The Daytona Factor
The Daytona Factor
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
"YOU GOING TO DAYTONA THIS YEAR?”
I asked my friend Jeff Weaver. Jeff is a fellow member of the Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang, and we were all at the Come Back In, located in the wintry heart of downtown Madison, Wisconsin, having one of our disorganized, random “meetings,” which consist mostly of hoisting a few beers from the dark, 90-weight end of the viscosity spectrum while waiting for spring.
Jeff grinned from somewhere behind his substantial beard and said, “Daytona? Of course I’m going. I am Muslim and Daytona is Mecca. I have to go. Besides, it’s the week that breaks the back of winter. A reason to celebrate.”
That pretty much sums up my own motives for going every year. In deepest March, it’s the only show in town, and when you get back it seems that winter is almost over. You wait for the snow to melt with the same impatience you feel when an old TV is warming up and you can hear the sound but there’s no picture. Still, you know the picture is coming. It always has before.
This year I drove down with another friend and fellow Crud, Mike Puls, towing my rusting bike trailer with his 1994 Buick Century station wagon. Mike, a Madison cop who just retired after 30 years on the force, had never bçen to Daytona Bike Week. He decided to take his 1984 Yamaha RZ350 Kenny Roberts Replica, and I my trusty ’79 Moto-Guzzi 1000SP.
We left at some ungodly hour of the morning with the Weather Channel threatening snow and rain just to our west, drove straight south through Illinois, “The Endless State,” and cruised into Kentucky past the portals of Fort Campbell as usual, this time on the 30th anniversary of my induction there. (Yet I feel like exactly the same person now as I did then-still saving for my next motorcycle.)
Stopping for the night in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in a blinding rainstorm, we made Daytona the next evening, right at dusk, subsisting only on 12 pounds of Georgia pecans and peanut brittle. Plus McDonald’s finest.
Actually, we stayed at Flagler Beach, well north of Daytona, in a nice old motel across the road from the ocean, a spot discovered by yet another fellow Crud, Stu Evans, who had trailered his BMW R90S to Florida and had already checked in. So how was Daytona this time around? A superb year, by my reckoning.
Clear, sunny weather, and the AHRMA vintage races were good, with more people competing than watching, which is just as it should be. We also watched Superbike qualifying. Mike and I sat in the grandstands at the exit of the infield, where riders accelerate hard onto the banking while heeled over-it’s a great place to see how the bikes are handling and what the riders are doing about it.
Star of qualifying was Anthony Gobert, who put his Ducati on the pole and set a new lap record. On his hottest lap, he actually appeared to lose the back end of the bike three times in “our” corner and catch it without ever backing off the throttle-an amazing performance. I would have abandoned hope and crashed all three times, in just this one corner. If you multiply that by Daytona’s nine distinct turns, that’s 27 crashes per lap. Maybe that’s why I was in the stands, rather than riding a 996 for Vance & Hines. No decent team will hire a guy who crashes 27 times per lap.
Hero of the week, however, was Miguel Duhamel, who, riding injured, won both the 600 and Superbike races for Honda. He had plenty of horsepower to work with, but still put on a stunning display of riding. Duhamel looks as if his tires are never actually in molecular contact with the track, but just sliding, spinning and floating around the circuit on a boundary layer of wishful thinking and pure aggression. Masterful riding.
On the Saturday before the big race, Mike and I spent most of the day at the Woods bike auction in nearby De Land. If there was a lesson in this year’s auction, it’s that you should restore your motorcycle only as a labor of love, rather than hoping for big profits. Buyers are pretty hard-headed these days, and I think the era of giddy speculation has given way to the era of calm calculation. There were bargains :to be had. Some year I’ll bring money.
Riding back from the auction at night, we stopped at the famous Gene’s Steak House and were seated in a room where the entire Yamaha team was celebrating its Supercross victory. We had just noticed that Randy Mamola was sitting a few tables away, when a waiter opened a side exit door right next to our table, and in came Wayne Rainey and Eddie Lawson to join the Yamaha gang.
Ah, Daytona. You look around sometimes and feel as if you’re at Mt. Rushmore, brought to life. The Great Ones are all there, roaming the earth.
Just before we left Daytona, I took a ceremonial swim in the cold ocean-just long enough to give myself an ice-cream headache, and a few other physical problems too lengthy to mention here-and we were off for home on Monday.
Thanks to my careful program of deferred trailer maintenance, we suffered a spun trailer bearing near Paducah and had to have the inner race ground off and new bearings installed at a machine shop just down the road from Possum Trot, Kentucky. I am not making this up.
Driving north through Illinois, “The Land of Standing Water,” we cruised into drifting snow and high winds, just at the Wisconsin border.
Doing my best Dumb and Dumber imitation, I said to Mike, “Have you noticed that we’ve been driving on clear, dry roads for two days, and the first place where you can’t ride a motorcycle is right about where we live?”
Mike just grinned and said something about spring being on the way.
And so it is. As I write this, a week later, the snow has already melted and two robins have appeared in our yard. We have been to Mecca and the back of winter has been broken. The TV tubes are warming up, the sound is on and the picture is almost here. A reason to celebrate.
