The adrenaline pumps through my arteries as I follow Freddie Spencer down the front straightaway. This is not the Belgian Grand Prix, but judging by the sanity-challenging speed we have reached and the shrieking Honda 600 underneath me, it might as well be.

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In reality I have latched onto Spencer for a one-on-one teaching lap at his High Performance Riding School just outside Las Vegas. But even with a student in his slipstream, Spencer displays the skills that made him a three-time world champion before age 23. He brakes hard coming into turn one. Moments later, I mirror his action. At the perfect instant, he suddenly and fluidly drops his bike into an impossible lean, turns the machine in what seems like a space of inches, brushes the striped corner curbing just at the apex, then accelerates away. I, lacking the cajones to brake quite so hard, subsequently carry too much entrance speed, turn the bike too late, miss the apex he was pointing at by several feet, then wait—at maximum lean—until I can right the bike and come back on the throttle. In just this one flash of 30 yards, I learn that Spencer—the Louisiana boy who at age 20 became the youngest-ever Grand Prix race winner—has a lifetime of knowledge to teach me.

Starting a racing school may seem like a natural course of action for Spencer, who retired from racing in 1996. But being a multiple world champion does not necessarily equate to being a great teacher. Many who excel in a given field simply do not know how they do it. But Spencer is different. He can teach because he has always taken a different approach to racing. "If I learned how to ride the bike properly I knew the race would take care of itself," he explains. This strategy led him to break down his riding actions into components that eventually formed his "system" for handling a motorcycle. A component could be as elementary as making sure he is in the right gear for each corner. But the perfectionist in Spencer demands that he become flawless at that technique before moving on to the next task. This level of exactitude helped him break the Suzuka track lap record on his first visit—on only his ninth lap—as a 19-year-old.