[ST] [v.long - mostly ON topic!] Keith Code is a Scientologist Part 1

[kwh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Ken Haylock)]

OK, here's my take. This is my review of the UK version of the CSS...

I must say that the Scientologist thing bothered me a lot before I parted
with my money. I read the Twist books early on, so I knew the actual
/riding/ stuff wasn't bullshit, but was this some kind of recruiting scam
for the Hubbardistas? A very good friend of mine, a fellow biker, born to
Scientologist parents, was stricken by schizophrenia and, in the thrall of
scientology and its complete rejection of psychiatry, remained untreated and
made a number of violent attempts to kill himself until eventually he
succeeded. It was entirely predictable, and a source of deep pain and anger
to those of us trying to help him, but who ended up watching helpless as he
inevitably died by his own hand. In my opinion Scientology isn't a religion,
it's a dangerous machine for separating fools from their money by
brainwashing (although everyone has to make their own choices and I wouldn't
dream of stopping them). For this reason, I specifically asked the guy who
runs the UK school - Andy Ibbott - whether anybody was going to try to
preach anything at me if I gave it a go. He assured me they wouldn't - I get
the impression, though I didn't ask, that neither he nor his people are
Hubbardistas, or if they are they hide it very well. Had anybody tried to
flog me Dianetics, or had any cheesy Scientologist literature been on
display at the UK schools when I went along to one of their schools in
advance as a spectator to check it out, then they wouldn't have had a bean
from me. It sounds to me from comments here like had I gone to look at a
Keith Code run CSS day in the states, I'd have chosen not to give them my
money.

That said, here is my write-up on the CSS UK-style. It was originally
written at the end of August for a local British audience, so excuse the
parochial nature of the reportage:

- - snip -
California Superbike School - Thoughts from a punter...

When I started riding, I bought both the Twist of the Wrist books on
recommendation, and read them. Or tried to. They are written in broad
Californian, a language I'm not fluent in, and much of what they were saying
went over my head anyway. I gave up and put them away. A while later, in the
quest for self-improvement, I read them again. Those bits I could translate
made more sense this time, and I experimented with some of his ideas, found
they worked really rather well, and started to incorporate them into my
riding. But some of the stuff in the book was so West-Coast (dude) that I
could make no sense of it whatever, some of it wasn't applicable at all to
riding on the road so far as I could see, and some of it just can't be
written down - try reading a paragraph on body position with the book in one
hand, while sitting on the bike on its centrestand and trying to set your
body position correctly based on a textual description of where your arms
and legs need to be. No chance!

It has taken me a long time to decide to open my own wallet and pay the
admittedly heinous cost of a CSS course. The one I really needed was Level
2, but you have to do Level 1 first so I signed up for both of them on
consecutive days at Pembrey. It's a bloody expensive school (£280 for one
day at Pembrey, £530 for two), so what do you get for your money?

Well, the first thing you are paying for is a veritable mountain of
infrastructure and staff. There are hordes of instructors for both the track
work and the off-track sessions (see http://www.superbikeschool.co.uk/uk/
for a list), two mechanics, the Dunlop UK head tyre guru (doing lectures),
the slide/lean bike, the instructor bikes (a fleet of R1 and R6 Yams), a
refreshment tent, course control, wranglers (who make sure everybody is
where they are supposed to be and organise the throngs of bikes and riders),
as many free cups of tea, coffee, or chilled water and salt tablets,
potassium pills or biccies as you can consume all day. And a free lunch.

Upon arrival (at 7am, FFS!), your bike is scrutineered, lights, mirrors,
plate, and speedo are taped up or over for you, and then the tyre pressures
are all lowered for the track. Meanwhile, your kit is also scrutineered for
track-worthiness. Each day proper starts at 8am with introductions, and a
safety briefing and then it's straight into the first classroom session, and
introducing the first exercise. In the case of level 1, for example, that
would be throttle control, opening it smoothly and driving right through the
turn. The classroom discussion is designed to encourage us the punters to
think about the point of the lesson at hand, and work out the correct answer
for ourselves. For most of the first day I was cheating - I'd read the book
and was using the ideas already, but the English version of the underlying
logic (delivered by ex-Fast-Bikes journo, racer and reformed serial crasher
Andy Ibbott) was far more useful to me than the whacked-out surfer-dude
version delivered by the books.

At the end of the classroom session, it's off either to the track or to
'downtime' while we waited for our track session. The school runs three
colour groups, and each group gets 5 classroom sessions, and 5 track
sessions each per day. That leaves 5 sessions of 'down time', of which 2 are
taken up with off-track instruction in smaller numbers - for example,
at level 1 it was a countersteering exercise in the paddock on your own
bike, and a lecture on tyres and tyre technology by /the/ man from Dunlop.
Incidentally, from the latter I can conclude that most bike journalists
write utterly uninformed shite when it comes to tyres. So, no surprise there
then.

Continued in Part 2

Ken Haylock - Sprint ST + TT600 - MAG Life Member #93160

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