| On the infinite lightness of being and an ex500 at the track |
[Aug. 4th, 2008|02:24 pm] |
I took the crappiest bike I have ever owned to Buttonwillow on sunday. It was also one of the wildest experiences at the track I have had.
My ex500 is a crappy bike from 1989 that I picked up for $900 on craigslist to get me back and forth to work. Given that I don't really do much big-bike track-days at this point, I don't have a dedicated big racebike, so I decided to take the ex500 to Buttonwillow on a lark.
Now, given that this was an already 'bargain' style bike and also given that it is from 1989 the engine and suspension technology is not what you would call 'top-tier'. Indeed, every bit of an ex500 is as far away as you can get from that spectrum of the motorcycle world. The brakes are soft and pull somewhat like you would expect for a single disc setup. The rear brake is not one to bother with on the track since it is an old style drum, with the rear disc not being introduced until the 90's models. For the suspension on the bike it has tiny 26mm front forks with absolutely the squishiest compliance from them you could hope for. Under heavy braking (which is using the term loosely), the forks come close to bottoming out. Further on the suspension, rather than 'soak' up road/pavement it more glides the front wheel over bumps and if you're lucky actually makes it back to the pavement by the next bump. With a series of surface irregularities it quickly goes from 'gliding' to simply floating the front wheel in front of you, as though moved against gravity and physics in general. The dark magics at play when this happens lead to a feeling of unease when on the track. Other bikes I have ridden before contained a piss-poor suspension setup, but they were positively beautiful compared to what the ex500 can do.
Further still the ergonomics and handling of the bike itself beyond the suspension and braking are such that the bike seems to actively work against what you want it to do. Looking to push it into a corner? No thanks the bike says and struggles against you. To get it through a turn requires a bit of wrangling and gumption. Every piece of the bike seems to actively resist how you would like it to actually behave. Combined together, the ex500 is by far the poorest motorcycle I have ever ridden at the track and in general far outstrips a bike such as the sv650 in this regard. That some of these motorcycles are actively raced amazes one to no end.
That said, the ex500 was by far one of the funniest riding experiences at the track you could possibly have. Once the 'Holy crap is this bike going to actually stop? Wow, am I actually going to be able to make it through this turn with the suspension bouncing like a two-year-old after drinking a Slurpee?' Incredibly enough, the answer for the day seemed to be yes!
In the B group there was an even mix of GSXR 600's, CBR600's and a few R6 bikes as well. Several of the riders were going truly well and pulling paces that should have moved up to the A group with race style paces. A few others were going well enough and managed some decent lap times. It was those that the ex500 would stalk. Given that the GSXR's have more than twice the literal horsepower of the 'noble' ex500 the straights on the track were a foregone conclusion. The ex500 nearly always stayed in top gears to make it around the track, while the GSXR's were likely zooming past on the straights in 3rd gear or so. Given this it was the corners where the little Kawasaki needed to shine. Once the entire idea of the bike barely making braking points and the entire chassis fighting against actually making a decent turn, was put out of mind, things became something incredible.
Within the first or second corners on Buttonwillow off of the long straightway, the overpowered GSXR's were reeled in quickly. Through the highside corner, or one of the more harrowing turns on the track suddenly the ex500 was nipping at the rear wheels of the same GSXR's that passed at about twice the speed coming out of the straight. What was this? How could it be? Even given that I, the rider, was extremely skittish still throughout the day, the bike was managing to tug at the GSXR's tails. It railed through sunrise corner and riverside, while the GSXR's passed at an even faster pace.... and were then quickly pulled back in at the AMA corner. More incredibly still, many of the B group riders were able to be out-braked by the crummy binders on the Little Kawi That Could.
At the end of the day, while no lap records had been broken on the ex500, neither a budget or leg were, either. It was a cheap way to make it around the track and all in all I can most safely say.................... it was the first and last time the ex500 will ever see the track :P |
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| Worst race-weekend, ever! |
[Jul. 13th, 2008|07:18 pm] |
Well, that was no fun. First on saturday my friend and myself got to the track late (like 1pm) and practice was okay. The turnout for practice was pretty low (like ten people). That was no good. It was decent practice time, though.
I did a couple sessions and then got off the track. Looking into the distance across the valley to one of the hills there were a bunch of heavy clouds and suddenly.. lightning! Looking closer at the clouds they were hanging low and below them was dark and foggy looking... in other words, rain!
I knew from the direction of the wind that this was all going to hit us in about a half hour so I yelled to everyone to get on the track quickly or we were going to be out of track time for the rest of the day. We got about 20-25 minutes in and I got off the track, tired. By this point the cloud front had moved over us. About a minute after I got off the track the rain started to sprinkle and then about another minute later the full force of the storm hit like the impact of a bullet-train. The storm began to pound the track. Within only a few seconds after the start I was soaked to the bone as though a great faucet had opened above us. The track quickly went from a dry desert to a turbulent river. All of our gear that was out in the open quickly became drenched. Anything that wasn't covered was engulfed in a torrent of water down the track that threatened to pull anything not tied down into the flow.
It was about this time that things became a little worrying for the rest of the weekend. The storm hit a little after 3pm. It lasted around 15-20 minutes, but during this time dumped at least 4 inches of rain on us. They say the desert gets little water and in my experience this is certainly true. The trouble seems to be that when it rains, it rains big! A hoped small shower turned out to be a bigger problem that we could have imagined. Looking out on the track there were many turned coated with a huge helping of mud and silt. It did not look to be tremendous, but given that most racers are on slicks, would not be ride-able without cleaning the track. Practice of course stopped after this happened and everyone went for food and to the motels.
What was neat leaving the track was that while it had only been an hour since the rains, all of the desert had come to life. The small, scrub looking bushes that are ever present all bloomed into tiny white bundles of flowers. The Joshua tree's which normally look like little desert palm-trees turned from brown and green un-interesting lumps into sprigs of white flowers. It was a fairly magical occurrence to witness, the desert going from brown to white in nearly a blink of an eye. It makes sense that this would be the way, given that the desert nearly never sees rain, but awe inspiring to see in person.
The next morning waking up, we weren't sure of what the day would hold since after we left the track it rained more and nearly as hard as the first rain. Driving from the Motel with Yasuyo, one of the people I race with, I received a call from a friend still at the track. The race had been canceled. Not only had I only gotten three sessions of practice, but the entire weekend was called off. Getting to the track itself made sense. There were several people out trying to sweep up the track, along with the track owner blowing the track free of dust. After walking the course it was obvious to see why things were called off.
There were still patches of dirt all over that were not going to come up without hours of effort and even still there was plenty of silt in places it should not be. Rather than wait and hope to practice at least, we left the track. While un-satisfied in terms of racing, it was still an interesting experience to see the two sides of what nature can do, a duality of sorts: the life that can be seen, but the ends that can be brought when it's force is shown. |
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| Documentation is a good thing, k, thx! |
[Jun. 30th, 2008|02:30 pm] |
I create websites in a small framework I create on top of web.py, a python web 'anti-framework'. It's an incredible tool.. very light-weight and easy to script with it because it behaves exactly like any other python scripting, unlike Django or pylons.
The problem with web.py is that the author (Aaron Swartz) didn't apparently learn back when he was learning to program, that documentation is key to success. I have known the documentation is fairly lacking since I started using the project, but just ran up against an issue that was so maddening that I had to vent about it.
There is a class in web.py called Forms which allows you to easily script forms and regex validation for them, etc. The forms can include default values defined with 'value = "Blah"'. Given a common web task, to have default values in forms after someone submits variables via the web, or reads stuff in from a database, etc. the use of a default value for form textboxes and similar becomes quite necessary. The problem that I ran across was that I needed to fill some of the text entries via variable input to the function that defined the GET for a sign-up page. Looking through the documentation for web.py Forms didn't net anything scripted for this purpose. Looking through additional links for documentation turned up nothing as well.
After looking through about ten pages of mailing-list entries for 'forms' I happened upon a mostly un-related posting here: http://groups.google.com/group/webpy/browse_thread/thread/6073e43e57d51f24/5a4b661d4b506846?lnk=gst&q=form+value#5a4b661d4b506846
In the post was a suggestion for the use of .fill(). This worked great and was exactly what I needed. The problem is that this function was noted NOWHERE AT ALL IN THE DOCUMENTATION... literally nowhere. It took pages worth of randomly happening upon this mailing-list post to solve my issue.
After this I am going to e-mail the author and suggest having the community help with the documentation if he doesn't have the time, because this was just inane. |
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