Missiles Du Mud

Missiles du Mud

RACE WATCH

The French take a good ol’ American weird idea and make it uniquely their own

BY MARK HOYER

AH, THE FRENCH. ALWAYS SO PROtective of their land and way of life. They've resisted importing Hollywood movies, tried to shut out non-French words from their language and pelted Euro Disney with negativity since the day it opened. And the Maginot Line notwithstanding, they've done a pretty fair job of keeping the outside out and preserving their highly cultured culture.

Which makes it all the more strange that they would choose something like this to import, even in light of the whole weird fascination with Jerry Lewis. But before we call names, point fingers and poke fun at the French for doing something this strange with a motorcycle, let us remember we still run a pretty odd-appearing national hillclimb championship and that the Saint-Maurice-sur-Moselle motorcycle club got the mud-bog

idea from us, in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Yes, with all these damn satellites hurtling electronic sewage around the planet on an ever widening band of channels, just about anything can make it to television. And once the signal reaches the sky, who knows where it may land.

So pass me le banjo, and let’s take a little trip

to the Vosges mountains in eastern France, where some American satellite lightning struck a gang of French bikers right in midbrain, all of whom were no doubt in the depths of a serious Pernod binge, trying to figure out what to do with the too much time and too many francs on their hands.

It’s easy to imagine the conversation that followed their first sight of this strange new sport. “Le hot daaaaamn, that looks like a freakin’ party. But all we got are motos. Hey, wait a minute...” An

intense techno-philosophical discussion would follow about the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence and its effect on stretched wheelbases, but would be unintelligible even to them over the din

of Brigette Bardot’s 1967 recording of her hit song, “Harley-Davidson.”

See, what they watched was four-

wheeled mud-bog racing, essentially

low-traction, tête-à-tête drags with purpose-built, over-horsepowered trucks

and cars sprinting through a semi-liquid

pit of carefully prepared slimy goo.

What our amis Français created was the same thing, only using motorcycles.

The same simple principle applies: Rip across a 300-foot-long, lVz-footdeep pit of mud in the shortest possible time. But honestly, as seriously as competitors seem to take the actual timing of the event (the fastest run is a quick 5.43 seconds) the real fun is after each >

run ends. For while fhi highly skilled (or ex tremely lucky) can skimi across the entire lengt of the pit and land reíatively clean on the other side, most of the time that’s not how it works out, much to the delight of the spectators. And, actually, IS most riders will quietly admit that a grand crash-n-splash is a big part of the fun.

The event has been around long enough now (the first time they tried it was ’92) to have bred its fair share of fanatics. The price of participation in at

least one bogger’s case was some 500 hours of building and fabricating his

highly specialized piece of moto-missile equipment. All for about 6 seconds of mucky, muddy full-throttle happiness. At this level of labor, a “prototype” (like >

one of the four pitted this year against about 20 unmodified dirtbikes) is made from pieces of other motorcycles.

Our case-study competitor describes

the origins of his special machine:

“The front end came from my Yamaha

XT600, the frame and engine were from my old CBR1000 and the whole

thing rides on a Renault car wheel I

found in a dump,” he says.

So, two perfectly good motorcycles and one automobile of dubious useful>

ness gave their lives for a few minutes a year of playing in the mud!

The real pièces de résistance, however, are the rear sprocket, chain and swingarm. The arm itself looks like it was ripped from an upper section of the Eiffel Tower, but was in fact fabbed from box-section tubing pillaged from a scrap heap. It measures almost 3V2 feet long, more than a foot and a half longer than what had been stuck stock on the back of the CBR. This in turn means the 15-inch-diameter, 57-tooth sprocket has to be made to measure, as well. The chain, surely of some agricultural or industrial lineage, is about 6V2 feet long.

And while this rolling hodgepodge is a shocking and more than slightly incongruous visual spectacle, the auditory show is uniquely its own too, owing in this case at least to the unbaffled exhaust system with le grand megaphone fabricated by the bike’s owner. All the rest of the machine’s non-essential bits are, of course, stripped off, which >

means the headlight, alternator and most of the electrical system are removed. This is partly to save weight, but certainly it also leaves less to clean!

Further, some racers even remove the stock streetbike fuel tanks as these are considered too heavy, since if the front wheel drops in the muck, so do you. The

replacement “tanks”-small-capacity tin-can-like containers with a tube sticking out to feed the carbs-aren’t as aesthetically pleasing, but they are lighter. And the bike only has to run for half a minute at a time anyway, so who needs 5 gallons of gas?

Definitely not these bikes, since most engines, even those used in the homebuilt machines, remain in standard tune. Your average dirtbike’s 30-50 horsepower is plenty for all the “traction” available, so why add complication, labor and expense to what would be a futile, wheel-spinning pursuit? (Cripes, Sartre was right! This bloody existentialism is everywhere!) The 100 to 140 bhp of the prototypes is simply entertaining overkill. Especially since the only real strategy here is to lay on full throttle and lean way back, hoping your course though the bog gets off on >

the right trajectory. Actually, the whole run is a struggle, since if you don't get your launch right, your trajectory is meaningless without the power and momentum to reach solid ground on the far side of the black hole.

If you don't make it that's okay, too, for in St-Maurice's club event, the rid er who has the most spectacular splat also gets a prize, so there's even glory for those who fail the stopwatch. Post run cleanup, for both bike and rider, is best accomplished with a jet-washer, for high pressure is really the only ef fective way to clean up from this low pressure affair.

All of which should give you the idea that ambiance of the event comes clos er to that of a summer camp than the paddock at a Grand Prix. -

So no matter how you do-first, last or splashed-or how you dress-full moto gear, jeans and sneakers or full haz-mat regalia-a good time will be had. Espe cially in the final event of the day, a foot race through the pit. After about 20 yards, the numbered bibs worn become useless and everyone looks the same: completely covered in mud and smil ing. With the event growing in popular ity every year, can a TV deal be far be hind? And how long before at some late-night post-race motorcycle club party here in the States, some guy flip ping channels turns to his friends and says, "Dude, check this out. Now that looks like a big ol' freakin' load of joie de vivre, don't it?"