Staying Hungry

Staying hungry

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

LAST SUMMER, WHILE WANDERING around the pits at Blackhawk Farms during a WERA race weekend, I had one of those rare watershed moments of actual life-change cognition. I was standing there, gazing fondly upon a TZ250 Yamaha and thinking about how I'd always wanted to try racing a 250 GP bike but never had. when suddenly the bike's rider appeared. He climbed on the TZ. did a running bump start and the little Yamaha ripped to life.

As he headed out onto the track, I suddenly realized that he was a fairly thin and lit looking guy—what Allan Girdler would call a bird-legged kidjust as I was (or imagined I was) back when I was last roadracing, eight years ago. Since then. I'd put on a little weight, graduallv eating and drinking my way from 165 to about 177 pounds. Not exactly Orson Wellesian, but not wasting away, either. I watched that Yamaha accelerate out onto the track and realized that, for the first time in mv life, 1 felt

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too large and heavy to contemplate racing anything as small and refined as a 250 GP bike.

Not that you have to be anorexically thin to race motorcycles— people of all sizes and shapes have flourished in the sport—but I firmly believe that somewhere in your mind you have to at least think of yourself as a kind of lean wolf in order to ride well. And. at that moment, I felt more like a well-fed brown bear about to hibernate for the winter. I stood along the fence, slightly ill at ease, wondering if my old leathers would even fit me anymore.

Only a few months later, I had a chance to find out. The Dueati people invited a group of journalists to Italy, fora road tour and track session with the 1 991 bikes.

“Bring your leathers," the invitation said.

So I reached into the back recesses of the closet and dragged out my green-and-yellow “desert lizard" leathers, former bane of CW cover photographers everywhere, curse of the comparison-test group photo. I tried them on. and naturally, they had shrunk quite a bit during those eight long years of storage. They were fine in the legs and a little tight in the waist, but in the shoulders and upper chest I felt as though I'd grabbed the wrong jacket leaving a party, accidentally nabbing Willie Shoemaker’s favorite sport coat. Shoulders and chest were suffocatingly tight. What we had here was desert-lizard sausage.

When 1 went to Italy, the old leathers stayed behind. I took my all-purpose Aerostich suit, which I figured would have good knee and elbow padding for the track, as well as warmth and weather protection for the touring portion of the trip. It worked fine on both counts, though I felt a little clumsy and overpadded on our track testing day, wearing jeans and a sweater under the touring suit. On a racetrack, there’s really no substitute for the confidence and freedom of movement you get with a good-fitting set of leathers.

More significantly, there’s no substitute for a general sense of physical minimalism when you're trying to crawl around a racebike. Even riding the Raymond Roche 888 Superbike (at 320 pounds and 1 35 horsepower, the most magnificent, torquey, powerful, laser-sharp motorcycle I’ve ever ridden), I felt miscast. There’s a phil osophical incompatibility between titanium bolts, magnesium castings, Kevlar swingarms and too much dinner. It wasn’t just featherweight 250 roadracers I’d outgrown; it was any light, agile racebike, regardless of displacement. Something had to be done.

Saturday night I got home from Italy and drove back to the farm.

Sunday morning I got up early, went to the closet and got out my running shoes and sweats. I did some calisthenics, lifted a few weights, and 10 minutes later. I was huffing down a country road, watching the sun come up over the corn stubble, taking in the cold, clear air.

That was five weeks ago, and somehow I've managed to drag myself out there for a run nearly every morning (except in the aftermath of a couple of notable parties where the margarita blender was running flat out). So far, so good.

I've also been reading the rule books, looking at bikes and considering the possibility of un-retiring from roadracing this coming summer. I’ve given thought to any number of classes, both vintage and modern, raging from a Clubman-class 500 Single to a new Dueati Twin. AMA’s Twin Sport class also has a lot of appeal. Time and finances will tell.

In the meantime. I'm ordering a new set of leathers. Okay, they’ll be just a little larger than the old ones (we have to be realistic here), but I’ll try to be down to fighting w-eight when I order them, and then stick with it.

Leathers are not cheap, so, unless you have money to burn, there’s a certain permanence to the size you settle upon. I'm approaching the purchase like an insect choosing his exoskeleton for life: No room for expansion. The individual inside the leathers will have to adapt.

The motivation for wanting to race again is not entirely clear. I certainly don’t have dreams of pursing titles or climbing the ladder of racebike sophistication. And I'm not sure, this time around, if I'm getting in shape to race, or racing as an excuse to stay in shape.

I guess mostly I'd just like to have fun and sharpen my riding skills, while remaining the sort of person who can look at a 250 GP bike and see a potential partner in crime, or at least a mechanical extension of my own sensibilities.

Not all of our role models have to be human.