#patent

The extravagance in which my surplus emotion expressed itself lay on the road. So long as roads were tarred blue and straight; not hedged; and empty and dry, so long I was rich. – T. E. Lawrence, The Road

In a little less than a month this nation’s most prolonged and painful presidential gestation period will come to a merciful end. Predictions of the impending apocalypse aside, I hope we will return to our normal state of disharmony and discord, the less consequential kind that can be addressed productively with a large Snap-On toolbox and a shelf full of shop manuals. We can get back to a world of fixing things that actually entails making something useful again rather than the amoral political machinations “fixing” implies.

Nelson Ledges Road Course in the wet was stickier than Summit Point Raceway in the dry. This was one of the first of many epiphanies I had in 1986 in my first full season of racing with WERA. I had shed my international orange “I am a Hazard” t-shirt along with my provisional novice status the year before with crash-free races at Pocono and Summit Point, and I was now a full-fledged novice racer free to crash with impunity so far as my license status was concerned. An option I would avail myself of at first opportunity.

California Superbike School’s Keith Code accurately summarized the existential conundrum of every road racer when he asked rhetorically, “You have 10 dollars worth of concentration, where do you want to spend it?” I’d maintain that the wisdom revealed by Code’s question goes far beyond the race track; it applies to life in general, and is confirmed every time I see a miscreant in a mini-van texting while purportedly driving.

An intensive care unit (ICU) is a great place to think – there is so much time on your hands at all hours of the day and night, and you get to meet all these really nice people. The problem is you really can’t focus on much, the shadows dance against the wall and change. I blame it on the Dilaudid, or Plato, or life itself. Much of my waking hours early on were filled with a kaleidoscope of images from the past, in some cases the distant past: people, places, and bikes for the most part, and questions.

We live in a contentious time, and, no, I’m not talking about the present-day election cycle. We daily encounter a world where the outrageous garners our attention, where “news” stories are presented to us in an inflammatory fashion, where the purveyors of this new-age “news” seek to stir our emotions rather than to inform us or make us think: A new age of the aggrieved and the angry.

The year was 1982, and I needed a new helmet. After years of use my Bell Star smelled like a barn and had acquired a patina that evoked images of the Anzio landing. It was all scarred up and it stunk. I think a mouse had been nibbling on the liner as well. It was time for a new lid.

MO’s regular Wednesday contributor’s columns are intended as an alternative to our usual straight motorcycle reviews and discussions. There is always a motorcycle connection to them, however tenuous, but they are first and foremost intended to be free-range editorial space. Last week we presented John Burns’ take on a current hot-button issue, and his “Guns And Moto” column touched off a blaze of controversy resulting in more than 130 reader comments. It also struck columnist Chris Kallfelz, who claims he tried to put Burns’ piece out of his head but wrote this column anyway. He expresses a different view of the gun issue. 

All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray
–The Mamas & the Papas

There comes a point where you just do not feel like stopping, where getting off the bike feels unnatural. It doesn’t start that way, it ends that way. Presumably you probably have a destination you want to get to: your own bed, your own coffee maker, your spouse, your front porch. Interstates are great for that, and I detest them. They are heartless, soulless slabs of asphalt and concrete looking at the same thing over and over again: orange barrels, the usual fast-food slop chutes, and truckers and tourists. That’s not living.

We live in an age of specialization and performance. A few words written by one of MO’s finest the other day drove this home to me. He had muttered those magic words: “200 miles per hour.” That is a very impressive number indeed. There was a time when topping a “Ton” (100 mph) was the magic number to the porridge pot helmet crowd on their British cafe racers, today we can kick around the notion of 200 mph without being regarded as completely daft.*

There has been a quiet evolution taking place that I believe is making roadracing opportunities more broadly available to a wider audience. This is good for both aspiring novice racers who seek to acquire their license and some seat time, as well as veteran go-fast guys who have a bike loitering around in the garage all safety-wired up with number plates getting dusty. A quick glance at the WERA rulebook, Chapter 11, Vintage Rules, would give you a hint. The notion of what constitutes “Vintage” has changed over time, and particularly in the past year.

Recently we have had a spate of rather serious columns about tedious but fun-loving affairs like horsepower limits, helmet laws, novelty helmets, and ethanol fuel. That’s all well and fine, but I’d like to change things up a bit here in the interest of you, the reader (because that is why we are here in the first place), and share with you a small glimpse into a lifetime of moto-stupid. I’d like to think in a way that I pushed the boundaries of dumb so you don’t have to.

The asphalt and tar strips are baking. When they throw the red flag on the first lap, you can guess what happened. Somebody screwed up and made a bloody mess out of things and you have to trundle back to the hot pit. If it was a three-wave start, it’s chaos – you are baking in your leathers, and now you have to start thinking. A rational human being would be thinking about what poor soul just augured in somewhere and brought out this red flag in the first place. But you’re not remotely rational, you’re a racer.

Shortly before our clan chieftain grabbed his Samsonite carry-on bag and blasted out the door for LAX, he took a moment to drop a line to myself and my esteemed colleague, J. Burns, the content of which caused a chorus of, “Oh no, not this again.” It concerned a proposed rule by our beloved National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) concerning their current regulation, FMVSS No. 218, the regulation addressing U. S. Department of Transportation (DOT) standards for motorcycle helmet testing. It seems NHTSA wants to revise their standard because they are concerned about “novelty” helmets.