After Barber we headed to Virginia for Round nine of the AMA championship. VIR (what they call the track) was another new circuit to me and from what I had seen of it, it looked quite good and your typical hilly AMA track. With all the circuits that are new to me I try to find out what I can about them. The first option and usually the best for me is to try and get a Playstation/PC game which has the circuit on it, whether it’s on cars or whatever.
But if the circuit isn’t on any game then I have the AMA Superbike DVD where I will watch last years race a good few times and also watch the onboard lap that is on the DVD. The only problem is the onboard camera doesn’t give you any sense of elevation changes, but it’s enough to get the general gist of things.
VIR was another tough one to learn, taking all day Thursday and most of Friday to really get my head around it. With FX qualifying being on Friday this always makes it a bit more difficult for me to qualify well. Anywhere in the first two rows is usually the minimum and I ended up tenth so I was pretty disappointed with that. I didn’t get too down about it because I knew that I didn’t make the most of my lap and felt that I was still a little 'scrappy' with the track so I felt like there was plenty more to come for the race on Saturday.
