Aprilia RS250 Race bike (past bike)

OK, back to reminiscing again:(  Back in 2004, I was experimenting with race bikes, or in my case, track bikes. Even though I had my race license and had the number 298, I had only raced officially twice in my life, I came in last:(  But I was out there baby! yeah!

The Aprilia RS250 is an awesome machine! It’s a V-twin design but 2 stroke. It’s incredibly fast, but the top end isn’t too fast, say 140 mph. When I finally got this bike painted to my likings, and graphics to make it look faster, I finally got it to the track. My first time on this superb motorcycle was at Texas World Speedway near College Station, TX. It was a track day event put on by Lone Star track days.

My Aprilia was setup with a GP shifter, which I wasn’t sure If I could do that or not. A GP shift pattern is 1 up and 5 down vs. 1 down and 5 up. It makes sense, but I just about blew up my engine cause I would go to shift down, but was shifting up putting the rpm’s way past red line!

So I got it back to the paddock area and switched it back to a Normal shifting pattern, then I was set!

I took great pride in how me and my bike looked! This bike was originally black, very poorly done.  I may not have been the fastest around the track, but by golly, I looked like I could! 😉  oh, look on the back walls, there is my first race bike, a EX500 Kawasaki! 😉

I’ll have to say it takes a while to get used to the 2 stroke. On a 4 stroke, one has engine braking, like on my TL1000r, you let off the throttle and the engine slows you, but the Aprilia feels like it speeds up when coming into a turn! EEK!

Another cool thing about the Aprilia RS250, on the instrument, I could set a shift light. When going around the track, you really don’t want to be looking down at your speedometer or tach, but the red line light was pretty neat, I could see it by peripheral vision without looking away from what I’m about to pass! I didn’t use it all the time, but it was a neat feature.

I really had the sharpest looking bike~ plus I was all decked out with tire warmers too!

This last picture is extra ordinary as there is another rider just right behind me, shadowing me! I wouldn’t know that! lol One doesn’t look back over their shoulder to see if they’re beating others! At a track day, the speech was to all riders: I can still hear Steve MacNamara, Macman from LoneStarTrackdays.com saying,” Hold your line, be predictable”, don’t do anything stupid to cause harm to others or yourself. Something like that! I feel like it applies to every day driving!

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse from my exciting past! To me it’s just like yesterday! What an exciting time it was!;)  dne’