I signed up for the California Superbike School — Levels 1, 2 and 3 — at the Madras Motor Race Track in Chennai. CSS is built for track riding, but honestly, it makes you a better rider everywhere, not just on a track.
This was my first time ever on a track, so I had no idea what to expect. I went in nervous and came out feeling like a completely different rider. If you're wondering what a day like this actually looks like — it's not just being handed a track and told to go fast.
You start in a classroom, not on the bike. A coach walks you through one specific technique, exactly what problem it fixes and why. Then you go out and try to apply just that one thing, nothing else, for the session.
You come back in, and your coach — you're assigned one for the whole three days — tells you exactly what they saw. Then it's back to the classroom for the next technique. That loop, repeated five times a day, is the whole method: learn one thing, isolate it, drill it until it's automatic, then stack the next thing on top.
The three days were split cleanly: Day 1 was Level 1, Day 2 was Level 2, Day 3 was Level 3. Level 1 fixes the basic things that trip up almost every rider — how you enter a corner, where you look, how steady your throttle hand is. Level 2 moves into vision — reading the track properly instead of fixating on the one thing you're scared of.
Level 3 gets into body position and how you work with the bike through a corner, with a drill called Attack Angles that changes how you think about cornering lines. On Level 3 they even ran a camera bike behind us to film our body position, so we could actually see what we were doing wrong instead of just being told. None of this was about getting a knee down.
It was about getting smoother, more consistent, and slowly bringing the lap times down — that's really the only way you get better at track riding: not by riding harder, but by fixing one small thing at a time and repeating it until it stops being something you have to think about.
Every day had five sessions on the track and a classroom briefing before and after each one. The coaches watched exactly what you did in a session, then sat you down and told you precisely what to fix — no vague advice, just one clear thing to work on next time out. By the third day, every single one of us in the group had visibly improved.
If you're going in for the first time like I did, expect to feel completely out of your depth on session one and genuinely surprised at yourself by session fifteen. I went from being unsure I even belonged on a track to feeling genuinely confident. I loved it enough that I already knew I was going back for Level 4.