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My wife is an artist, and has taught drawing and painting for many years - she tells me your method of teaching composition based on the rule of thirds is the easiest and most accessible she's seen. Nice work, Chris.

Thanks, Dave (rhymes with "short")!

Thanks for the great article. I'm looking forward to trying these techniques next time I'm at the track.

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Welcome to the world of real-life photography.
I bold-faced part of your comment because of its accuracy. Different people use different methods for different things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
I know a local photographer who prefers to set his camera on a tripod, preset the focus and hit the button when he thinks the bike is in the frame. He says that this technique works for him with good results. I've tried it a few times with spotty results.
I know some people claim to leave the camera on manual focus when shooting motorsports. It's never worked for me. The speeds are too fast (for me anyway) to get a good amount of shots that are acceptably sharp.
Others, like myself, usually leave the camera in autofocus mode (AI Servo for Canon users) and I find that works best for me. Is every one of my shots in focus? Hardly. Autofocus will fail to lock on completely a fair amount of the time...it's far from perfect.
When I use AF I have the ability to select my focus points on the camera. I use as few as possible in order to make it easier for the camera to lock on to what I WANT IT TO LOCK ONTO. If you just throw it on AF you're letting the camera choose your subject.
Shooting conditions can affect how well AF works. If it is a low light or low contrast shot, AF can get confused. This is usually indicated by the lens "hunting" for proper focus...and by you missing the shot you wanted.
There is no one proper method of focusing on moving objects. Getting used to what your camera is capable of and what appears to work for you most of the time is the only way I know of to find out which way is for you.
Practice, trial and error.

Like it.

Nothing wrong here although not too many people go for shots like this...except maybe the sponsors. Focus looks good, though.

Cropped it a little. Looks like your focus was on the guy in the middle. Groups of three are nice to have but this one would also work with just the two on the inside.

This looks like it was shot with a very shallow DoF. The Suzuki stickers along the bottom fairing are nice and sharp but the top half of the rider are out of focus.

Overall....definitely not bad.

Thanks! I took some more this past weekend, with improving results. I'll post them up soon after I go through them (many hundreds!).