Living Dangerously by Jon Pearson
The van not starting at 4.30 at. The tent blowing away. A puncture in a race. The long, lonely drives home in a slow, old van. The rain. the rain, the rain. You hope you learn a few things as you progress through life but these themes have been re-occurring in my life since I was about 12 years old.
What I hadn’t ever done before was complete a full season o2 club racing. A stack of British, regional and club off-road championship are tightly under my belt but after 50 years testing bikes,for magazines the itchy urge to do it ‘for real’ finally grew too strong in 2007.
There are loads and loads of options in the UK for going racing I’ve tried a few and written about them in the mag before; each of them is fantastic, but exactly which one should I do? Of all the championships I’ve guest ridden in the Bracken KTM 660 Cup stood out his single make, has control tyres, has an organiser and on the face oft it very few tuning regs and above all a good bunch of blokes taking part.
Those things make it less daunting, friendlier and easier to get into. Having a very nice man. in this case lain Hutton. to turn up at each meeting and act as usher for the thirty or so of us helped no end. especially when I couldn’t start the thing. Alarmingly quickly my wallet smelt of burning Mastercard and my shed had an orange bike inside it.
It makes you think
I had no idea the season would turn out to be quite so full of emotion There was an ‘up’ for everyone of those downs listed above but I never thought the commitment would be so testing or that each race would be so demanding.
The ‘ups’ are good though. The Domington Park round (my favourite circuit was a glorious sunny weekend but it was clear from the off that the fast, flowing circuit didn’t favour my bike at all. I invested in different gearing but it made little difference because the bike didn’t have the power to take advantage of it.
There was some advantage in the slipstream but on my own or if I led onto a straight it was hopeless, like hitting a brick wall. The race was quickly a matter of seeing the two faster bikes get away and settling into the usual battle for third/fourth.
But there was the interesting bit A juddering two-wheel slide, flat out through Craner Curves is a bad feeling believe me, and for a few laps third became fifth and a gap grew larger.
But a longer-than-usual race gave me time to think. The long and the short of it was pushing down with my outside boot, really hard through every corner (while still counter steering to keep the bike down on my knee) stopped the heart stopping slides.
It made for one of the most physical races all year and I found myself braking so incredibly late into the final corner my brain couldn’t keep up with the deceleration. In the end I’d never been so pleased with a fourth.
I wish that could be said for the rest of the year. But like I said, the surprise was finding so many ‘downs’. The inevitability of turning up to race for third made turning up at all seem more and more pointless as the year progressed. It’s the taking part that counts is it? Fuck off. I want to load things into the van at the end of a weekend knowing I did the best I possibly could. I’ve done enough ‘competing’ to know when third is really as ‘hard-fought’ for as it might say in the paper the next week
The poinllessness of it all never hit me so hard as it did on the Friday of the Mallory Park BSB meeting. I competed in two KTM SuperDuke races last season, and Mallory was the first. The weather was awful all the way up the M1 and I arrived at the circuit in time to see a helicopter taking off. Nothing much was happening; no bikes, people standing about and nothing but grim faces in the rain. Eventually I saw someone I knew.
Bob Gray, who told me the terrible truth that Oily Bridewell had been killed. God rest his soul I thought and set about heading home. Except I didn’t even make the van door because the racing goes on. it turns out. Even in the face of more atrocious weather, a whole day of standing about, no qualifying or practice on race day, we still lined up on the grid and I still went along with it.
The farce inside the big bowl of Mallory Park was four laps old when my front brake completely failed and I entered Gerrards. the fastest corner on the circuit, without a front brake. To everyone looking I just ran a bit wide, slowed up and pulled in. But inside my lid the reality of racing hit me harder than I ever thought it could. Why was I doing this? I didn’t have an answer.
Crashing
Racing makes you push harder than you’ve ever pushed. You try and make up for your other pitfalls and that means sometimes you go over your true limits and. about one in a hundred times by my maths, that means you crash. You do learn from your mistakes, but not one of my crashes was the same so what can you do?
I fell out of the lead at Pembrey when the footrest hit the deck and lifted the back wheel off the floor. I lost the rear after clipping the curb at Castle Combe, I had the longest front wheel slide which I thought I could save Ibut eventually had to concede I couldn’t) at Cadwell. The worst of all was falling off on the way to the grid.
It was certainly the most humiliating moment because clerks of course don’t take too kindly to people falling off on the way to the grid, whatever your reason. Your brain might sey you need to try and scrub the tyres but in the eyes of some clerks of courses you’d be better howling into turn one ahead of thirty maniacs with a cold and shiny new set
VERYSUPERSTITIO
For no explainable reason I became superstitious. I’d piss in the same urinal all weekend, sometimes waiting like a weirdo while someone else uncomfortably wondered why I wasn’t using one of the three other unused pots in the bog. I also now have a pair of gloves which make me crash and a pair which keep me safe.
I tried all year to disprove this theory but every time I wore the blue ones I ended up on my arse and every time I wore the red ones I stayed on and had a good race. It hasn’t quite got to Rossi levels of weirdness but I can see how it escalates.
Long and winding road
Your van is your kitchen, workshop, changing room, bedroom, place of solace, even church at some points. It’s where you do everything and nothing all at the same time. Some people spend lots of money, time and effort kitting themselves out with motorhomes and nice dry awnings. There’s absolutely no doubt this is better, if you’re going to spend so much time away from home you might as well make it as much like home from home as possible.
But not everyone can afford such luxuries. My rusty old van is a joke, literally. People laugh at it in the paddock and by the end off the year I was getting rounds of applause when we made it (this was largely because оf a flat battery incident at Pembrey but we don’t like to talk about that). But it. plus a Eurohike tent, was everything a racing man could need, albeit in a slightly more modest way.
Loading things into and out of the van is something you don’t ever enjoy too much though. Pembrey. Cadwell. Donington: none of these places are very near my house. There’s nothing more deflating than the sinking realisation of the journey ahead of you at 5.30pm on a Sunday night with hundreds of miles to your door, the football phone-in on Five Live or not.
And even then you still have to trudge backwards and forwards from the van with the bike (which you’re still angry with), your spares boxes (which seem twice as heavy and you still don’t need half the things you’ve packed “just in case”), your kit (strewn across the van, wet with sweat/rain) and the dirty pans half full of cold pasta.
When it’s all said and done
Before you know it it’s all over and the ‘ups’ finally out-weight the ‘downs’. The modest pile of trophies and the odd set of laurels in the spare room add up to a third in the championship and prove the season was worth the time effort and money. ‘Getting rid of that bike from the shed’ (the wife’s words, not mine) and deciding what to do next year looms like a naughty liaison with an old girlfriend. Slowly but surely the buts, whats and ifs creep in and 2008 is offering a world of possibilities again.
Source: SuperBike Magazine