Code

Story by Eric Putter

Like a ball of caffeine-addled, chain-smoking energy. Keith Code worked the class with aplomb while bounding around asking rhetorical questions and espousing his gospel of roadracing’s soft science in a rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness manner. Seemingly mesmerized, nobody in this leather-clad audience dared question his wisdom or challenge his teaching methods.

Nobody but me, that is.
Don’t get me wrong. Code, who founded the California Superbike School way back in 1980, is an accomplished roadracing Riding Coach, a guy who helped guide many champions—including Doug Chandler, Eddie Lawson and Wayne Rainey—to world and national roadracing titles. His books still constitute every canyon-carver’s and roadracer’s Holy Grail.

But I wasn’t so sure about some of the school’s hype.
First, a little background. I initially attended the much-lauded Superbike School back in 1990, and came away unimpressed. The format was spotty, Kawasaki’s first-generation ZX-6 felt slovenly compared with my little FZR400, and Code left his fabled chalk talks to a top deputy.

Since then, I’ve dabbled in roadracing, sampled other riding schools, added more than 100,000 miles to my street-riding resume, broken a couple of bones, and, with a little luck, grown wiser with age.

In this time, the school has also matured. More history: Code closed up shop in ’92. While on sabbatical, he concentrated on his many abstractions and studied the latest throttle-twisting technology, even getting behind the bubble in that year’s AMA 250 GP championship. In’97, armed with new teaching tools, a battalion of howling ZX-6Rs and fresh leathers for all, the California Superbike School once again hit the road. In 1999, Code and company will be conducting classes on 49 days at 13 tracks nationwide.

Without intimate knowledge of my past school experience, Code recently admitted me into his Master’s Degree program. Because he talks about roadracing as a "soft science," I decided to make his four-course meal a serious science experiment.

The new-and-improved California Superbike School is split up into four distinct levels, each lasting a full day. All students start in level one and (hopefully) progress from there. Graduation from one level is the prerequisite for the next, but students can repeat a particular level as many times as they wish. The first three levels offer training techniques that become building blocks for the next set of skills. Those who reach level four work with riding coaches to customize a regimen for their final day. Beginning at ground zero, I took level one at Willow Springs International Raceway, level two at The Streets of Willow, and levels three and four at New York’s Watkins Glen, completing all in a three-week period.

"The fastest road in the West," quickly became an intimidating 2.56-mile maze of undulating pavement in Lab Session One. Throughout my first day and those to follow, students alternated between five 15- to 20-minute chalk talks and five racetrack outings of the same duration. Code drove class time with his distinct rhetorical question-and-answer technique geared to invoke deep thoughts. Peppered with terms from his books, the pseudo lectures slowly ambled toward laying out drills we were to perform in our next track session.

Our first roadcourse exercise, the famed no-brakes drill (using only fifth or sixth gear), is, by far, the school’s most potent—and feared—training tool. Without the ego-gratifying and mentally exhausting acts of shifting and braking, the theory goes, students are better able to focus on technique.

Code suggests—but doesn’t insist—that students use this technique all day. I committed to such painstaking torture for my first two schools. Still, in my crankiest, most skeptical journalistic heart, I couldn’t help but wonder if these limits on gearbox rowing and brake usage were enforced to limit the school’s liability and expenses. So much for blind allegiance.

This brakeless/shiftless track time was no free-for-all. Under the watchful eyes of our personal riding coaches and near-Gestapo-like corner workers who radioed all transgressions to course control (I was pulled over twice for arguably skinny passes), we completed a foundation of skill-building drills, adding tools one by one to our school toolkits. Day one’s exercises got students to focus on recognizing turn-in points and flicking the bike quickly while not upsetting the chassis. At The Streets, level two’s exercises unraveled subtle visual techniques and contained important lessons in traction management.

Of the two days spent on Willow’s wildly diverse road courses, I found level one’s skills the ones that everybody—from first-year street rider to streetbike retread to seasoned canyon blaster—could benefit most from. In fact, at every school I attended, level one students outnumbered all other levels combined. Other than sometimes lengthy downtime between classroom and track sessions (up to an hour) and not enough time to write notes about what was learned during knee-dragging stints on the forms provided (which weren’t discussed in class), I found a new, more-polished Superbike School.

From sign-up to clean-up, things moved in a fluid, organized manner, classroom sessions proved entertaining and informative, the torquey, well-behaved ZX-6Rs were perfect trainers, and students got all the personal attention they needed—especially if they were caught ignoring the drills. Best of all, my lap times improved by eight seconds in level one.

For my next two track days I traveled to the twisted laboratory of asphalt and Armco called Watkins Glen, set in the rolling hills of western New York’s Finger Lakes region.
Call me a scofflaw or just paint me plain impatient, but by this time I’d had enough of wobbling back markers and bogging motors while doing the no-brakes drill. At Willow I was a scholastic sponge, sucking up every bit of information and applying it to the tarmac. My final days at the advanced level three and level four programs were different. I flogged the school’s ZX-6R in full gearbox and late-braking race mode for all it was worth.

I circulated with every utensil I’d been given from the school’s extensive toolkit: using reference points while taking a wide-screen view of the track; down shifting before the corners; hitting my brake markers and applying the binders while modulating the throttle; doing a two-step entry procedure, adjusting entrance speed, nailing my turn-in points; countersteering quickly, keeping a light touch on the bars and relaxing my body on the drive, peering through the bubble while accelerating to the next glorious corner.

To complete this experiment in scientific manner, I threw in a simple control element. After almost two hours of getting "The Glen" dialed-in full-race mode, I went back to using the no-brakes drill during my final, 20-minute racetrack session.

The result? I was only two-tenths of a second faster rattling through the gearbox and rushing into the corners on the binders than I was in smooth, fluid, no-brakes mode. Just two-tenths of a second from besting my quickest time during two days of analyzing and attacking the track from all angles. Amazing!

You could do the same thing. Sign up for the Superbike School, patiently wade through Code’s dogmas, apply his teachings on the track and, like me, you’ll leave with more than a few hot laps and graduate with tools that will ultimately make you a safer, faster street rider.

This article originally appeared in the June 1999 issue of Motorcyclist.
It is reprinted with their permission.

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With a student-to-teacher ratio of roughly four to one in the bigger groups, scheduled and impromptu instruction is never far away—whether pupils reach out or not.

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You don’t have to ride the latest sportbike weaponry to benefit from Code’s teachings; cruisers, Buells, shih tzus—all are welcome.

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Yes, ladies do grace the Superbike School ranks. Not all of them garner special attention, but, when need by, suspension adjustments are made on the school bikes to better accommodate their weight—or lack thereof. Female students make up 3 to 5 percent of Code’s students.

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Students can bring and crash their own bikes and save $210 on the price of admission ($240 at The Streets of Willow) or use one of the school’s ZX-6Rs and forfeit their $750 deposit after performing big-time bozo no-nos. In most cases, crashing means expulsion and forfeit of tuition.

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Sportbike training wheels. New for level two students in 1998 was the Lean Machine/Slide Bike. Keith Code’s patent-pending invention is a priceless tool for newbies searching out correct body positioning. Most are ecstatic just to drag a knee for the first time. Pitching the bike sideways in Slide Machine mode without getting thrown out of the seat is much more difficult and entertaining. Here, stuntman Gary Rothwell gets as horizontal as possible milliseconds before sliding down the asphalt on his AGVs.