#125: I Hate Racing

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

That title got your attention, didn't it? Let me be more specific: I hate (as in “can't watch”) a specific sort of motorcycle racing. I love motorcycle racing, except when kids are doing it. When a stadium motocross is broken up (too often literally) with a bunch of 8-year-olds plodding around a motocross track, smashing into each other and the track obstacles, I have to be somewhere else. I can't watch. Likewise, I can't watch movie torture scenes, horror movies of any sort, much of anything by Disney or Lucasfilm, and romantic or sex scenes that last longer than a handshake. I'm a lightweight, I admit it.

This isn't a new thing for me. I have never liked any of the big three of what we call "organized sports" for little kids: Pop Warner football, Little League baseball, or youth hockey. Motorcycle racing for little kids combines everything that is dangerous and useless in all of those sports into one injury-plagued, little-league-Dad-hyped, emergency-room-filling sport. I did not encourage my kids to ride motorcycles or play any organized sports, although I have always been a sports fan. Neither of my daughters or my grandson have been inspired to ride a motorcycle (although my oldest daughter is seriously considering a scooter this summer), but they have all been involved in a variety of sports: skateboarding, cross-country and marathon running, triathlons, baseball, and archery. If they'd have expressed an interesting in motorcycle racing, I'd have recommended they get serious about bicycling and, once they were good enough on self-powered two-wheels, we'd talk about a motorcycle. So far, bicycles have been more than enough two-wheeling for all of my kids and I'm fine with that. Motorcycling is not for everyone. Motorcycle racing is for hardly anyone.

Kids find enough ways to bang themselves up without having some nutball parent urging them to do dumber, more dangerous stuff to fill in the spaces in Dad's sadly unfulfilled life. No body needs to see good-'ole-dad raging at some pimpled-up teenage kid who was foolish enough to play referee at one of those half-pint gladiator events. The only life-lesson to take away from most little kid sporting events is that most people should not be allowed to reproduce; that goes double for the infamous little league dads. They shouldn't even be allowed to watch other people reproduce.

When kids like Peter Lenz (13), Jake Wilson (5), and ,even, Darrel Davis (16) and Oscar McIntyre (17) are pushing the limits of sanity, I'm not into watching it. I'm not trying to say they shouldn't be allowed to race and risk their lives. I'm just saying I don't want to watch. I don't like seeing anyone get hurt on a race track, but I'm just not up for seeing kids hurt . . . period. I don't watch races for the crashes, I watch racing for the passes, for the battles in the corners, and for the strategy. I don't want to see anything more exciting than a low-side that results in a racer sliding harmlessly into the gravel runoff and, at most, harmlessly bumps into the air fence.

About ten years back, when I was producing a cable show called "Motorcycling Minnesota," I took my grandson to the Dome to watch a Supercross. Ricky Carmichael was on top of his game and the cast of characters who pushed him to AMA Hall of Fame status were on hand. The first heats were terrific and we were enjoying our great press booth seats and the free food and booze when the half-time "entertainment" turned out to be a couple dozen kids pretty close to my grandson's age riding tiny minibikes around part of the pro course. The whoops amounted to large hillclimbs for some of those kids and the course was excessively difficult for the majority of the kids. They high-centered at the top of the whoops and fell over, they nose-dived into the troughs and fell over, they crashed into each other and a couple of kids crawled off of the course in obvious pain and likely injuries. Dads were incensed and a couple of kids got yelled at for crying after crashing. After thirty years of loving motocross, I lost my taste for the sport. Neither I or my grandson have thought twice about going back for another Supercross event since.

Kids don't need to start early to be great at most sports. There are exceptions, like gymnastics and . . . I can't think of any others, but for every "I got into ____when I was four and went on to be world champion" story there are 10,000 "by the time I was nine I hated ____ and hung up my helmet/shoes/skates/bat/hat for the last time" sad tales. For every Valentino Rossi (his failed racer dad started him on karts and motorcycles when he was 8 and put him on a motorcycle racetrack at 11) there are a half-dozen Bob "Hurricane" Hannah's who said, "My father was against racing. He did not mind me riding, but at the same time he didn’t want me getting hurt. So I never raced until I was 18 years old and living on my own."

For more than a year, the AMA peppered me with press releases about how we motorcyclists needed to campaign Congress to overturn the 2009 ban on lead in kids' toys, which included the batteries and other components in motorcycles made for kids. I even took a little editorial heat about consistently finding "more important" things to report in All the News. Sorry, I can't give a damn about manufacturers having difficulty selling crippling "toys" to kids. I think they deserve all the political expense, legal liability, and moral suffering they experience for those products. Eventually, crazy heads won the day and kids were back on their "donor machines," but at least I didn't make a contribution.

In 1988, in an article titled "Controversies about intensive training in young athletes" a pair of British doctors argued, “Young athletes are not just smaller athletes, and they should not become sacrificial lambs to a coach’s or parent’s ego.” To put a fine point on that statement, "young athletes" are our children and should be allowed to be kids without the pressure of imagining themselves to be the future of a sport or their parents' retirement plan. Even more important, if you expect me to pay big money to attend a sporting event, do not torture me with a gladiator kids event at half-time. I'll take a gymnastic display of cheerleaders over gutted and busted-up kids anytime.

My Motorcycles: 1974 Rickman 125 ISDT

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For me, the Rickman 125 was a turning point in motorcycling. It is, 26 years later, one of the two new bikes I've owned. Before and after 1974, I've always bought used. I paid $500 for the Rickman, right out of the box. I did the dealer assembly myself, as part of the price I'd negotiated. The bike was sold as a 1974 model, but I think it was a 1973 that was just relabeled when the '73 inventory carried over. Modern suspensions just started to appear in 1974 and the Rickman was almost instantly obsolete.

On one hand, it was a terrific motorcycle. The Rickman 125 ISDT (International Six Day Trials model) had strong, bulletproof motor and the bike was an artistic example of European design. The chrome-moly, nickel plated frame was an example of the finest workmanship. The quality and beauty of the welding was the best I've ever seen, anywhere.

While the radial head Zundapp motor was a nightmare of false neutrals and monster-Q powerband, the motor had a chrome-plated cylinder and rings. I think the Zundapp 125 would outlast any other motorcycle I've ever heard of, off-road. However, the powerband was so limited that it drove me to disassemble and reassemble the motor dozens of times, hoping to find some miracle that would put me in the front of the pack without having to spend hard-to-come-by money getting there.

In those days, I was earning $3.60 an hour and supporting a family of four on that wage. My average work week was 80 hours and I'd saved spare change for a whole year to scrape up the $500 to buy this bike. Regardless of how unsuited it was for the purpose I intended, it was going to have to work because I had no other choice. I raced the Rickman in the last few cross-country events in the Midwest. I thrashed it through several thousand miles of motocross tracks across Nebraska and northern Kansas, including "the big show"; the Herman, NE track where the nationals and international racers visited on the AMA and and TransAM tour. (My bike actually touched the same dirt as Roger DeCoster, Bob Hannah, and a host of great riders of whom you've probably never heard. I ground the Rickman's gears through a half-dozen enduros, a 24-hour winter endurance race in South Dakota, and, once, an observed trials. I even taught my wife how to ride a motorcycle on the Rickman.

As you can see by the above scan of a nasty old Polaroid, motorcycling was a family sport for my family in those days. No, I didn't ride in that "outfit" (how about those Converse riding "boots"?), but I did a lot of tuning in an enclosed garage that probably could have smoked meat. My passenger is my beautiful daughter, Holly, when she was about three years old. Remembering that exhaust setup, the bike had to have been stone cold for us to be sitting in those positions. That homemade expansion chamber could fry a steak at 2".

Don't ask me why I left the speedo on the bike in motocross form, but there it was. I probably had twice as much invested in the add-ons for this bike than I'd spent on the original motorcycle. I pounded out the exhaust myself, finishing it off with one of the original pie-pan SuperTrapp silencers. I'd "blueprinted the intake ports (which made the bike even peakier), tuned the crap out of the Bing carb, and attempted shimming the transmission (which reduced the number of false neutrals available between gears from 4,358 to 12), and invested a thousand hours in the suspension. All in vain. The Rickman was about 50 pounds too heavy, 10 hp too wimpy, and the wide-band ISDT transmission just didn't cut it on the motocross track. I did OK in the half dozen cross-country races I'd managed to locate, but cross-country racing was all but dead in 1974 and enduros bored me stiff.

Toward the end of my racing "career," all of the major damage I did to myself happened on the Rickman. More accurately, those things happened as I was being flung from the Rickman. Broken toes, fingers, ribs, collarbone, and all sorts of burns and road rashes. After 10 years of riding damage-free, I went through a six month period where I couldn't seem to keep the rubber-side down. At age 31, I quit racing while I could still stand mostly erect.

I probably put several thousand hours on the Zundapp motor and, every winter when I tore it down, the rings and cylinder met like-new specs. I sold the bike in 1978, for $125. By then, it was absolutely useless on a race track. Long travel suspensions and watercooled motors had turned the Rickman and most of Europe's motorcycles into ancient history. It was still a beautiful piece of workmanship, though. It was almost like selling a member of the family. I have not been sentimental about selling a motorcycle since the Rickman rolled out of my garage belonging to someone else.

The left picture is of the Rickman in cross-country or enduro dress. Working (mostly) Bosch electrics, a Carl Shipman toolbag on the tank, and, otherwise, the same bike I raced on Nebraska motocross tracks. I'd gear the bike down about 6 teeth (rear sprocket) for motocross, because the top speed was 75mph over broken ground in stock form. The bike was so stable that a good (and light, less than 150 lbs.) rider could wick it up and hang on for miles, WFO.

The last cross-country race I did on the Rickman was in far western Sidney, Nebraska, about 30 miles from the Colorado border. I was blasting the 125 class when the race was called for the mother of all dust storms after the third lap. I looked like a filthy raccoon, when I pulled off my goggles and helmet and my eyes were so sandblasted that I could hardly open them the next day. The dust was so dense that it chewed through the master cylinder on my Mazda's hydraulic clutch on the way back home. We drove almost 400 miles, clutch-less, 100 of that through dust so thick that visibility was barely beyond the nose of our 1973 Mazda RX3 station wagon. The Rickman, however, was doing fine when the race ended.

It took a lazy Nebraskan, who thought air filters were for girly-men, to kill the Rickman. He put in a whole day of riding on the Platte River bed before the power vanished and he walked back home, leaving the Rickman to sink into the sandy river bottom. He even had the gall to call me and complain about the bike, two years after he bought it and 2,000 miles after I'd sold it to him. The bike's frame was a work of welding art. It should have enjoyed a much more honorable demise, but dirt bikes don't often die happily or attractively.