TRACK TESTED
Elite Sportbike Trackday Review
Author: Jim Richardson
Spend a LITTLE More for a LOT More Personal Attention
At 4:30 on a crisp and clear Deep-South-in-autumn Friday afternoon, the pickups, trailers and vans were lining up outside the gates of Carolina Motorsports Park, waiting to claim their paddock spaces. “Has anyone seen Robert McKay,” someone asks. “No,” comes the reply, “But I know what he looks like.”  The answer seems a bit odd, until you meet the man. At 6 feet and 3 inches with easy humor and the physical bearing and sense of purpose peculiar to the ex-military, McKay is someone who is easy to pick out in a crowd. The same can be said of his company, Elite Sportbike. In an increasingly crowded trackday marketplace in ever-worsening economic times, McKay and his team work hard to keep their organization a cut above the rest, beginning with a vision that puts rider training and safety ahead of the profit motive.
“It has to break even, to pay for itself,” says Robert, whose day job is consulting. “If it makes money, fine but if I wanted to get rich, I’d do something else.” Robert and the members of his staff used to work as instructors with other trackday providers, however they had their own vision of how a trackday should be set up and what it should provide to a participant. “We just had different ideas about how to do things,” McKay said. Apparently, that approach appeals to numerous trackday riders, since Elite will be going into its third year of operation with the 2009 season. Perhaps the thing you notice most about an Elite trackday, the thing that sets it apart from all others, is the number of riders allowed on the track at the same time. Where other organizations typically allow 30 to 40 bikes per group, Elite limits its groups to 25 riders. “I’ve seen other companies squeeze in more riders at the last minute, just to get the extra bucks,” Robert said. “That’s not what we’re about. We offer quality track time so you can hone your bike handling skills in a safe environment. I’ve always enjoyed teaching and passing on knowledge,” Robert stated. “This is my mission – to teach people to be better riders and share the experience.”  To that end, Elite also offers one of the best instruction programs we’ve ever seen and we’ve seen quite a few. Having sat in on everything from a minimalist club trackday intro to full-on race school, we can say that the team at Elite ran the best novice instruction from a trackday group that we’ve ever observed. If someone who’d never been on a track asked about the best place to start, we’d point them to Elite first. Why? Because the basic information is the same, regardless of who’s presenting it: foot position, lines around the track, throttle and brake use, shifting, body position. The important thing is that, how the information is presented, can make all the difference in whether students “get it”. On this particular day, lead instructor Clyde Romero managed to be both entertaining and deadly serious as he took the novices through a step-by-step process that seemed a bit, well, elementary at times, beginning with basic slow laps and single-gear drills. But by the end of the day, students “got it”, cutting smooth lines and faster laps, with a lot of grins and a few scraped knee pucks.
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