NO MORE CONES!!!!!!!!!!!!
hahaha, ok, just kidding.
Actually Keith and I talked on the subject of shut down and new riders at length this past meet. My suggestion and thoughts are contrary to the beginning of this thread. I think too much emphasis is put on short shut down. As John stated above, as your speeds increase, short shut down comes up fast!
My thoughts/suggestions in reference to new riders is with each licensing pass from 150 up that the rider should be required to take long shut down. Licensing is about control and acclamation with the track. As your speeds increase the feel of the track and the way you need to negotiate the dog leg changes.
One common recurring issue I see happening, myself included, is breaking too much at higher speeds between the traps & short shut down. This sets the rider & the bike up for difficulty negotiating the turn due to the physics of turning a bike under heavy braking.
My thoughts are to encourage the riders increasing their speeds to learn how to negotiate the turn without “heavy” breaking. If they get a better feel for the turn, knowing they need to run it through long shut down anyway, I really feel it will help them as they increase speeds. I think too many new riders that are worried about the turn just try to brake before they hit it rather then learning how to run through it.
If you suddenly find yourself at the speed that won’t allow you to make short shut down (and this speed is different for every racer) and all you’ve practiced is taking short shut down then I feel the odds of having a less then graceful shut down are pretty high. I’m a good example, Darrell is a good example, Walt is a good example. We’ve all had that “oh shit” moment. Walt’s pulled it out more then once, Darrell hit the cones & didn’t go down, I froze on a cone and went down.
Since then Walt has practiced running through long shut down with less brake and has gained more control. Of course now that he’s running in the 240’s he has to negotiate shut down differently again, but we’re talking about new to the track riders here. I talked at length with Darrell prior to this past meet. I’ll do a follow up with him to see how he feels about shut down now and what if anything he’s done to improve his approach.
Granted, racers with a lot of high speed experience and/or road race experience won’t feel the same. However, orientation is best served to assume that the rider is a relative novice at speed.
Take someone like John N. If he were new to our track and had to license up, I really don’t see that there would be any hardship in making him run down long shut down 3 times. After that, if he knew his skills were there, it would be his decision where to shut down. But at least having felt that run down, if he were to loose brakes or run faster where he couldn’t safely use short shut down, he would already be acclimated with long shut down.
Of course the next set of instructions to follow will be why you don’t need to do only 10mph to get OUT of long shut down! But we’ll save that for another thread!
