ISDE Blog: Friday

Brian Pierce and I arrived in Frankfurt a little before 7:00 this morning after a shorter-than-expected flight and quickly made our way to the rental car agency. We lucked out and got an extremely friendly worker at the Avis check-in desk who gave us a Citroen 4-door hatchback instead of the 2-door Fiat I had reserved and paid for at no extra cost! This turned out to be an awesome thing as we were cruising on the Autobahn at what we thought was a fast 180KMH and getting our doors blown off so I can’t imagine what that would’ve felt like in a little shoebox of a car. Once we got the hint that the 100KMH signs must be the minimum speed limit we wicked up our diesel-powered 6-speed to over 200KMH (roughly 125mph) and we were able to keep up in the fast lane. Pretty wicked!!

We hit up a rest stop for an amazing breakfast (see pics below) and then made our way to the hotel to get checked in and then finally to the track. The paddock for this year’s ISDE is the Sachsenring MotoGP facility so it’s a pretty nice place for the pits as everything is paved. The majority of the riders were out walking tests but we did get to run into the majority of the American Trophy, Junior, and Women’s teams as well as some of the Club team members. The riders were just finishing going through sound test and we saw a few guys have problems but eventually with some creative methods the riders were able to get their bikes under the 112db limit.

Tomorrow is the opening ceremonies so we should be able to catch up with more riders and get a better feel for what’s going on. But, for now, there’s a restaurant in the hotel that’s calling my name and then it’s time for bed as there wasn’t a whole lot of sleeping done on the flight here. Check out a few photos I snapped with my iPhone today below:

-Hooper Out.