You keep going, stopping is absolutely not permitted, even if its your wife or best friend or even if you are a trained paramedic. I almost had a crash at VIR north, someone had crashed i guess braking for turn one, because they were down on the track, i see this as i'm coming into the braking zone so like 150ish mph with no time to slow down anymore than i would normally for entering turn one at full speed, well the two guys in front of me decide to both stop next to the guy and see if his is ok, so now with the crashed rider and bike, and these two guys my 30 foot wide piece of track to turn into is now more like 10 feet, with a major hazard on the outside... ended up squeezing through ok but i really got a look at how dangerous of a situation stopping for your friends can be. Its hard to watch someone crash hard and knowing their hurt just keep going but thats why they have dedicated paramedics on track, if you stop you just delay them getting to the injured person or potentially create another person they will have to attend to.

 

..wow... did anyone say something to the guys that stopped?

 

Yes he was. He had a nice leather suzuki racing jacket on with icon gauntlet gloves, and some motorcycle riding boots...not race material, but good for the street, and a full face helmet that was snell approved. I havent seen any road rash, then again, i havent seen underneath him. I know his whole upperbody, including his hands have no road rash on it whatsoever. He is seriously lucky to be coming out with what he did. He said he remembers everything up to the point of impact - sliding and all - , where he goes blank, and then coming to with me holding him down. He doesnt really remember trying to stand back up though, which was what he tried to do as soon as he came to a stop.

I told him, dude, you arent getting up on that leg, just lay back down.

 

I hope your friend has a speedy recovery.

 

nope... that was the worst track day i've ever been to by far, and although i hate to judge a group by a single day, the just vast number of dangerous things i saw going on and the incompetence of every single employee i dealt with that day made me swear to never subject myself to another team promotion day... it was only one of many many things i saw go on that day that just blew my mind, i told the organizers about that and a couple other extremely dangerous situations they had going on, some they shrugged off, another time they told me i seemed to be the only person that was having a problem with it so i should just ignore it, and another time they basically called me a liar because they didn't see it happen, one of the control riders i approached about a dangerous on track situation actually said "thats not my job" and turned his back to me... and in the morning riders meeting instead of adressing any of the common critical safety issues like stopping in the middle of the track, instead the guy talking spent over half an hour bragging about how he broke all these lap records last month in spain or something

i guess after years of only doing track days with cornerspeed, sport bike track time, and occasionally nesba my standards of safety and how a track day should be run profesionally were just unreasonable

 

happy to hear he faired as well as he did. Ive been in a similar situation followng my buddy on some back roads. We were in cars though which is a bit different. His car started to over steer, which it had never really done before, and if it wasnt for an extra turn lane being there he would have been right into a tree.

Im thinking about getting a bike this summer and its stories like these that really make me want to go right to some sort of school or class before trying to learn from friends at first.
(other then the test to get the license and all that i mean)

 

Sorry to hear about your friend, hope he gets well soon. Ride safe all!

 

err....you're suppose to.

 

glad he was able to attempt to walk away, hope he has a speedy recovery

 

Sucks being the one to watch that shit. Friend of mine did the same exact thing 5 years ago but he died and i was riding behind him. RIP