Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There (25 page)
One by one they demonstrated that they could ‘bail out’, which sounds like they’re going to jump from their vehicles or something but actually means they know how to save themselves. If you’re hurtling across the salt at warp speed and something goes very wrong, you need to have the presence of mind to remove your death grip from the steering wheel, pull the parachute, kill the master switch, activate the fire extinguishers, kill the fuel pump and start the process of egress from your fully armoured driver seat, assuming you’re not upside down or on fire and are still conscious, possibly having just flipped over several thousand times. Getting out is even harder.
You know that old footage of the manned rocket missions into outer space in the 60s and the astronaut with his briefcase air supply is getting helped into his seat, then the German guys in the lab coats pile into the capsule and strap the astronaut in by standing on his groin and shoulders and pulling collectively as hard as they can. Well, these salt lake racing guys are strapped in like that, so they can just breathe, then their entire full-face-helmet-clad head is restrained and strapped into another metal frame, then their arms are tethered with more straps and they’re also wearing fireproof undies, dragster spec fire suit and gloves.
As I stood there I suddenly realised that Speed Week is a serious and extremely dangerous business.
By the time we got to the scrutineering tent I was grinning but completely terrified, I had also managed to cook my brain and was overheating at a frightening rate. The motorcycle scrutineer looked at my riding gear and helmet, then turned to Ed and asked if I’d recently had a stroke. ‘Mate, you need to drink some water and try to relax before your run,’ he said to me.
I nodded but couldn’t talk as I’d run out of spit and my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.
‘The bike’s fine,’ he said and slapped my pass into my hand. ‘Good luck.’
He smiled and moved on to the next bike, while we went back to our pits where I drank 600 litres of water, pulled on my leathers and boots and got in the queue at the back of the GPS track.
Speed Week is all about queuing and patience and drinking 600 litres of water and still not peeing. At the GPS track a truly oddball mix of would-be speed aficionados lined up, sitting around in leathers in 50-degree heat and waiting their go. Mates, wives and family members took it in turns to hold umbrellas over heads while now and again someone would pour water down the back of racing leathers, wet towels abundant. We patiently waited for our turn while Ed ferried water to me. I needed a nappy by the time I was at the pre-start line.
FINALLY THE PRE-START
line was there in front of me; about 10 metres beyond that lay the start line, a thin length of blue rope stretched across the surface of the salt. This was when I had a few moments to get organised while the rider ahead of me waited for the official starter to give him the nod. I waited with the bike grumbling under me while sweat trickled down under my leathers; helmet on and strapped, engine on, fuel pump, fuel management system, engine kill line tethered to my wrist, GPS, gloves, all on.
Sean Kelly was the man ahead of me. He was poised, focused and ready, and the starter was standing to Sean’s left with a two-way radio pressed against his ear waiting for the spotters down the track to tell him it was all clear. Then Sean rolled forward slightly and collapsed, falling from his bike; the engine died the moment his hand left the grip. The starter rushed in to get his helmet off. Sean was in trouble and was whisked away into the shade, his bike pushed over to one side.
The starter waved me forward. I popped the bike into gear and rolled up to the line and looked down the endless track; the Coriolis effect of the earth came into play here. The lake was so vast, I was suddenly not hot anymore—I was so pumped I nearly puked pure adrenalin into my lid. I broke my stare into the white abyss to look over at the starter; he was talking into the two-way, then he stopped, gave me a big smile. ‘Good to go,’ he shouted over the engine noise. ‘Visor down,’ he motioned like a man finishing a salute and pointed down the track. ‘Go!’
I throttled on slowly and clutched out at the same rate, remembering I had so much more time and space than the blacktop, this was the salt. The bike still slid slightly sideways, fishtailing off the line with wheel spin through first gear. Second stopped the slide and I gained grip and acceleration, slowly climbing through the revs. It’s a bizarre surface to ride on, the whole lake looks like white crazy paving. It’s not a flat smooth surface at all; each piece of the crazy paving is at a slightly different angle from the one it’s attached to, and in between there is a bulbous line of salt that grows out of the cracks like too much mortar between concrete slabs. The track is about 10 metres wide and visible because the DLRA shave the salt mortar off the surface in the morning by dragging a huge piece of angle iron down the track.
Third gear started the vibrations, to my horror, that increased to a point where I could no longer read my instruments. The boundary between the salt and sky blurred on the horizon as I found fourth gear and tucked in as hard as I could. That morning I lay on the surface near our pits and licked the lake while Simon laughed at me; it tasted like salt, it looked like salt. I rubbed it between my fingers and imagined hitting it at 200 mph with a half-tonne bike on my head. It was tacky to the touch and sticky underfoot, caking onto shoes and tyres. But now in the heat it had dried out and hardened; now it was like a combination of hard damp sand and snow. The 1-mile marker shot past my shoulder out of the blinding white blur, then from nowhere a massive gust of wind hit the bike and shunted it over to the left; adrenalin made me grip harder and heave the bike into the wind, trying to correct my line. Inexperience had me riding down the centre of the track and not prepared for the crosswind at the halfway mark that everyone, even the guy selling meat pies off the back of his ute in the pit lane, knew about, except me.
The unique composition of the salt and the power of the wind combined with the size of my bike meant that although I was leaning as hard as I could into the wind, I was still getting pushed and sliding across the surface closer to the left edge of the track. Straying off the track meant a fall. I backed off the throttle and regained control. Salt lake racing was not at all what I imagined it would be like. I thought it would be easy, you just hold on and go, but it’s not that simple.
My ride down the return track ended at the back of the queue where the DLRA officials retrieved their GPS unit and logged your speed. The official said, ‘94.6 mph,’ and went on to the next vehicle. That’s about 152 kph, well under what I’d achieved on the tar and much less than what we knew the bike was capable of.
Ed and Colin looked perplexed. With few words exchanged we put the bike in the pits and then I hit up every rider I could find over the next few hours, getting the rundown on speed and wind and salt.
The first question they asked me was always ‘What are you riding?’. After I told them, the same sympathetic face was pulled. I found Jeff Lemon, a big New Zealander, very experienced rider and record holder. Jeff knows salt lake racing; he does Speed Week both here and at Bonneville. With that classic, quiet, methodical all-in-a-day’s-racing calm about him, he jumps on his bike and sets a record as casually as I would nip down to the supermarket for a loaf of bread. Jeff was on the verge of cracking the ‘Dirty Two’—that means passing 200 mph—on a stock Suzuki. He smiled when I found him; he knew I’d just had my first run and had been waiting for the onslaught of questions. ‘When the crosswind hit you, did you go rigid and get the death grip on the handlebars?’
I nodded.
‘Did the bike slide to the left?’
I nodded.
‘Were you running down the centre of the track?’
More nodding; he talked and I listened.
‘When that crosswind catches you, don’t panic,’ Jeff said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t sit up—just a shoulder poking out from your fairing can throw your bike off balance and cause a fall. So just relax into it, crank your steering damper right up, tuck in and steer the bike, don’t go rigid and over-grip. That bike presents a huge surface area for the wind to push against and you’re running solid wheels, so you need all that track to get up to speed because it’s big and heavy. It’s a lottery: you either ride through it or you need a run with no crosswind.’
My bike had been granted an exemption for the solid wheels; just having solid wheels is enough in a crosswind to blow a bike off the track, as opposed to a spoked wheel which allows the wind to pass through it. The rules stated that front wheels had to be cross-ventilated by an area equal to at least 25 per cent of normal rim circle area, but my bike was outside the rules and required me to compensate accordingly out on the salt.
Jeff put his big hand on my shoulder and leant in to speak over the noise of V8 crackling nearby. ‘Start your run at the far right of the track and try to stay there, the cars and other vehicles are churning up the surface and dumping loose salt on the left side, that should give you more time to get speed before the wind just blows that huge mainsail with wheels off the track.’ He slapped me on the back and laughed. ‘Go and catch some wisdom out there as well as crosswind. Now get back in the queue.’
I went back to the pits and talked to the lads. First we put more air into the tyres, an overpressure of 20 psi; this would help any correcting lean against the wind. Jeff told me not to worry about there being less tyre surface contact with the salt as I’d have so much forward momentum keeping me upright. Next we cut off the back of the front wheel guard; it was creating drag. Ed buried his head in the computer fuel management system, tweaking the software around the extreme heat to get more from the hardware, and with that I was back in my leathers and sitting in the queue again.
I asked another rider next to me if he knew what had happened to Sean Kelly. ‘Heat stroke, mate,’ he said. So I drank another 600 litres of water over the next 40 minutes until I found myself at the pointy end of the queue again. Sean Kelly had been put in a special shower that is set up for racers to recover from heat stroke; he got out of there and went on to smash two world records, and drink 600 litres of water.
AS FAR AS
Speed Week goes, it’s 90 per cent waiting and 10 per cent racing.
‘How’d you go?’ The starter at the GPS track yelled at me, smiling with his big hat on.
I smiled back in my helmet and gave him the thumbs-up. ‘Can I go over to the right?’
He nodded. ‘Crosswind?’
I shifted over slightly to the right, primed myself and the bike, gave the starter the nod.
‘Stand by . . . Visor down . . .
Go!
’ Exactly the same thing happened again, at the same point: the crosswind collected me, but this time I held on the power, leant into the wind way past my comfort zone and held my breath, letting go on the power as the bike wobbled through the loose salt in the middle and slid towards the left edge. I remembered not to sit up or touch the brakes and changed down very late to avoid a compression lock on the back wheel. The result was 95.5 mph, 153 kph.
I rode in to the back of the queue. Everyone was suffering from the extreme heat and dealing with the wind in their own way. I sat there thinking about it: all the things I took for granted when riding this bike on the asphalt on that runway at Corowa last year were now amplified on the salt to a new and utterly frightening degree. That kind of speed on a factory racing bike, on a straight racetrack, is child’s play, but on a half-tonne, homemade, 4-metre-long behemoth, on this surface, with this crosswind, and the aerodynamics of a Sherman tank, I started to realise Jeff was right. This was a lottery, a flat-out gamble on whether or not I could hold onto the power through the wind and stay on the track long enough to nail it. It was that simple.
Salt fever was creeping in, that heady mix of adrenalin and fear; I now knew why these nutters kept coming back. Their source code was written, processed and hardwired into their brain the second they finished their first run. It takes years to get the feel for what you’re doing out there. Lake Gairdner is widely recognised as being just as good as Bonneville, the slightly fat but funny little sister of the queen of speed in the USA. As I rolled towards my third run, she reminded me that although fun to be around, and good to look at, she’s got gas, and can ruin your day if you don’t give her the respect she deserves. It was at this moment she blew one of her 30 kph crosswinds at the queue and half a dozen riders stack it, including me.
Embarrassed by this, everyone sprang up and immediately heaved their bikes off the ground. It took four guys to get mine back on two wheels and, unbeknown to me at the time, I had just fractured my L5 vertebra; that is to say, a half-tonne bike falling on you is going to hurt and it did, but I did what men do and ate painkillers to shake it off.
Half a box of Tramadol later I was back at the start line; the starter, still grinning, jogged over. ‘You again, we need to stop meeting like this.’ He leant in to remind me of the gusting crosswind somewhere after the first mile and asked if I was sure I wanted to make a run.
I nodded and flicked my visor down.
Pulling away off the line, I was racing myself; I’m my own worst enemy and always have been. My back spasmed as I tucked in, my movements through the clutch lever, gear lever, throttle twist now automatic. I wasn’t shooting fast glances down at gauges; I could hear the rpm, I could feel what the bike was doing. My death grip was now just a loose hold, and everything was focused on the vibrating horizon, its fixed, fully charged dark clouds colliding high above and sparking lightning across the windscreen. When the first mile marker blipped past my peripheral left I was flat out in fourth gear; any moment now that fucking crosswind would hit me. What do you do? Definitive moments, life comes down to them all the time. Fiddle with your comfort levels, your life, your sanity; if you don’t you will always wonder. I let out a high-speed torrent of abuse, shouting as hard and loud as I could while my mind dropped acid and decided to show me pictures of Lola and Sid hugging my father. The wind slammed into the side of the bike, the handlebars wobbled, and there was a sharp intake of breath as I made leaning corrections, pulling the bike over further than I dared and slipping into the mushy centre of the track.