Peter Jones' experience riding a Suzuki GSX-R1000 at Road Atlanta

Check this out:
http://motorcycling.speedtv.com/article/bikes-peter-jones-if-you-can-read-this-t-shirt/P1


"By the time we reached turn six, I was emotionally used up and considered reaching forward and hitting his kill switch. I was completely drained and had nothing left inside to push me to finish this lap, forget about doing a second one. And we still had a turn to go before we reached Road Atlanta’s famous, long back straight.

If you’ve never been to Road Atlanta, there are three things you need to know about its world-renown back straight; it’s neither straight nor flat and it is long. Very long. It begins in a short climb up the front of a hump that drops so quickly on its far side that racers have to fight the wheelie out of their bikes, dabbing the rear braking, pushing their weight up over the bars. From there it stretches out, allowing a drive up through sixth gear. Then it crests a second hill in a sweeping, right-hand turn that falls away as the track heads downhill into the hard-braking zone for turn ten. In a race, on a GSX-R1000, that sweeper is taken at full throttle in top gear at around 180 mph. Or 185. Or at the speed of an atom smasher. "

 

back before the back straight was shortened by installing turn ten
i saw a guy running wide open thru the bottom of the "gravity cavity" at mentioned speeds:

a deer bolted straight across the track pretty damn close in front in him.

he never came off the gas, but im pretty sure he needed to change his leathers after that.

 

I raced there in 1982 at the WERA grand national event. I took my RD350 and my GPz550. It was in November and rained all weekend. My GPz fared the worse. I went off on about turn 3, a right hander off camber. After digging the worst of the red clay out in I went back out and slid off the outside of the track after going under the bridge. My bike was a bit bunged up but not to bad. As I was standing behind the bridge waiting for practice to end here comes a silver Honda 900 out from the bridge, low siding the rider off then it started doing endos down the hill all the way to the bottom. Maybe they could salvage the engine but the bike was bent every which way.

That was a turning point for me. Off came the Dunlop's and I put on Metzlers much better. I also retired both bikes and got a new Canadian RZ350 for 83.