Thompson Speedway road course · 11 corners · 20 clean-pace laps on the Tiger Sport 660, 8 Sep 2025 · the ZX-4RR on Monday

Thompson on the ZX-4RR: a corner-by-corner plan from your Tiger day.

Eric Wood's framework sorts every corner into a roll-speed, drive or entrance line from two things: the corner's minimum speed against the bike's threshold-of-traction speed, and how much straight the exit feeds. This page runs that on Thompson's measured geometry for the ZX-4RR, puts the lines you rode on the Tiger beside it, and turns the differences into what to try on Monday. What the day actually said is the next page.

The circuit, sorted

roll speeddriveentrance

How the sorting works

V_min vs V_TOT. If the corner's minimum speed is above the speed at which the bike can spin the rear at full lean, horsepower can't hurt you there: take the roll-speed line — maximum radius, apex at the arc's centre, slowest point at the apex, light trail brake to it. Below V_TOT, the throttle becomes the limiting input and the corner is about the exit.

What follows the exit. A long straight rewards exit speed for many seconds: drive line — enter wide, apex late, gas-on-bike-up to the outside edge. Another turn right after gives the exit nothing to cash in: entrance line — brake deep, apex early, slowest point after the apex, set up the next turn.

The advantage runs to the next corner you brake for — read off the speed profile, not off V_TOT. Extra exit speed is banked up to the next braking point and no further, so what matters is where the median profile next dips. Out of T1 the profile never dips through T2 — T2's 72 km/h "minimum" is you still accelerating out of T1 — so T1's exit is carried through the T2 sweep to T3's braking, 8 s, and T1 is a drive corner. Out of T8 it does dip, 9–11 km/h of roll-off into T9 and again into T10: speed given away, so T8's advantage ends at T9. T5→T6 (0.5 km/h) is one corner numbered twice, judged at T6's exit. The first version of this page took V_min below V_TOT to mean "brakes here", split every pair, and called nine corners "entrance"; it also let a roll-speed corner extend the chain (T10 paying "through T11" for 29 s at 70 km/h), which the profile contradicts — you shed 15 km/h for T11 whatever the bike.

A connecting turn is a roll-speed corner whatever its V_min. Wood's chicane clause: a turn the rider neither brakes for nor drives out of is rolled through. T2 is one — no braking into it, 14 km/h of rise out of it before T3 — and so is T9 (no braking in, none out). Wood himself calls T2 a roll corner; that is what set our "no drive out" threshold. T10 is not: it is driven at T11 (+29 km/h).

The thresholds are ours, not the framework's: "long straight" = at least 5 s to the next braking corner on the median speed profile (his duration of advantage: a straight pays for 5–15 s, a braking zone for 1–2), "brakes" = the profile dips at least 12 km/h before the next slowest point, "carried" (the exit still paying through the next corner) = a dip under 5 km/h, "connecting" = no braking in and under 20 km/h of rise out, "linked" = the next turn-in within 80 m. A version of this page softened his rule for a few hours (a short run counted as a drive unless the next corner was "worth more"); that was ours, not his, and is gone. V_TOT for the ZX-4RR is 80 km/h as set in the app (the framework's 400-class figure); the app's modelled value from your own WOT curve is 66–73 km/h, and the second map shows what 70 does here. Why the Tiger day transfers: the Tiger 660's measured wide-open-throttle curve is in the same power-to-weight band as the ZX-4RR (its modelled V_TOT at Thompson is 70–73 km/h), so the corner classes are the same on both bikes and your Tiger minimum speeds are a fair baseline. What the framework can't see is the rest of the bike — the ZX's shorter wheelbase, sportier geometry and higher revs — which is exactly what to feel out in the first session.

Corner by corner: the book vs your Tiger lines

"Your line" is the median of the day's 20 clean-pace laps, read in the road frame: where your apex sits against the arc's centre, and where your slowest point sits against your apex. A drive-shaped line apexes past the centre with the slowest point before it; roll-shaped apexes at the centre with the slowest point there; entrance-shaped apexes early with the slowest point after. Lean-corrected to the contact patch and aligned for each day's GPS bias.

Each corner

Strip: your median line through the corner per session, inside limit at the bottom, outside at the top; the tinted band is the tarmac, warm ticks are kerbs, the dashed vertical is the arc's centre. 10:36 (first session) dashed, 16:39 (last) bold, the others grey. Targets: the bar is the share of laps meeting the framework's target for the corner's strategy; the number is how much faster (or slower) those laps exited than the laps that didn't, relative to the day's median — the framework's prescription checked against your own data. "—" = fewer than 3 laps on one side.

Does the book pay? All corners pooled (Tiger day, 20 laps)

Per target: the median across corners of "exit speed of laps meeting it minus laps not meeting it" (each relative to its day), and how many corners it helps or hurts by at least 1 km/h. Read this before taking any single corner's number seriously.

What this says

Grain of salt

V_TOT is the softest number on the page, and at Thompson it decides the map. The Tiger sessions here bound V_TOT at ≤ 122–152 km/h (loose — you weren't driving hard at lean) and model it at 70–73 km/h; the ZX-4RR's modelled value at Palmer is 66–73. T2 (V_min 72), T8 (78) and T9 (70) sit right on it. The two maps above are the honest range.
20 laps. The Tiger day gives one day's worth of lines; the σ on apex placement and the "does it pay" deltas are correspondingly rough. Read shapes, not decimals.
The arc centre is not a recommendation. It is the framework's reference point ("apex 5–20 ft later than the centre" for a drive line). On a 150° hairpin the centre is mid-arc by construction; what a coach would call the apex may legitimately sit elsewhere.
Exit speed relative to the day's median is a blunt response. GPS is good to ~1 km/h; most per-target deltas are 1–3 km/h on 10–40 laps. The pooled table is the honest read; single-corner numbers under ±1 km/h are noise.
Body position, bar pressure, vision — the framework's other half — are invisible to a GPS/IMU/OBD logger. What is measured here is the consequence: lean re-added after the crack, throttle closures, roll-off shape.