quite a bit of distance on the others behind us and so, I could pick the bike and move it off the racing line to the edge. I tried starting it, but the gear lever was bent and was not moving. I asked a kid standing close to the fence for a stone to beat it into shape; I think he got scared of me or something… He just ran way. I decided the bike and I had been beaten, more than we’d have wanted this weekend and decided to call it a day. I just pushed the bike to the marshal’s post, with the help of my driver Krishna who’d seen me crash from the top of the timing tower and had come running and then returned to the pits.
The only thing left now was to get into the photographer mode that I have been in at this track more than once before. I changed into comfortable clothes and headed out to the point from where I wanted to take the snaps along with Boom, Krishna and Shiva. We just watched the race from behind the tyres on the run off area of Turn 1, took snaps, chatted, had a good laugh at how screwed up the weekend was and later after the prize distribution, headed back to Bangalore.