We returned to our home away from home, Thunderhill East, for AFM Round 7. The last event of the 2019 season was here already! The last eight months had flown by. Each round had taught me a little bit more; braking slightly deeper here, accelerating marginally faster there. I wasn’t winning (consistently), but I was getting closer. Any races that didn’t involve shuffleboarding my bike down the track or shooting off into a tire wall were a win in my book anyways. If I managed to stumble my way into the top three and received a little plastic trophy commemorating my exceptional luck, even better! This was my last chance to make a bid for those spots this season. One last chance to chip away at my PB, get my monthly adrenaline fix, and sacrifice another paycheck to the gods of going in circles real fast before everyone mothballed their bikes and gave their wallets a few months to recover over our temperate “winter” break.

Round 7 also determined the final points standings for the AFM 2019 class championships, if you kept track of those sorts of things. I hadn’t. At least, not until this point. After reorganizing my bookcase to fit my commemorations of exceptional luck from the last round, morbid curiosity got the best of me. I was lucky… but was I lucky enough to grab a spot on the novice class podium?

I was in good spirits after my stellar luck at Sonoma the previous round, but luck wouldn’t help me much this time. AFM Round 6 took us back to good ol’ Thunderhill East, the bread and butter of North Californian superbike racers, and a circuit that many of my competitors had anywhere from tens to thousands of hours of experience on. I stuck with my old tires for practice and decided to focus on my lines and reference points. That didn’t help my times much – I didn’t even crack 2:00 – but it did help me get comfortably reacquainted with the track. By the time Clubman Middleweight rolled around I almost felt like I knew what I was doing.

Conveniently located, AFM Round 5 took place at Sonoma Raceway, just a (relatively) short, one-hour-ish drive from home base. I got home from work Friday afternoon and threw my things together, opting once again to skip the Friday practice. While packing I wondered how smart that was, considering that I’d only ridden Sonoma once two years ago, and that it was by far the most dangerous track on the AFM schedule. Would four practice sessions be enough to learn the track, get up to race pace, and then prevent myself from accidentally yeeting my ZX6R into a concrete barrier while trying to win a little plastic trophy? I guess we’ll find out!

Round 3 had gone well enough, so I (once again) skipped Friday practice and leisurely rolled through the gates of Thunderhill late that night. I hadn’t made any changes to the ZX6R since the previous round; I was trying to avoid making any large adjustments that would require compensation from my end (that and I’m too cheap to buy any fancy race parts). I just wanted to jump right back on the bike and continue where I’d left off last weekend. Saturday morning brought warm weather and ideal practice conditions; my sessions were spent concentrating on improving my lines and consciously trying to pay attention to my reference markers. This was met with mixed success. However, I was feeling quite a bit more consistent by the end of practice and rolled onto the Clubman Middleweight grid with a positive outlook.

I was more than a little apprehensive when I arrived at the gates of Thunderhill for Round 3. I’d opted to skip the Friday practice earlier in the day due to work obligations (turns out gainful employment is pretty critical if you want to race motorcycles), so I was coming in with a bit less seat time than I would have liked. The good news is that I was able to make it to an annual private trackday that was held the previous week, where I spun a few laps on the ZX6R and familiarized myself with the track once more. The bad news is that I was turning rather lukewarm ~2:05s at that event. If I wanted to have a chance at a podium finish, I knew I needed to run sub-2:00s (ideally 1:58s, but let’s not get greedy). Can I pull more than five seconds out of thin air and start hanging with the leaders?! Let’s find out!