dp Safety School at Sears Point (05/22/98)

dp Safety School at Sears Point
05/22/98

It took about 10 hours for us to drive up from Fallbrook. Just to be on the safe side, we left at 11:00a on Wednesday, stayed overnight near Gustine on I-5 and arrived at Sears Point at about 12:00 noon on Thursday. We couldn't pull our trailer into the pits until 4:00p, so we took a walk around the perimeter of the track. 4:00 rolled around and we found out that there is no camping allowed at Sears Point - nada, never (at least for AFM events). That little bit of news put a real cramp in our evening and a $300 dent in our race budget. Finding a motel room in the San Francisco area has always been tough - Memorial Day weekend made it even tougher. We found a room at the Skylark Motel in nearby Novato for $100 a night. Much more in a room than we needed (a Motel 6 would've been fine), but it was a very nice place and included a full kitchen area.

Steve and I signed up for Dennis Pegelow's dp Safety School to learn Sears Point Raceway before the AFM meet there on May 24th. As we learned at Buttonwillow earlier this year, trying to learn a new track through the AFM New Rider's school on Saturday is not the way to go. There simply isn't enough track time before Sunday's races. To their credit, the AFM does put together some very useful information about getting around Sears Point's 12 turns, which proved very helpful as study material before hitting the track on Friday.

Dennis splits the school up into three groups: A, B, and C riders. The 'A' group is for those folks who are track regulars and are looking for more practice time and / or input from the school's instructors. The 'B' group is for experienced racers who may not have been at the track before or need more handholding. The 'C' group is for first-timers who've never been on a track at all. Their time is split between classroom and on-track sessions. Steve and I signed up for the 'B' group and received seven 20 and 30-minute sessions.

First session up we followed Tom Montano to learn the line around the track. We ran the next three sessions on our own, then had Tom follow us around to check our progress. We didn't get any times today, but Tom said we were good enough to hang with the second fastest practice group on Saturday. We ran a couple more sessions after that and called it a day - a very productive day!

The dp Safety School lived up to its billing and gave us exactly what we needed - time to learn a new track and local experts to guide us when we needed it. It was money well spent.

Bob.