INTERVIEW
PIKES PEAK CHAMPION GREG TRACY
P88
tires off the warmers at the start,
a mile and a half into the run they
will be at the track temperature.
By the time you reach the Picnic
Grounds straightaway, that's
when they start to lose tem-
perature, and a lot of guys crash
there because the front tire has
already lost too much tempera-
ture."
That's about two and a half
miles into the run. Two and a half
miles and the tires have already
seen their best days. Bloody
hell.
"You won't have any heat in
the tires when you get to the top.
But that's all about adapting your
riding to the conditions," Greg
says. "You have to be adaptable.
A lot of road race guys come
to the track and think they are
going to slay it, and they don't
because they are riding under
completely different circum-
stances. The track changes all
the time. There's stuff on the
road in the race that may not
have been there in practice.
Melted snow, haybales, dust,
even spectators. You have to be
ready for it."
One thing this race, and for
that matter all races, have in
common, is the singular goal of
linking all the corners to make a
fast lap time. Pikes is no differ-
ent. At the Colin Edwards Texas
Tornado Boot Camp, the first
thing they teach is corner exit.
"You can't attempt a corner if
you don't know about the exit,"
Edwards once told me. "How fast
is the exit? Where do you pick up
the throttle? What's the camber?
What's on the other side?"
These sentiments are ringing
truer by the day as I approach
the race—they have just been
further hammered home by
Greg.
"To do well, you have to put
all the corners together, make
sure your exit speeds are good,"
Greg says. "Obviously, if you're
on absolute race-winning pace
your braking and corner lines
have to be perfect, so it's no dif-
ferent to any other track."
So what are Greg's favorite
corners to make up some of
those precious few seconds?
"I really like the super high-
speed stuff. I like to push the
edge of the speed. Across the
Track changes are a fact
of life at the PPIHC. Here,
it's nice, around the next
corner, maybe not.
