Vintage Nationals

Oct 24, 2011

No, that’s not a picture of me. Not even close. After arriving home with a broken shoulder from Flat-track racing school, Deborah wasn't keen on allowing me to pursue the venture any further. She didn't want me riding a motorcycle at all, and racing? "No way!" But yesterday I convinced her to come with me to watch a few friends race at an upstate speedway.

After seeing the riders all headed in the same direction, wearing heavily padded gear, with an ambulance parked a few yards from the track, she began to soften her staunch anti-racing stance. And once the little kids took to the track, some of them as young as six years old, she melted all together.

"Oh my god, so cute!"

"It looks like so much fun!" she said.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you," I said. "It's just a bunch of guys having fun on old bikes. No one is out to hurt anybody."

"You should do it," she said.

My plan was working.

It was the last race of the season, however, so Deborah still has a few months to change her mind again. We’ll see.

We arrived at lunchtime. Deborah ordered some French fries and, as she paid, the guy behind the counter asked if she was with The Discovery Channel. "No," she laughed, not sure why he was asking.

We were there to watch my friends race—Hugh, the owner of Sixth Street Specials. and Fumi. a mechanic there. As it turned out, a crew from The Discovery Channel was there to watch them, too. The crew was filming for the latest season of a show called "Cafe Racer." Hugh and Fumi appeared in the show's first season, but since I don't have cable, I still haven't seen it.

An episode of the show features Hugh and Fumi building a cafe racer from a collection of rusty old parts. Although a cafe racer is a completely different style of motorcycle from the dented-up flat-track bikes Hugh and Fumi were riding that day, I guess the show wanted some "color" and tagged along to get some footage for the show.

"Fumi's good," Deborah said to Fumi's girlfriend, Asami, who stood next to us during the racing. "He's beaten, like, everyone he's been racing against today, right?"

Asami shrugged. "I don't know," she said. "He has so many trophies, I don't know what any of them are for, I only know that there's no more room in the apartment for all of them."

We didn't stay all day —didn't stay to see the final races, anyway— and we made our way through the pit to say our goodbyes.

Hugh was busy talking to a guy who had ridden from New York City -- roughly 90 miles -- on a custom-built chopper with a biodiesel engine. It was the furthest he'd taken it since getting it running. Hugh asked him how the ride was.

"It was a little chilly this morning," he said. "And, um...well...the whole thing vibrates...A LOT."

"Getting out before the blood and guts, eh?" said Hugh when he saw we were leaving. "Did you ride up on yer bike?"

"No, we drove."

"Very civilized, very civilized. We did, too, of course," he said, thumbing over his shoulder at a van full of oily rags and tools. "Take care of yourself. Come racing next time."

Another member of the Sixth Street Specials team said we were smart to head back. "That's the worst part about racing here. By the end of the day, you're whipped. You have to load up all your gear and then fight all that traffic. It's a whole other race to get back. The human race...the rat race."

I told him Deborah and I were hoping to find a little roadside diner, and asked if he could recommend something good nearby.

"No," he said. "I really can't. If you find something, everyone would love to hear about it. I always wind up just eating the crappy food here, hot dogs and stuff."

As it was, we didn't find any quaint places to eat and, honestly, after a couple hours plodding along in leaf-peeper traffic, a crappy hotdog sounded pretty good to me.

Okay, enough writing, time to start scrounging around for race bike parts.