Monday, April 27, 2009

First Day at ORP

Saturday I was at the newly opened Oregon Raceway Park. The track is more construction zone than finished product. The in-field is dirt, the last 3 miles of road leading to the track is dirt, there's no power, no water. In the afternoon when the wind and dust kicked up the visibility dropped to zero. A few sessions were cut short and I called it a day around 2pm.

But the track surface itself was in place. And early in the day the weather was nearly perfect. Here's a video of one of the early laps:

It definitely has some interesting sections. Lots of blind areas where you have to remember where the track went last lap and hope it hasn't moved since. Once they sort out dirt control (grass in-field, added curbing) it should be a great track.

5 comments:

Dave Bacon said...

Is that from your perspective?

TJ said...

Yes. The camera lens is mounted in the nose of my bike and the microphone is on the dash.

Ray and Susan said...

Spose they'd let me and ol' Wrex out there? Looks like fun!

Amma said...

That video made me a little sick in the stomach! But I guess that is the point of the whole thing!How fast were you going? Were there a lot of people on the track at the same time? Amma

TJ said...

ORP seems to be a pretty slow track. My top speed for the day was 92mph. In that video it was probably in the mid 80s. ... I'd rather have a track with turns than fast straight sections anyway.

There were about 60 bikes on the track at a time. That's more than I'd like. Usually 35-40 would be "full" for a track that size.