THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2025 – Load In Day
Loading day, Thursday, was pretty uneventful. My crew chief, Carbon, and his wife, Jessica, who also provided transport, met me at the registration window so that we could pick up our credentials. The rest of our team, Sam and Paul, would be arriving later that afternoon.
Carbon is pretty well known around the MotoAmerica paddock and also well-liked. He was able to pull some strings and get us a pit upgrade, so we got to set up right in the thick of it. Surrounded by a packed paddock full of factory racing team rigs, big trailers, RVs, and a bunch of Privateer canopies like ours.
We spent the day setting up our Pit and prepping the bike. Of course, I also had to take my MotoAmerica Headshots and attend the mandatory riders’ meeting.
By now, it should be no surprise that the day didn’t go as smoothly as planned, which seems to just be my lot in life. We spent – make that wasted – over an hour looking for a small aluminum spacer I dropped somewhere into the front compartment of the motorcycle. We had been combing through every nook and cranny of the bike, from every angle, searching for it until we all developed migraines. Paul finally showed up, and he helped us look as well. Finally, about five minutes before Sam showed up, Carbon found it. Yes, it was incredibly frustrating, but really just one more comical story in this wild adventure we were on.
For the past week and a half, I had been obsessively watching weather predictions for Braselton, GA. I had several forecast apps on my phone, including a live Doppler radar app. Depending on which app I was using, and when I was looking at it, there seemed to be somewhere between a 0-100% chance it would rain! I have ridden my street bikes in the rain before, but I’ve never raced in it. I hoped to eventually have the opportunity to challenge myself and learn how to compete in the rain, but definitely not on my first MotoAmerica round of the season! I had been overwhelmed with nervousness about the likelihood that a rain race was my destiny for this weekend, and I would just have to suck it up, adapt, and overcome!
So, doing what we could to prepare for any eventuality, we all took turns glancing at various weather apps, trying to figure out which ones to believe since they all seemed to be predicting different weather patterns. Personally, I chose to put my confidence in the ones that said it would stay dry despite being told by my crew and other racers in the paddock that it was all but certain that I would be riding in the rain at some point before the weekend was over.
We wrapped things up sometime in the early evening so we could all have a little food and get a good night’s sleep before the real action started on Friday.