By Michael GougisI
t was the 1970s, an era of
cheap track rentals and motor-
cycles with excellent power and
not-so-excellent handling, brakes,
and tires. That era inspired a few
far-thinking racers to start help-
ing other riders upgrade their tech-
niques for operating those bikes.
Literally decades later, the
work that they did during that pe-
riod still shapes the landscape of
rider training and personal coach-
ing. Keith Code, Reg Pridmore,
and Jerry Wood created some of
the most popular riding and rac-
ing schools in the country—and
internationally! And in doing so,
they have helped coach some of
the most accomplished road rac-
ers in the world, and most likely
kept many racers and riders alive.`KEITH CODE
Code started training riders in
1976, with what he called the
Keith Code Rider Improvement
Program. It was a two-day, one-
on-one school, with one day of
classroom work and a day out at
Willow Springs Raceway. Code
was racing Superbikes at the time,
and was also riding in the can-
yons of Southern California on the
weekends when he wasn't racing.
"I had fi gured out a couple of
things that improved my riding,"
74-year-old Code says. "I start-
ed looking at them from a kind of
universal perspective—would they
be common to other riders? They
were observations I made about
how I was using my eyes and what
I was using them for. I was making
comparisons between corners I
knew I did well in and the corners
I did not do well in. I thought, 'I'm
going to write this stuff down.'"
That written curriculum—
about seven to eight pages—be-
came the basis for the classroom
portion of the course. The idea
attracted students, including a
young racer named John Ulrich,
who went on to edit one of Code's
books and to found Roadracing
World. Code started the California
Superbike School in 1980 and con-
tinued to work with many riders
on an individual basis, including
Wayne Rainey and Eddie Lawson.
"It was fulfi lling. I got inter-
ested because fi rst of all it helped
me. I started to have good results
with the students, guys I was
coaching—their average lap time
improvement was seven seconds!
I thought I had something import-
ant. There was a lot of bad infor-mation being passed around, even
among the pros. They'd say things
like, ‘You don't know how fast you
can go until you crash, kid!’"`REG PRIDMORE
Reg Pridmore was racing in South-
ern California and doing well in
the ultra-competitive production
classes, fi rst on Nortons, then
on BMWs, which he raced to his
fi rst—and the very fi rst—AMA
National Superbike Champion-
ship. He followed that up with two
more consecutive AMA Superbike
Championships, on Kawasakis.
Pridmore was disturbed by
what he saw happening on the
streets with the bikes those pro-
duction racers were based on, he
says. "I lived in Santa Barbara
(California), and dealers were sell-
ing these 900cc bombs that were
getting kids killed within a week or
two. It really pissed me off," Prid-
more says. "And when I was racing
BMWs, we were doing things that
people hadn't seen before. And so
people started asking if we could
show them what we were doing."
Pridmore started in the ear-
ly 1970s with small groups of
students, between 12 and 15, at
the now-long-gone Riverside In-
ternational Raceway—a track
that he recalls could be rented
for $200 a day! Speed wasn't the
primary goal of the class, Prid-
more says. The primary goal was
teaching students a set of skills
that improved their ability to op-
erate a motorcycle at speed. It is
a philosophy that still informs the
79-year-old Pridmore's curricu-
lum all these years later in what
has evolved into the CLASS Mo-
torcycle School. "I wasn't teaching
racing. I was teaching control and
technique," Pridmore explains.
"That has always been the primary
thing for me."`JERRY WOOD
Jerry Wood, co-founder of the Pen-
guin Racing School, also recalls
the days when instruction was
hard to come by, even at the track
when you went racing. Wood, now
72, says that one of the motiva-
tions for him to start instructing
was an incident involving a friend
of his, experienced in off-road
competition, who decided to give
road racing a try. With absolutely
no information from the race orga-
nizers before hitting the track, that
friend was understandably con-
fused when a corner worker waved
an oil fl ag at him. Thinking he was
being encouraged to speed up, hesped up—and crashed in the oil.
"When I started, you just had
to fi gure it out. They would have
some kind of lecture for the new
riders from the top of the tower,
but that was after half a day of be-
ing on the track," Wood says. "We
started out doing a school once a
year, at the beginning of the sea-
son. Then it developed into a real
business, something we would do
at every race event.
"To be honest, we fi rst did it
for free track time! Then we real-
ized that this was a really dumb
thing to do, to send people out
there without knowing anything."
Wood's program was effective
in one very fundamental way, he
says. "Riders weren't going home in
an ambulance, and they were hav-
ing a good time and they were com-
ing back. There were days when we
didn't move an ambulance. That
kept them coming," he recalls.
Racing at the circuit then got
taken over by new owners, who
eliminated the teaching portion
from the race weekend. This was
disastrous, Wood says.
"They lost their insurance. So
we got a call from the track askingus to run the races. So we start-
ed LRRS (Loudon Road Racing
Series), we took care of the whole
thing, and they let us do whatever
we wanted. We got it up to 1,400
entries a weekend. We ran it as a
club, and they let us because every
weekend we'd leave an envelope of
money on their desk for when they
came in on Monday morning."
The fi rst level of instruction
was basic—how to get on and off
the track, what fl ags meant. Then
Wood started teaching racers how
to be faster and better riders.
Things like body positioning, GP
shift patterns—Wood say these
techniques were being taught to
racers at the Penguin school in the
early 1970s.
"We taught them looking for
brake points, turn-in points, apex
points and exit points. We put that
all together for them," Wood says.
"And we taught them that the mo-
torcycle goes where you look. A lot
of little do's and don'ts about how
to keep the motorcycle from get-
ting upset. We taught them how to
fi gure out where you want to go,
and how to look at those spots. So
the corner's not a big blur.Three-time AMA Superbike Champion Reg Pridmore is still running his
CLASS school after founding it about 40 years ago. Here, he observes
students on the Streets of Willow road course. Photo by etechphoto.com.56—Roadracing World, Trackday Directory 2019Teaching The Art
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