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Scan those slivery shards shimmering metaphorically on the pavement, and smile.

The glass ceiling remains shattered. Those two seconds of pleasantly unexpected lap-time improvement at Nelson Ledges a couple of weeks ago turned into three seconds of magical movement at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course this weekend.

Compared with just a month ago, it was the same mostly stock Buell XB9R, same rider. OK, hopefully the results prove the rider is a bit different.

The occasion was the Grand National Club Championships, sanctioned by the American Motorcyclist Association. At stake were about two dozen AMA “Number One Plates” and the even more highly coveted title of “Horizon Award” winner.

The latter is an attempt to identify the young rider most likely to succeed in the pro ranks. After two days of bar-to-bar competition, and probably some heated backroom debates, this year’s winner is Zac Chapman, 18, of Weatherford, Texas, who barely got the better of Dane Westby, 20, of Tulsa, Okla. Congrats to both of these guys, who seem ready to jump into the AMA pro sportbike fray.

Us “old guys” may have been a bit of an afterthought amid all this drama, but we all had hopes and dreams of our own. Mine was to prove to myself whether the Nelson Ledges experience was an epiphany or a fluke.

It didn’t take long to find out. After a short, Friday morning, feel-your-way session on a cold, dewy track, Friday afternoon brought instant gratification: 2 seconds of improvement on my best race time during the previous AHRMA Mid-Ohio race-fest.

Let the trumpets sound!

Same deal Saturday — cautious in the morning for a handful of laps, then another second faster in the late-morning practice.

Three seconds of improvement in less than 25 laps. That’s pretty amazing.

I could have gone home happy at that point — except there was still some racing to be done.

Actually, my race expectations were quite low, considering the power deficit that the Buell faces under the class definitions set forth by WERA, the group running the event for AMA.

They would have been even lower going into the Lightweight Twins Superbike race had I known that young Westby and Chapman were going to be bringing Jedi light sabers to a knife fight.

Westby came out on top of this one by a scant 0.121 seconds, and the pair of them were turning lap times on Suzuki SV-650 twins (the entire field was made up of these bikes, except my oddball Buell) that would have landed them in the top-10 of the ultra-competitive 600 classes.

Bear in mind that the average 600 sportbike, with four cylinders, comes stock from the factory with better suspension and probably 30-40 more horsepower than an SV-650. But then the average SV isn’t ridden by guys like Chapman, Westby or Dustin Dominguez, who also was tearing up the track.

So while the leaders were in a league of their own, I didn’t exactly feel hopelessly outclassed, and was able to keep in touch with a couple of riders and get into some real racing. Fun stuff.

Sunday morning practice was not optimal — WERA decided to tighten the practice schedule considerably. Time-robbing incidents, which seem all too frequent at a tough track like Mid-Ohio, had forced some of Saturday’s races to be shortened.

Sunday’s challenge was the Heavyweight Twins Superstock race, which pit the 73-hp Buell against some real heavyweight contenders — bikes like the Aprilia Mille, Ducati 1098 and Honda RC-51 that all crank out well over 110 hp.

The challenge of keeping these beasts in sight — at least some of them — brought a slight improvement in lap times again, as the Buell really felt dialed in.

The second half of the race also brought a hammer-and-tongs battle with Jon Clausen, who oddly enough was also riding a bike bearing the number 919, only with yellow novice plates.

Jon’s Ducati was very fast on the straights.

This battle taught me a few things about Mid-Ohio that weren’t obvious:

* Mid-Ohio is a handling track. Everybody says this, and it’s true. There are whole sections where you’re transitioning the bike from being leaned one way, to being leaned the other way. Very seldom is the bike straight up-and-down. If you can corner, this is a very fun track.

* Mid-Ohio is also a track of straightaways. The obvious one is the long back straight, where the power bikes really stretch out and fly. But linking all those corners are some critical short straightaways, where power plays havoc too. I’m thinking of the front straight, the section betweens Turn One and Two, and the run-up to Turn 11. Even the blind section through Turn Eight. Granted, most of these “straights” actually curve quite a bit, but they are acceleration zones where all the hard work you do setting up a pass can go up in tire smoke.

* Mid-Ohio is not a braking track — at least not on a Buell XB9R. One of my goals was to try getting through Turn One without braking by the end of the weekend. I think it’s possible, but I never managed it. Maybe next time. A rule-of-thumb measure of whether a track is a “braking track” or not is to touch your thumb to the front brake disk after turning some laps. If the hot disk raises a blister, it’s a braking track! My brakes never got that hot.

* Mid-Ohio is a dangerous track, especially for bikes. A friend and really good rider, Pete Cline, struck the safety Air Fence during the Clubman race. If that inflated barrier hadn’t been in place, he probably would have struck hay bales then solid concrete, and we would be writing an entirely different column today. There are simply too many unyielding walls, too close to the edge of the racing surface. And even after repaving, Mid-Ohio has slippery tar “snakes” that seem to hold moisture after the rest of the track surface has dried. I understand why it’s hard to make safety improvements — owning a race track probably isn’t wildly profitable, and such infrastructure improvements are very expensive. Miguel Duhamel, one of the most talented riders in the business, is recovering from injuries sustained when he struck a wall at Road Atlanta while testing. The other side of the argument is that no one is forcing us to ride at such a track (unless, like Westby, Chapman and others, we want to be the next Horizon Award winner and launch a pro racing career). But I got a sick feeling this weekend every time the Medivac helicopter took off, not knowing whether it was carrying an injured rider or worse.

* Mid-Ohio is a friendlier place. Yes, there are still inexplicable, draconian rules against riding a bicycle. But the steely-eyed deputies weren’t there cracking down on these lawless young hooligan exercise nuts, as in years past.

So kudos to the AMA for sanctioning an event that invites the nation’s best club racers — and a supporting cast with a bit less talent — to one big shootout. Thanks to WERA for doing a fine job managing the thousand-and-one details that go into such a project.

And keep your eyes on Chapman. One of the previous Horizon winners is a guy named Ben Spies, who just wrapped up his second consecutive AMA Superbike title.