La Guacima
Today I got up early and headed over to a track called “La Guacima” kind of near the San Jose Airport. It’s Costa Rica’s nicest track for racing cars and bikes which, admittedly, is not saying much, but it was pretty cool. It’s definitely a professional-level track with a lot of tricky turns, although it isn’t like the big tracks with huge stands that exist in the US. One of my co-workers named Jerry belongs to a group called Tico Super Bikes which is basically like a local club of some kind. TSB had reserved the track for the day so about 30 of them could race around the track. I don’t actually ride motorcycles (you don’t have to worry Mom) because of the dangers associated with it, but I do like fast machines, so I decided to go over for a few hours.
It was awesome to see those guys fly around the track. Bikes are INCREDIBLY quick. Granted they couldn’t really go over like 100 mph because the track wasn’t long enough at any point to allow them to get up to top speed, but the acceleration on the bikes was stunning. As I learned, pretty much all of the bikes that were there today can do 0-60 MPH in under 3 seconds, which is faster than almost any car in the world with the exception of some F1 cars and the like. In addition to Jerry, another co-worker of mine named Thiago brought his bike and rode around the track. Obviously, I got a lot of pictures. Here are some of my favorites.
Before they got on the track, I spotted a cat with his/her head in a bag of chips going nuts. I wish I had a video because the cat was running all over the place with the bag on its head. Was pretty LOL at the time.
This is Thiago’s bike track-side
A bunch of the bikes, although this was before everyone got there. I think the nicest bike there was an R1 with a bunch of modifications. I’m not sure though since I don’t really know bikes well…
Thiago on the straight-away.
It was hard to get good pictures on the long straightaway because they were going too fast, so I moved over to one of the turns and I had a lot more luck. Here’s a few pictures of Jerry on a turn:
Here’s Thiago on the turn. And no, I didn’t intentionally crop it like that, I just missed the shot because he was going pretty fast and I was out of position at the time (trying to move backwards)… oops.
Here is my favorite shot that I took all day. I have no idea who the guy is, but I like the picture.
And here is a picture of a few more people who I didn’t know at all, but they came pretty close to where I was standing. A little scary, although it was actually more room than it looks like in the picture.
Anyway, it was a fun time, I’m glad I went. Although it will be hard to ever convince me to get on a fast one, I still concluded that bikes are cool.
UPDATE:
I put up a video on YouTube. The guy riding past from like the 17 to 19 second mark is Jerry.
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Thanks for sharing the pictures, it was a nice day at the track.
What type of bike are you getting Nat? GSX-R, CBR?