Hubris

Hubris

Jeff Hughes

Turn two is supposed to be the hard one. Every lap, flying hard up the hill off the long front straight, the wide pavement and that very same climbing elevation serving to soften the edge off of turn one, you’re cooking. Carrying lots of corner speed and winding on lots of throttle and your heart hammering with the rush. Rising into the sky, your mind is already fixed somewhere beyond your vision. There over the hump of the hill after the landscape has flattened, lies turn two, soft and beckoning. You know, having done it countless times before, that you’ve got to check your speed more than you want, more than feels right. Because the exit of two tightens, almost imperceptibly at first, but then with a flash of urgency. Like most decreasing-radius turns, the curling pavement of the hard right-hander disappears sooner than feels natural. If you’re carrying too much speed into two, you’ll blow the entrance to turn three.

So it’s only natural that after getting through that sequence you relax a bit. The downhill esses which follow aren’t terribly technical. You just follow your lines as you wind up more speed on the descent. Your head is already wrapped around turn five, another few hundred feet in the distance, with maybe even a thought or two already intruding about the quick six-seven combo at the end of the finger beyond, and the long, scary-fast backstretch which follows.

As the third session starts on this July day the Georgia sun is already high in the sky and the early-morning comfort is quickly giving way to serious heat and humidity. Road Atlanta can be a hot place in the summertime. As I zip up, with trickles of sweat already running down my arms and back, my hands clammy under the Held gloves, I’m thinking the track might get greasy this afternoon, with tires quickly going off in the heat. I’ve got to watch that, especially since I’ve got yet another track day scheduled here tomorrow. And tomorrow – the advanced-only session - is the day I really expect to push the pace. Today is just a warm-up, a day to have some fun and get reacquainted with one of my favorite racetracks.

The first lap of the session is easy, of course, just getting heat back into the tires. As I hook turn seven and head back down the long back straight I marvel again at the changes along that section. The old Gravity Cavity – that suspension-draining, stomach-sucking black hole of American racetracks - is gone, replaced with a double-set of ninety-degree turns. I miss the old roller-coaster feel of Gravity Cavity, but the new turns are certainly more demanding, more technical. As it is with most things, you get back something with everything you give away. The new layout is still way cool.

Turn twelve, my favorite, remains the way it always has. You go firing hard up the hill, blind to what’s on the other side, running on hope and belief. Then there’s that flashing transition when you’re flung over the crest and suddenly the pavement is falling away from you and your suspension has extended and the bike has gone all light and the pavement is curling hard to the right and you’re pressing, pressing. And in that moment the hot, floating exultation wrapping around you is like nothing else and you suddenly remember why you’re here and why you do this.

Starting my second lap, I begin to push some speed. Not a full-on press, but probably not more than a click or two down. My pace still feels relaxed, but now there’s a bit of an edge to it.

Up the hill out of turn one I’m mindful of that turn two-three trap and I work my way carefully through there. It’s actually pretty easy right now, with my speed still building in a slow crescendo, still a few ticks down. It’ll be harder in a lap or two, when the prelude is over and the tires are warm and there are nothing but hot laps, done as quickly as one can. You hate to give up speed then.

Into the esses, first a left, easy, then pulling the bike back upright and hard over onto its right side. Ahead, down the hill, through the tunnel of vision clamped around me by the vortex of speed, I can see the black top of the pavement tinged in orange, runoff from the red Georgia clay. I’m thinking I need to adjust my line ever so slightly because of it, the fine red dust a mild impediment to the exemplary traction this track offers. There’s plenty of space, and shifting over a few inches won’t affect my entrance into five.

There in that downhill right-hander I’m half aware that my toe-slider, even with my boots tucked in hard and tight, is pressing on the ground, trailing invisibly-tiny fibers of ground-off plastic behind me. At the between-sessions break I had already begun worrying about that, having started with a fresh set of sliders - but having no more and knowing they would have to last two full days.

Mostly, I’m thinking about turn five and that line I’m aiming to change. And maybe, just maybe, a little bit about why this morning, on the subtlest of levels, doesn’t feel quite as connected and grooved as it usually does.

Then, with as little drama as it takes to say it, I’m down. Just like that, without any warning, just that quick. I’ve got an instant headache from where my helmet has smacked down and my right ankle hurts from the weight of something hitting it and my vision is but a blur of color and motion as I tumble along the ground. It takes a fraction of a second for all these things to coalesce into the realization – one of the most surreal, disbelieving moments I’ve ever felt – that I’ve crashed.

This is not happening…

I could have guessed it, of course. I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t want to. Crashing was, well, beyond the pale. Something that happened to other people – poor bastards. Never to me.

In retrospect, looking back at the warnings I had received along the way, there was one particular shot across the bow, an especially stern rebuke, if I only I had had the wisdom to see it. At Mid-Ohio, eleven months earlier, on another double-set of track days, I had ridden the hardest and fastest I ever had. It was one of those times when everything seemed to come together with amazing alacrity, a time when it seemed I could do no wrong. A couple of days to feed the ego.

It never occurred to me that, quite apart from the polished display of riding skills I thought I was exhibiting during those two days, I was in fact dancing around the edges of conceit and vanity. It never occurred to me that I had gotten to a place of illusion, that I was peering into an abyss I didn’t even recognize, that I had ventured to a place of implacable, remorseless odds. It didn’t occur to me in that moment when my gear shift lever touched down in 13 and snicked up into a false neutral, or when the rear end broke loose on the long, sweeping turn one - that maybe, just maybe, I was pushing a little too hard.

It never occurred to me that I was a crash waiting to happen.

When we look at this sport of ours we tend to think of new and inexperienced riders as the ones most at risk and the ones most likely to be involved in an incident. And, indeed, statistically that's true. But sometimes things happen even to riders of long experience. Sometimes that's just the long odds of the sport finally catching up with us. But sometimes it's because a rider keeps pushing beyond what is prudent – first just a little bit, but then more and more - believing himself infallible, until the inevitable harsh reminder that we’re all subject to the same laws of physics and the same vicissitudes of chance. None of us are exceptions.

It’s a progression a lot of us end up going through. Somewhere after our long apprenticeship in the sport something changes. We come back from a ride one day to the realization that that fast rider we’ve long admired is no longer some abstraction – we are that fast rider. And so we start adding on track days like they’re pieces of candy, tokens to our growing addiction. We go hard-charging with our buddies on the street, getting faster and faster all the time. And all the while we revel in that sense of invincibility that comes from doing something long and well.

And then the worm turns, like it always does.

Most of us aren’t quite as good as our fantasies would sometimes have us believe. These days, I try and remember that.