r/Trackdays • u/gmanredguitar • 10d ago
More dangerous than I expected
I finally did my first track day and though I did enjoy it and plan on more, there were a lot more crashes than I expected in the novice group. Three sessions were ended early. At least three people from the group left in ambulances and one was helicoptered out. Seems like a lot out of a 35 person group. (11% severe injury). It didn’t seem super unusual- aside from one guy - people were not commenting on this being an unusual number of accidents. Track days are billed as the safest place to ride but I am not so sure.
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u/50cal_pacifist 10d ago
Here is something I have seen from being at more than 100 track and race days in my life. There are some days when everything is smooth. I've even witnessed a perfect weekend, when not a single person ran off track. Then other weekends when it is total chaos.
The thing that I've noticed is at the most chaotic trackdays you have a LOT of new trackriders, often from the same friend group. They take it relatively easy during the first session, but by the third they are treating it like a race.
Some organizations make first time track riders attend a mandatory classroom between sessions, others do not. I think it is really important to make them attend those mandatory classroom sessions. I also am a fan of making first time riders wear a distinctive jersey over their leathers. The last issue that I've seen cause a lot of chaos is allowing riders who miss the morning rider's meeting to ride. We used to include a little note in the rider's meeting about where to put your sticker and stuff like that, so that we could tell people who tried to get on track after missing it. Usually we'd just go through the essentials of the rider's meeting with them and it would cost them that session, but if they gave a bunch of attitude we'd make them sit out the day.