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Attended California Superbike School on my Suzuki V-Strom 650

25th February 2024, 12:35 by Utkarsh Chaudhary

The sump guard as well as the side stand extender was also scraped. It's a weird feeling. But exciting and fun nonetheless.

BHPian shyamg28 recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

My 2 cents on the event, learnings, philosophy and life.

I was nervous heading into this. Needed continuous reminders that I'm in this for me and me alone.

My aim is to be a better, more self-aware and more responsible rider. Attending a school by itself, isn't the means to achieve that. Like every learning in life, you need to continually retrospect and introspect. If you don't practice what you've learnt, there's zero purpose to the learning itself, except in allowing one to participate in highly intellectual conversations as a "know-it-all" haha!

That out of the way, why was I nervous? This was a gift from my wife. Whatever said, it's a large sum of money. Put in perspective, it's not. We happily spent 10L on a motorcycle. 1/10th of that is on learning how to ride, why that's a steal deal, isn't it? But the mind is a strange place. It doesn't always have the perspective one needs at the moment. With that playing at the back of my mind, I was constantly thinking of "maximizing" my learnings.

"Make the most of this opportunity".

Couple of things helped me relax a bit.

As I left to ride down to Chennai, my wife said, "Forget about the money, you just have a good time and return home safe and sound. Don't think about the money. We'll do it all over again if needed." That did relax me quite a bit.

On day 2, I recall mentioning to Deepak and Sujai that I feel my learnings, and therefore application, was relatively slow. And Deepak said something that helped immensely - on his first outing, things were just going by, but 20 days later, he was able to realize the gains. Things were starting to make more sense. The application was getting better.

I headed down to Chennai on the 25th of Jan. Early morning start, reaching by 10am. Deepak had recommended that I get a good amount of sleep the night before the 26th, as things can get quite tiring, which they did. I had a massive headache by the end of Day 1.

The school is run extremely efficiently. A brief on the schedule for Levels 1,2,3.

Day 1 - reach by 6.30, registration takes place, where you receive your batch color and number, along with stickers and a Level 1 booklet, with all the exercises for the day in it. I was Yellow 22.

Next, Gear check - Leathers are not mandatory, but recommended. While CSS themselves do not have an official rental vendor, there are plenty of them that can be contacted for this purpose, who can hand deliver leather suits, gloves and boots. A rough estimate I was provided was INR 3500/day. Just a leather suit would be about INR 2500/day. The condition of the leathers is suspect more often than not, as I'm given to understand. I decided to ride in my own textile riding jacket and pants, purely because I felt that would keep me most comfortable, allowing me to soak in the learnings, rather than focusing on a weird fitting leather. To each his own.

You're then ushered toward breakfast, which is a decent buffet. Class 1 for the day is all batches together in a large air-conditioned classroom.

You are made to understand the 1st drill, the why of it (very important) and then each batch gears up to head out. For us, it was the White batch heading out first, followed by the Yellow, and lastly, the Green.

As the White batch returns after spending 20 minutes out on the track doing the drill, their coaches return first, and get into a briefing area (each coach has 3 coachees under them from each batch). The riders then head straight towards the briefing area to hear from their coaches what they did well, where they can improve, etc.

Meanwhile, the Yellow batch lines up and gets ready to head out on the track. This is the tricky bit - while each batch does 5 drills in the course of a day, the coaches end up doing 15 Last I checked, we were averaging ~100kms per day. That implies, the coaches were doing ~300kms each day, at seriously high speeds. Goodness!

The White batch heads to a classroom to learn about the next drill. As the Yellow batch returns, they head to their coach briefing, while the Green group lines up for their time out on the track.

And this is how the day progresses, with a total of 5 drills each day.

Day 2 - we're asked to come early for the Steering Drill. Followed by breakfast, and then, same as what you read above. 5 drills for the day.

Day 3 - similar as Day 2, except that at the end, there's a certification ceremony, followed by a group photoshoot out on the main straight.

E.F.F.I.C.I.E.N.T!

The other important bit is that they keep an assortment of fruits, lemon juice and water for consumption, throughout the day. This was seriously a game-changer for me. Although the weather was mostly excellent, I don't think I could've survived the 3 days without the refreshments, given my current fitness level. In fact, when I got back home on Monday, I recall feeling exhausted and passing out for a good 5 hours in the evening, waking up for some dinner, and then passing out again for the next 8 hours. Highly recommended - get fit, stay fit.

A few notes on the V Strom

it held up pretty damn well! It can lean, it can go decently fast too. And keeps you comfortable as hell - even out on the track.

The drills and my relative application of them ensured that the entire tyre width was used up, with even the edges becoming rounded. It is a 150/70 rear tyre.

I had similar thoughts as Sujai - I wanted to learn on my motorcycle, and importantly, I wanted to stay onto ADVs for a while longer. So it made most sense to learn, on my ADV.

The relatively long suspension travel actually is a big-time deterrent, especially with some of the body positioning drills. In particular, I recall on Day 3, I used the footpegs to move my butt across - wrong move - wrong wrong move - the handlebar wobbled quite a bit but luckily, I was able to throttle it out to keep it steady. In addition, the footpegs are relatively low as well. I scraped them on Day 1 (which actually shows poor application). The sump guard as well as the side stand extender was also scraped. It's a weird feeling. But exciting and fun nonetheless.

I made zero changes to the motorcycle. I could've reduced weight by removing a host of things - the rear side bag stays, sump guard, mirrors, visor, aux lights, etc. I "chose" to let them remain. Ok, I was probably just lazy. Regardless, like I said, I was nervous and didn't want my focus to waver too much from the essence, which was to learn.

The only change I did make was to ensure I replaced my front tyre. The previous one had about 3-4k kms left. Decided to let go of them.

Like Sujai said, our pics did look like we were out on a long tour and happened to land on the track. We tried our best!

I've probably rambled long enough already. One final thought I had about cornering - while one of the aims of the school is to learn how to corner well, the one common theme remained for me - how can you keep your bike as stable and straight as possible? Essentially, the lesser your lean, the more stable you are, therefore, the faster you can go! Sounds obvious no?

Lastly, a big big thank you to Sujai and Deepak for allowing me to keep their company for the 3 days. I also bugged Deepak a lot before the event with many queries lol. And Sujai, who was left with me in Yellow company, thank you for your patience!

P.S. On a lighter note, Sujai has no idea he rides an ADV. Every single time that he started behind me, he overtook me in about a minute, making me look like I was at a standstill! Probably start a petition to change his name to CrazyRider?

And Deepak - NO, I'm not getting a supersport.

Some coffee on the way to Chennai.