Colin Edwards' Texas Tornado Boot Camp | Don’t Mess With Texas

The Texas Tornado Boot Camp is the creation of two-time World Superbike Champion Colin Edwards and a few fellow Texans. It’s a boy’s weekend away, most of it spent riding motorcycles or shooting guns, with plenty of food, fraternity, beer, and laughter. It isn’t exclusively for boys, though; this weekend there were five women, and they weren’t the first. It’s a seriously good time and if you’ve got the money, and you enjoy riding motorcycles, you should do it.

This was a four-day edition of the Texas Tornado Boot Camp (there used to be two-day camps, but they have since been dropped because Edwards and staff felt that it wasn't enough time...more on that later). For one it was Halloween weekend, and most all the students brought costumes for the Saturday night bash. And there was a special guest instructor: Three-time World Champion Freddie Spencer was helping out, when he wasn’t riding with his son Connor. Spencer had a roadracing school for years, but it was nothing like this. Nothing is.

You ride motorcycles, and you can shoot guns too, if that’s your pleasure. You can watch football on Sunday or troll the internet. You can drive go-karts, play paint ball, or drive RC cars. An earlier group of students wanted to go wakeboarding, so Edwards loaded them up and drove them to nearby Lake Conroe. There isn’t much the camp staff won’t do to be accommodating. The tenor of the camp is a reflection of Edwards’ personality; every camper gets personal treatment, not only from the instructors, but Edwards also.

“Whenever I thought of building this, there’s only one way to do it,” recalled Edwards. “I do it my way and my style. I don’t want to do it for the money, and I don’t want to just charge people a bunch of money to hang out, (then) ‘see ya later.’ It’s got to be more personal to me. So first thing we built was ‘the roof’ (a giant fixed canopy). We can’t have anybody come and say, ‘Sorry, we’ll see you next week.’ If they’re flying from Europe, we had to have a ‘rain-out’ feature that we could still ride. And then the hotel was the second thing…the Saloon…I’m a people person. I like to hang around. I like the campfire stories. A lot of what I’ve learned through the years is that’s what a lot of people really want. That little bit of extra connection.”

Before a single engine was fired up, the campers went through a short calisthenics program to loosen up. Then they gathered around the camp’s lead instructor Joe Prussiano, a former roadracer and longtime friend of Edwards. Seated on one of the camp’s mostly stock Yamaha TT-R125s, Prussiano started the first lesson with a discussion of body position, then braking. “Use both brakes in every corner,” he advised, after which Edwards gave a more detailed explanation about the effect of braking on the attitude of the motorcycle. In addition to stopping, he pointed out, braking creates load, which segued into an explanation of weight transfer and throttle control. “The goal is 100 percent of the time to have some sort of input,” he said. It was a lot for the students to take in, but they’d have plenty of time to put the fundamentals to the test on one of the facility’s many tracks.

The riders were broken up into three groups, with the smallest group the beginners, then the intermediates, then the intermediate/advanced. The curriculum is set, but advancement is done at the pace of the riders. If they’re quick studies, they advance more quickly. The drills get more difficult, the pace picks up. Front ends wash out. Explanations are given.

Guns are big in Texas, and legal. You can pretty much buy any kind of gun without a lot of stress. Edwards owns a lot, many of which he shares on camp weekends. Anyone who wants to shoot has to take a short gun safety course given by Gale Tynefield, a club-racing former Marine who teaches firearm safety and techniques. Tynefield and Edwards take safety very seriously and are diligent in making sure the guns are properly handled.

Friday’s weaponry was handguns: .22, .45 and 9mm; Saturday for skeet shooting with a shotgun. And on Sunday they brought out the ‘50’, a .50 caliber rifle known for its use in long-range sniper work and vaporizing varmints.

Edwards holds the record of 1:27.3. “Generally, most of us instructors, we’ll finish all within a second and a half,” he said. “And if it goes right, I’m usually the first. Most of the time.” Not this weekend. Four days before the start of the camp, Edwards was involved in the horrific crash that took the life of Marco Simoncelli in the Malaysian Grand Prix, resulting in a dislocated left shoulder. Scheduled for surgery two days after the camp, he was roaming from group to group on his Yamaha Grizzly, often in the background, deferring to his instructors—and always holding a can of some sort, either a Monster Energy drink or Coors Light or an empty that he used as a spittoon for the smokeless tobacco he enjoys. The shoulder popped out from time to time, but Edwards would nonchalantly jam it back into place.

Corner exit techniques were taught on Friday. Saturday would begin with mid-corner technique that incorporated what had been learned about corner exit.

Edwards told a story about learning the value of neutral throttle. At the 2006 Malaysian Grand Prix, the Texan was a second a lap slower than teammate Valentino Rossi early in practice, despite having equal top speed. “Why is he a second faster?” Edwards asked. Though this was his fourth season racing a GP bike, Edwards still had “some old Superbike ways to work my way out of.” What he saw on the data was that the interval between Rossi being off-throttle to back into it was negligible. “The brakes coming down and the throttle coming up creates heaps of load,” he said. “Just that little bit he did every corner, a half a tenth here, a half a tenth there, that’s a second.” He added, “When you don’t minimize that time, the bike’s riding you.”

“We tell ‘em at the beginning of every camp, if you’re worried around ride time, don’t, because you’re going to get more than enough. And always that first day you want to go out and ride and ride and ride and ride. [Then] you’re screwed for the next two days.” The TTBC also has two-day camps, but “the two-days are a lot more intense. We’re trying to cram everything in two days and for me two days is not enough to really see progression. We’ve seen it, but generally that first day is getting familiar, trying to figure out body position, get everything right. Sleep on it, by the second day, just starting to get it and then everybody’s gonna go home. So that’s why we came up with the four-days. It’s a lot easier, a lot more relaxed pace, a lot more time to sleep on it, sleep on it again and then it comes.”

This four-day camp ended back at the Saloon, with a Texas barbecue and a bonfire. Edwards pointed out how many riders had improved their Superpole times, and thanked them for attending. There would be more improvement on Sunday, then the swapping of emails and phone numbers. Another class had graduated from the boot camp, and many were certain to return.

The Texas Tornado Boot Camp is now offering special one-week "racer only" camps designed for racers looking to tune up before the season starts. The next Racer Only camp is scheduled for Feb 6 - 12. Cost is $1950.