Monticello Monday Sucked!!!

I remember pulling into the hot pits for the first time lining up and thinking "holy shit there are a lot of bikes here". Then the siting laps in advanced were slower than the novice pace, yet there was still a red flag.

 

I agree with all that the day was a bit frustrating. Sucks when half of the riders seem to be there for the sole purpose of wadding their bike up....sucks even more when it's obvious a Novice rider has put themselves in the Expert group.

Regardless, the facility is incredible and I'm glad I made the trip.

Thank you to the STT crew for making the best of an otherwise ridiculous day.

 

Guys, it is a reality that track days on weekends and holidays get booked up pretty fast. The obvious suggestion is to offer to your boss to work that holiday (if possible) and swap the time for a weekday off so that you can attend a mid-week track day. They are usually very lightly attended and there is more track time and way fewer crashes.

Just a thought.

 

Oh yea to top it all off I was so irritated with the program that I packed up before the last session and headed for home. On the way home I realized that we forgot to pack up the Honda generator tucked behind the barrier. After sitting in traffic for an hour we turned around and went back to the track to find that someone had liberated the generator for themselves. I asked all around the track officials and nobody saw a thing. So if anyone out there grabbed my generator I sure would like it back. I'll even pay you a $100 reward for being so kind and keeping it safe for me.

 

rubber chicken,

unfortunately if you want to run MMC full monti its only offered once a year so you have to take what they give you.. but personally i prefer tuesday trackdays over mondays or weekends anyday for that exact reason.

bob, that really sucks man i hope you get it back. you should post up on the stt forum asking about that maybe someone will know something.

 

Somebody borrowed my buddies 50' extension cord and kindly took off without giving it back. Guess he figured if we didnt ask for it back it was his

 

Unqualified riders in the advanced group is a common problem. It often seems to stem from the Intermediate group being packed and riders not wanting to be in the "beginner" group. So I group riders are now in A, when they shouldn't be.

I will say NESBA does a good job of policing the A group. It's more work for them, but it works. It would probably be beneficial for other orgs to look at doing this as well.

 

I know this is not feasible for most tracks but when FasTrack rides Autoclub Speedway all riders are assigned a transponder and they group the riders in each class based on lap times. Seemed to work out pretty good.

Lacking that it really is up to the organization to make sure they have enough control riders on hand to police each group and give the control riders authority to re-class riders as they see fit.

 

+1....AMEN Brotha

 

Jennings does this as well. Someone has a stop watch and if you don't make X time, you're moved.

I think people are afraid of being the "bad guy" to a paying customer, but in the long run it makes more people happy. It's quite often that people (both racers and non-racers) are voicing concerns about a track group being too full - both for lack of quality track time and safety.

 

i noticed while at Monti that there was a severe lack of control riders in each group. i counted like 3 CR's in a group of like 50 riders on track.....that seemed a bit reckless

 

How the hell do you let people put themselves into whatever group they think they should be in!?! It is one thing to have a laptime cutoff and tell people to look at it and put themselves in the appropriate group (still a dumb idea), but it is insaine to let them place themselves without any benchmarks/evaluations at all.

 

Can't speak on the other groups but the A group was very rideable so long as the faster rider was patient. I had one real incident in the morning with a slower rider. Most of my issues were with some of these fools trying to jam a pass. Outside of that it was all about being patient. Qualified for a respective group or not, I saw a ton of riders not using their heads when setting up for a pass.

As far as the red flags are concerned, it's not up to any trackday organization to keep your bike upright and on the tarmac for you so, IMHO, if anyone is going to be upset at something be upset at the riders who binned it from siimply riding over their abilities or for trying to win 1st place at a trackday.

All things considered I had a good time and look forward to riding with STT again.

 

Other then first time track day riders, it's pretty subjective. As Eddie has stated the best way to sort them out is use your grid marshal or race/track control to put a watch on riders. Asking a rider about lap times is like talking about dick sizes......

Having alert CR's out obviously helps too, but over booking and overloading a group is recipe for disaster. Shit if there were 70 riders in the advanced group, even if they were all qualified to be in the group is asking for it.

 

I did MMC 4 times this year once with STT and the rest with TPM. All where Mondays or Tuesdays and never had a problem. I The first time i was there with STT it was a tuesday, and was my first trackday and there was far more Control riders than riders in novice. It made for an awesome day. The novice group was easily running intermediate pace. I think mainly because there was maybe 10 riders in the group.

 

"Full" is a very ambigious term and one which isn't always related to the number of bikes on a track. I've ridden "full" days where flow was exellent and we had tons of open track. I have also ridden days (the very next day is some cases) half-full on the same track that were pretty wonky, with lots of clumping up and not a lot of clean laps.

It is noteworthy that the balance of our MMC dates went quite well this season.

 

The other thing i noticed, is that being it is many people first time at MMC and they dont know the track, They should necessarily run the group they usually do at other tracks. I may run an advanced place at say NJMP lightning but never seeing MMC i would never sign up for a advance group.

 

Some riders learn tracks faster than others but a nearly four-mile track is harder than Summit JC. I did VIR Grand once... OMG!

 

+1 That’s a recipe for disaster...

 

+1 on the NESBA advance riding policy. I love riding with NESBA's advance group. Rarely is there ever riders in it that shouldn't be there. They roll really smooth and I have never encountered a problem. I just wish they would return to Talladega. Riding advance class IMO should be a earned right not a click away.