Agree with Eric, to expand on a few things, we want you to be safe and comfortable in the next group as well as the group to not be impacted by your riding. So, seeing good lines and body position without excessive lean angle is important. We don’t want you at the limit and then you get bumped and chase someone over your limit and crash. I think the last thing Eric said is the most important for me especially for the A bump, would I be comfortable coming up on you at 98% and trusting you’ll do what Is expected.
A couple things to add to the list, do you only ride that track? There’s a lot of people that are fast on one track and lost on every other track, it’s not good if you can’t translate your pace from one track to another. Experience, if you’re the next Rossi running A pace your first day I will have other CRs working with you to put you into situations that make you uncomfortable to see how you react and test your judgement. Because of all this, N2 has the fastest, most predictable safe groups. We regularly get questioned about, “I am an Intermediate rider with xxx, do I have to start in novice?” With the exception of an expert race license, we all started in Novice and if you truly are running at the next level we will see you and bump you. The best advice I received early in the nesba days was “ride your ride and don’t chase the bump,” every bump I received was a surprise and also bitter sweat, I went from slaying my group to being a guppy and having to work my way up again. Last thing and I’ll get off my soap box, during tech last track day I had 7 people ask me for bumps (we hadn’t even been on track yet) I think 3 of them earned them and we bumped 8 others that were just riding. We are out there always evaluating so just ride your ride. The excuse this group is slowing me down makes me question if you’re ready because I was able to ride 3 seconds off my A pace in Intermediate and 7 seconds off in novice following the passing rules of each group respectively so if your group is really impacting your ride you need to work on getting through traffic or finding open track.