Some Thoughts on Motorbike Racing
It’s a lot to get a street bike, learn how to ride it, and ride it on the street without dying.
To want to race it at a race track, with all of the arcane rules and standards for bike preparation, the gear, the travel, is another thing entirely. It’s an all immersive experience. The skills involved have to do with planning, are deeply mechanical, and athletic. That’s to speak nothing of the money involved, where the question of “How much?” is answered with “All of it” and a $5000 machine is the least expensive part of the equation.
By the time a racer sells their race bike, they will hopefully have spent multiples of its purchase price racing it, that way they know they got enough use out of it. This is why people practically give their race bikes away just to see someone else use them. What’s $5000 when you’ve spent 6 times that racing it during the past couple few years?
There is no prize money. Nobody makes money doing this anymore. We spend money. Why do it at all then? There’s a certain type of person in this world for whom something is worth risking everything to do. That something could be anything. Many people casually say they would give anything for the opportunity to do a thing that sounds exciting to them, but very few of us actually follow through with those impulses. It always seems like there’s something more important going on in our lives.
Motorcycle racers absolutely follow through. We are the passionate ones. We understand that money is infinite and time is precious. We will spend whatever we can get and whatever it takes to maximize our enjoyment of our thing and by extension our lives. If someone doesn’t get that, I don’t know what to say to them other than I don’t really get how they carry on the way they do, either. And to each their own.
Some people like the outdoors or what used to be called the great outdoors. I like being outside, but I’m not outdoorsy. There’s not much pristine wilderness left. There are pristine stretches of tarmac at race tracks though, and racing motorbikes on them amounts to a kind of tempest in a teapot, a wilderness of my own making. Controlled chaos. Playing with fire. Seeing how far I can push a thing. It’s also about engineering a situation, putting things into motion. That’s the planning part. And I have to use my body, all of it, to pull off something like a disappearing act on top of my motorcycle.
A disappearing act?
I think many people have the idea that the person on the motorcycle is striving for complete control over the motorcycle, but control is a funny thing, a strange idea. The more we try to control something, the more it seems to resist our control and the more it controls us. A motorcycle is a self-stabilizing machine more than capable of running straight or leaned over without a rider on top until it loses momentum or hits something. This is another way of saying there’s only so much a rider can to to control a motorcycle. The racer must work within those limitations.
The motorcycle needs the rider to
- Remove momentum (brake)
- Maintain momentum
- Gain momentum (throttle)
- Initiate turning
- End turning
Everything else is extra; there is no everything else. The idea is to do just those five things while upsetting the motorcycle as little as possible. In theory, the bike is more than capable of doing these things without a rider, but it needs a rider to tell it what to do. Once I tell it what to do, I disappear until it’s time to tell it something else.
It’s in this way that I turn myself into what I think of as a Focused Ball of Primordial Light on top of my motorcycle, which sounds really pretentious, and it probably is (stolen from a weird Russian novel of course), but that’s how I feel when I’m going really fast on my motorcycle at the track. I don’t feel like a person anymore with all of my stupid problems, the regrets and the failed relationships, wrong turns, financial disasters, and bad decisions. In those moments it’s like I don’t exist anymore; my eyes flit from one marker to the next, every movement feels automatic, and conscious thought like an unnecessary luxury, just another one of society’s nonsense affectations.
I don’t know why the other racers do it, but that’s why I do it.