GP Report: The Tradition Continues...sort of

I had high hopes for the 4-Hour Team GP at the Eddieville Motorsports
Park in Goldendale, WA this year. Last year my 2-months-pregnant
teammate was just slightly slower than me and we still managed to win
the women's class by the huge margin of 3 laps. This year Cindi
Roberson and I were teamed together as the Enduro Chicks, seeings as
how that's pretty much what we are. I've done exactly 1 GP in my life
and I won it. Perhaps I should have quit while I was ahead? Cindi raced
the D36 enduros for several years, winning the B-Vet class one year and
the B-200 the next. She's also a pretty fearless hare scrambler. It
doesn't really need to be said that she's faster than me. We were
feeling pretty good about our chances of doing well, providing neither
one of us did anything stupid.

The night before the race one of the other women racers ambled by our
pits and stopped by for some friendly pre-race chit-chat. Seems she was
a GP rider in the OMRA series that runs at the Eddieville track, and
she was currently #2. She wanted to know who we were racing with.
Uh...each other, we told her. She got a little cagey when asked who she
was racing with. She said there was another woman that was her same
speed that she was thinking of hooking up with, but that there were 2
"really, really fast gals" that were there and they didn't know who was
going to end up riding with whom. It seemed like a no-brainer to me to
put the 2 really, really fast women together. And that is apparently
what happened. One of them was the #1 GP rider in the OMRA series and
the wife of an AA rider. Don't know anything about her teammate other
than the fact that she was probably about 15-20 years younger than me
and Cindi.

Ok...so the 2 old enduro riders (on 125 and 200 2-strokes) are up
against the local hot-shoe youngster GP riders (both on big 4-strokes,
I think) on their wide-open horsepower-hungry home track. No problemo,
right?

I'd ridden the track last year, and Cindi had never been there. I'd
told her it was nice and loamy, not a speck of dust for miles, killer
traction, nice old-school MX track with no serious jumps or whoops. She
instantly thought me a liar when she arrived. The Pacific Northwest has
been mired in a drought this season, and its effects on the track were
immediately apparent. Also, there was not one but three sets of whoops
on the track. Big wide bike swallowing whoops, little sharp
tightly-spaced whoops, and semi-huge pointy oddly-spaced whoops, none
of them rideable by mere mortals such as ourselves. Add to that this
was my very first ride on my new clutch and way-overdue new top end and
well, the MX play day on Saturday was quite the adventure. I just
figured something was going to end up broken before the race was over,
and I was hoping Cindi was up to the task of finishing without me. She
looked like she wanted to kill me after our first lap around the track.

I'd talked Cindi into starting the race, using the argument that the
faster rider should go out and put us ahead, then I'd try to keep us in
the game til it was her turn again. I mean, she's the more experienced
racer, right? In reality, I'd had my fair share of fun with the
40-rider gate MX start directly onto the MX track last year, and felt
that she deserved to have the same opportunity this year. Joke was on
me, though, as it was a dead-engine start in front of the gate with a
right-hander right out onto the fastest section of the GP track.
Damn... Not only did they save the MX track for last this year, but
they ran it backwards. We'd ridden the MX track the day before the
race, but now that it was backwards it felt totally different. I was
actually getting lost in my mind, not remembering where I was. As if it
mattered...

Cindi wheelied all the way up the start straight and somehow ended up
in the first turn in a solid 3rd place. She maintained that place
through quite a few turns until the riders disappeared up the hill and
out onto the back section of the course. I ran back to the pits and
tried to relax before it was my turn to take the reins. Cindi put in 2
solid laps, about 6 1/2 miles each, and came into the pits grinning
ear-to-ear, looking like she was having a ball, and giving me the
thumb's up. After my first lap, I concluded that she must have been
faking it just to get back at me for making her start <G>

My lap started fairly well. Coming out of the pits we had the option of
hopping right onto the biggest set of whoops and riding as fast as
possible, or staying on the flat section right next to it and
maintaining the pit speed limit of 5mph, only hopping onto the track
after the whoops. I figured I couldn't roll the whoops that fast, so I
chose the flat section. The back section was totally different from
last year. Gone was all the hero dirt, and in its place was dust,
hard-pack, super-slick mud bogs from over-zealous watering, lots of
deep sandy-like wide open whoopy sections with tire tracks going every
which-a-way, and humongous braking bumps everywhere. There were still
some confidence-inspiring berms that were fun to roost and rail
through, but they weren't fool-proof like last year. Sometimes they'd
hold you, sometimes they'd just disappear in a fluff of brown as you
slid wide right through them. My clutch and motor were working
flawlessly, and it was...uh...exciting trying to hold on in the fast
wide-open stuff. It's been awhile since the CR would float the front
wheel effortlessly in the high-speed chop. After getting the card
punched that was attached to the scrunchy on my left arm as I finished
my first lap, I mentally thanked Cindi for saving me from the Iron Man
class. What was I thinking??

My 2nd lap felt much better. I was starting to remember certain
sections from last year, and the elevator shaft drop-offs weren't
sneaking up on me any more. I had much more confidence and was actually
having fun and riding hard instead of wondering how I was going to
survive 3 1/2 more hours of hell. The jumps were actually becoming real
jumps, and I even passed a few riders. Got passed by a lot more,
though. At the end of my stint, I pulled into the pits, came to a stop
with my left arm up in the air, and our A#1 pit crew of Lorena and
Theresa Harrell took care of the rest. Cindi got the scrunchy on her
arm and was off in a flash. I had a nice cool wet towel for my face,
grapes and ice water for my thirst, and a chair in the shade to rest
in. Life doesn't get much better.

The rest of the race was just a blur of laps, and watching the riders
come through the scoring check.
Cindi and I did 2 laps per stint, and our pit stops were very quick and
efficient. We could have done more laps in a row, but we figured with
our quick stops we were better off being fresh for our laps. I had 2
moments on the track, but neither one resulted in a get-off. I got
seriously out of shape on the high-speed sandy stuff and ended up with
my hips up against the bars and me looking right at my front number
plate. The numbers were upside-down. But the dirt gods were smiling
upon me and I managed to get back in the saddle and ride it out with no
damage done. The other time I just went into a turn at the end of a
long straight a little too hot and couldn't quite negotiate the fluffy
berm. I ended up out in the weeds, bouncing through unseen rocks and
other various and assorted obstacles. I managed to find my way back
onto the track before the death-defying drop-off came into full view.

I passed a gal lying on the ground in the bottom of one of the
drop-offs, her bike facing towards me. I slowed and asked if she was
ok. She gave a thumbs-up so I squirrelled my way to the top and carried
on. She wasn't there the next lap so I assume she got herself together.
There weren't really any turn workers out there, so if you did have a
problem you were kind of on your own. There were sweep riders that
would ride a lap or 2 every now and again, but it felt much more like
an enduro rather than a MX race in that regard. I saw a kid on an 80
parked on the side of the track. He was waving wildly at all the
riders, but he was standing on his own 2 feet so I avoided eye contact
and kept going. Racing's racing, after all.

I thought for sure I'd see more of our crowd out on the track, but I
only saw Gary, Cindi's father, a few times, and I think I saw Robert
pass me in the fast stuff. I'm not sure though, because he was going so
fast that the big number on the back of his custom-made nameplate was
all just a blur. Judging by the wild style and reckless abandon,
though, I'm pretty sure it was him. Ol' Gary was reverting to James
Bond tactics with me on his butt through the whoops, throwing out oil
spills, smoke screens and razor-sharp tire-flatteners. Well, ok... we
were cheating and taking the far inside line where the whoops weren't
so...whoop-like, and Gary clipped the blue garbage can and it landed
right smack in front of me, forcing me out into the blender-zone. And
this is after he made me work my butt off passing him the first time! I
stalled my motor coming into a downhill set of braking bumps and he
motored on by me as I kicked the CR a few times. I finally got him in a
wide-open section and then I never saw anyone I knew again.

Cindi went out for our last stint with 25 minutes remaining on the
clock. I knew she'd be able to get 2 more laps in, barring any on-track
disaster, giving us a total of 14 for the day. After the clock expired,
riders were funneled into a single-file line that took them up to the
scoring trailer. Riders turned in their scrunchies with the punch card
attached, the scorers would count them and ask the rider if they agreed
on the number of punches found, and then they'd write it down. Last
year we had fanny packs with transponders, but since the track was
littered with fanny packs, I guess they thought this was a better idea.
It worked pretty well.

Cindi and I felt pretty good about our effort. We had 14 laps, one more
than Leann and I had done last year, neither one of us had hit the
ground all day, our bodies and bikes were still in one piece, we gave
it all we had, and we'd had a good time doing it. We had to wait a
little while for the results, but since we'd both been passed by one of
the "really, really fast gals," there wasn't a whole lot of suspense in
regards to who the winner would be.

We finished in 2nd place. The winning team, OTBG #2 (the hosting club
was the Over The Bars Gang, hence the team name) also completed 14
laps, but had finished their last lap before Cindi. We were both
disappointed at first. Cindi is the consummate competitor, always in it
to win it, and I certainly didn't drive 1,320 miles just to finish in
2nd place. But after getting our big purple trophies, and letting the
events of the day sink in, we realized we had done pretty well
considering the competition and our complete lack of GP experience. The
fact that we completed the same amount of laps as the winning team was
the saving grace in our defeat. We're woods riders, and we kept the GP
specialists honest in their own back yard.

Besides, a trophy for one's 42nd birthday never hurts, even if it is
only 2nd place <G>

Tami-

"WoodsChick" <TamiRowell DeleteThis @msn.com> wrote in message
news:1110947685.307057.236460@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
 > Well, ok... we
 > were cheating and taking the far inside line where the whoops weren't
 > so...whoop-like, and Gary clipped the blue garbage can and it landed
 > right smack in front of me, forcing me out into the blender-zone.

Pfft! You call THOSE whoops? Why, a 12 year old kid on a minibike can blitz
them.
<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://scotts-first-race.mypicgallery.com/" target="_blank">http://scotts-first-race.mypicgallery.com/</a>

Tim H
Roller<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->