AMA Flat Track Grand Championship Am Nationals Du Quoin Illnoise 2023

 My racing and the likes of this blog are pretty self centered. Most racers are to some degree in my opinion at minimum a bit self centered. At least I know that for me to focus on racing successfully I must spend a lot of time inside my own head figuring it all out. Sometimes I try too hard to figure shit out and it end ups making no sense. Like trying harder to grab a hold of a slippery fish. The more I try to find meaning of the AMA Flat Track Amateur Grand Championship the more I find nothing other than just simple good times. This was the first time in a long time that I teamed up with others instead of my usual simple solo missions. The team for this effort was the meaning of it all. And it was outstanding!

The Mile was FAST, FUN, and FAST!

Getting to spend time with Jeffery Carver and get one on one instruction was a real treat. When the Wizard talks I listen.

Fish eating smile after taking a podium finish in the TT

The Cushion 1/2 mile was a dream come true. The XR650R was in it's element unfortunately I ran it in hot on the inside of first turn of the main and ran out of nerves opting to gracefully lay it down.

I had an apt arsenal loaded into the back of the van!

Winning the Short Track LCQ on the ol 89 YZ250 was one of the highlights. The lone two smoker made a lot friends especially with all the dads. I did not have a baseline to use with the old Yamaha's suspension, it was ok but fork damping was a bit fast and spring rates were off. That and how fast modern 250 four strokes are along with a stacked field of young talent in the 250 Production class made it a real challenge to qualify but when we did it in the TT and the Short track it was so sweet. On my bikes we ended up 4th overall in the VET 40 plus class with a couple of 3rds in the TT and Short Track which felt like a good pat on the back for not having my hot shoe on for 5 years. All in all it was a pretty damn good time. 12 days on the road. A solid crew with Lambrick Brothers and Jeffery Carver. Will I train and go back next year with a more dialed in ol 1989 YZ250....?

Go time

 

Jeffery Carver shaking down the race bike. Could I ask for anything more?!!

So I loaded up my van with a back up secondary class bike, a back up back up, because I want to know what the xr650r will do against 450s on the mile, and for shits and grins and against all good judgment I brought the Trackmaster KX500 because: live for today…

I writes this post from a rest area in lush green Kansas after successfully finding my tire on a UPS truck and crossing the ol rectangle of Colorado. The birds are singing louder than the whine of the passing 18 wheelers as drizzled rain drops pitter patter out a soothing rhythm on my roof. Tomorrow I’ll visit the Late Great Cosmic Cowboys ol pad, maybe unload the 500 and do a donut in his front yard, leave a Hot Wheels toy as an offering and go stay with the Pottorf’s, friends Cowboy introduced me to. Young Pottorf is contesting some of the AMA pro flattrack series this year. Maybe spin some laps on their private test track before heading out to Carver’s place for some Wizard sessions. Here we go…

Strikes and gutters

First hill climb of the season: CHCA Temple Canyon 

 First practice run the ol Pontiac broke an axle.  A bummer after all the work I put into this car over the winter but at least the rolling projectile didn’t hit any spectators. If it came off on the 100 mph straight section right before it would have been real interesting…

It has been a couple of years since I dusted off the ol Pikes Peak bike. I should call this bike “New Record.. it has set the record at Pikes Peak, every Colorado Hill climb course, which all it still holds except Pikes and Rangel. We set a new course record this weekend.

KX500 Trackmaster finally roosts.

It has been a few years since Wallace and I have done things with his camera and my subject matter. But I figured he better come shoot some pictures of this thing before I wreck it or it wrecks me. I started building this thing almost two years ago. I am getting slower and older but perhaps no wiser. Wallace showed up at the shop 1.5 hrs before sunset. We took some glamour shots in my shop with the bike up on a lift, on the floor from a ladder and out in my junk yard then loaded it up and went to an industrial fuel refinery down the road. The place was locked up tighter than a nun's volvo wagon but the train yard seemed a good enough background. I went to load the bike back into the van and a sudden burst of spontaneous mischief over took me and I threw a leg over the bike doubting I could start it without a riding boot on but I must be making friends with the half liter skeeter eater because it fired up echoing off the train cars like a tortured dragon. Before Wallace could get his camera set for action I was dragging pipe and sliding the beast. It was a blast. With only minutes to spare before sunset we loaded back up and headed to the other end of my little town for a rare backdrop of the elusive desert flowers. Seeing this bike come together finally means a lot to me. Ol Cosmic Cowboy me dear late friend brought this frame into my shop with the plan that we would do something cool with it. I think I will put some of his ashes in the fuel tank and continue raising some hell with it :)

 

'Tis the season

 The green leaves are all blossomed out like a flood of big beautiful green boobies bouncing about in a busy strip club. Finally a cloak of shelter and privacy from the neighbors allowing freedom to pee outside at will. The birds are singing like a 480 piece choir from the academy no fucks given tourettes syndrom blasting their songs at 4:45 in the morning loud enough to wake up Helen Keller. The afternoon temp is enough for me to climb up on the roof, burning my knees and palms of my hands in the process to resurrect the ol swamp cooler. All this can mean only one thing.... IT IS TIME TO GO RACING!!!!

Captain's log(clogs the toilet)

Out in Illinois King John is readying the White Knight for it's week of epic action. 

I have been riding my xr100 around the back yard holding my left leg out and trying to build my hot shoe holder upper muscles. So far I have not broken any windows with all the flying gravel...

 

This small block chevy is something I am rather proud of. It seems every year or two I take on a big project and building this engine was a few years ago's project. It is just now blossoming into fruition. First Hill Climb is only days away!

The stoke is strong. Layla is ready.

I still don't know about racing this bike in Illinois...

Breaker points point to broken

But Nova is learning how to fix

The Hayabusa car is slowly coming together one little bit at a time.

After getting the pleasure of talking with Jeff Carver the Wizard about racing the AMA Am Nationals it was decided that bringing the old 450 out of hibernation would be the best bike to bring to the all format flat track championships. I will knock the cob webs out of her this weekend at the Hill Climb..... If I can figure out how to weld titanium. I always say that "dirt don't hurt" but when it comes to welding I need to clean up my game!!

AMA Championship time

Shit is getting real...

 Time to start strength training my ol hot shoe holder upper leg I reckon!

giving, getting, having, letting go, holding the fuck on.

 Some people believe in fate, a higher power, or even destiny. I am just as mystified as the rest but I myself believe in what most call manifest destiny. Life is full of crazy emotions, commercial brainwashing, and negative influence but I think at the end of the day we can only control so much of it and one thing we do actually have control over is how we feel. I have learned from my mom that by keeping a positive attitude, good things will attract like a magnet. It is like nature's way of keeping balance. But nature gives and takes and the more you have to give the more it can take. A loss is a hard thing to not feel bad about but we can only grow from every experience and choose how we feel about it when it is all said and done. I have tried to learn from every fail, every regret, every experience and build something from those that I felt the most strong. I reckon passion is like gas on a fire, and the more our internal burning flame grows the more fuel we can consume, fuel being the dream. But instead of burning it down we let that fucking flame rage. But I don't want my ego to consume like a forest fire; Some Evel Knievel heart throb idle hot shot racer. I just want to do what I dig and I really dig going fast. Really fast. I admit that I have more than a few passionate projects burning but they all keep me sane, somehow focused on something so that everything doesn't just drift away like dreams as we awake. Any day could be anyone's last so mind as well enjoy every day. And everything that brings joy, especially those wicked wheels.

About two weeks away from the first Hill Climb of the season. The Stock Car has sat untouched since the last race of the season over six months ago... I reckon I better get to it. Oh yeah and figure out what bike to race. They are all in need of a lot of attention. A lot of passion, a lot of burning, and the dream shall rage :)

Uncle Reemus update via Zappa

 It feels like the world spins too fast sometimes.

I get lost in the internet's web like a fawn in a barb wire fence factory surrounded by busy highways, freeways, train tracks and streets and then I fall into a worm hole of warmth and seclusion of my own making. Like today when I did my once every few years vanity search of my own name and pikes peak. After watching a few youtubes, some making me smile and almost tear up and others making me chew at my own lip with anxiety, I remembered that after all nothing has ever been, ever is, and ever will be only but what we make it to be. Simple as it may be I best just get back to work. So what have I been working on lately? Nova and I have been resurrecting an old Z50 we dug out of a friend's back yard. I try not to influence her desires and passions but I can see it is futile. She is surrounded by them and at 1 1/2 years of age she lays in her bed at night and repeats "Derwt bikes, Derwt bikes". Call it genetics, hopeless disposition, or just the universe dealing out fate in a drunkin bastard's bowling game. All I know is she likes this bike and thinks it is cool every time we put another piece of it together. Two days a week plus weekends we rule the shop together. When she naps I get back to the endless amount of customer's with paying work. Work I am so thankful for and still enjoy doing after 20 years of it. And work I probably owe some to my racing success.  After dinner and my little one is put to bed I go back out to the shop when I am not to run down form the endless brought home daycare illness or the mental and physical pain brought on from my weekly therapy sessions to avoid a premature hip surgery. I chip away at the Hayabusa powered hill climb race car I am building from scratch. I bit off a lot to chew but I am chewing away like a laughy taffy stuck between my teeth and making my belly ache as I avoid the teary eyed laughing. Did you know a proper oil sump system for this rage cage project will double my cost so far?! And then we get back to the last big project I started over two years ago. The KX500 Trackmaster. I let it gather some dust like a bottle of fine fucked up wine more than a few times during last years shop move but I have been chipping away at it a little sip at a time almost trying to savor the project the old late great Tommy's Triumph Shop bestowed upon me. I'd like to think my old dear friend Tommy reached down from the Cosmos and slapped my shaking backside when this half liter skeeter eater hit the powerband on the highway in front of my shop last week. It pulls like a skidder and sounds like a steam train wrecking. It makes enough power to blush Babe the blue ox and when it hits high rpm my arms shake like Michael J Fox. What did I expect when I built this Frankenstein. A true Mel Brooks Abby Normal Frankenstein beloved beautiful beast capable of destroying, dismembering and disemboweling all of us. So do I take it to Davenport this June? ... I am scared. Like the Cookie Monster. Or a squirrel. Just out to get a nut...

styling in the angles on the rage cage

 Between being a dad, dreaming of flattrack racing again, running a shop with enough work to make me feel like a three legged dog in a fire hydrant factory- I have still been plugging away on the crosskart/rage cage/ oversize go-kart. Whatever the fuck it is. I call it the Fuzzy Eagle. If Dan Gurney built his own F1car to take on the world's best and he named his car the Eagle than my creation for Colorado hill climb domination is named Fuzzy Eagle. Or maybe Daffy Ducks illegitimate Dodo bird off-spring. Did you know Ben Franklin thought the Bald Eagle was a disgusting coward of a bird and he wanted our national bird to be the Turkey. I like Turkey. Not only with swiss on rye but they are a feirce, native, and resilient, majestic dinosaur of a creature. So if a Japanese Hayabusa flying at 200+ miles per hour crashed into a Turkey doing boogie woogie dance moves and somehow impregnatied it while Slayer was blasting through a blown out woofer, the offspring might be the two too many wheeled project that I am building and hope to someday race up that ol mountain that ol Zebulion declared un-climbable...

Betty's revival

 Story time:

Back before I started this blog, back when I was just starting to bud as more than a recreational racer, I was working at my first dealership job a couple of years out of MMI. A badly beat up dirtbike came into the shop. It looked like it was used for cleaning mine fields on the wrong end of a bull dozer. The owner apparently got some wild hair to go desert racing and took it out to vegas for the Mint or something like that and got the desert bug bad. I must have impressed him with my ability to straighten and fix up the old bike because he asked me if I wanted to go race Baja with him. I had just won a national amateur WORCS championship and my desire matched his enthusiasm. He bought a brand new XR650R and left his credit card with the parts counter. I built my dream bike. We named her Betty and the three of us went south of the border for the Baja 500. Without any support crew or real Baja experience we finished and had a total blast. Next was the 1000. It was a point to point peninsula run, much more logistical than the 500 mile loop we did before. With the help of a few good friends on the crew including my own Mom who nearly suffered a nervous break down due the extreme insanity that are Mexican highways, we managed to finish the race in 32 hours. Betty had the ever loving shit flogged out of her for 32 hours! The war stories were too many. We were bloodied, bruised, and beat to shit but poor Betty looked so much worse. This was the last year that Honda offered it's pit support to racers on the XR650R. A move to transition everyone to the new CRF450X platform. So A new 450X was purchased and I did what I do to a bike with an open budget. Here is where the story gets hard for me to tell. It all started when I was working on the bike after hours at the dealership on the bike and I was not allowed keys to the place so when the other senior employee there was ready to leave I had to put down my wrenches and go home. Somehow I forgot to fill the engine up with oil... Never will I forgive myself for this awful blunder. The bike went 40 hours before the transmission stated to whine. I was gutted. Nobody made me feel worse than myself. I tore the engine down and everything looked fine. A testament to Honda's rollerbearing cam and overall durability. We gathered a 3rd rider and with two crew trucks we headed to Mexico. Before crossing the border we stopped for a meal at an interstate side steakhouse in San Diego. After dinner we came out to the parking lot to only find one of our trucks. In the parking space where our other truck was parked was only the ignition key switch tumbler. Lots of gear and pre run bikes were gone but our race bike and old trusty Betty were in the truck we still had so we decided to continue. We shouldn't have. The next day south of Ensenada a speeding conversion van on lowly inflated tires swerved around us and then a few miles later we saw it crashed off of the highway while at least half a dozen Mexicans crawled out and then stood grimly while a girl whaled from inside the upside down van. I helped my EMT buddy crawl in the van and we extracted an infant. I held the tiny small lifeless body in my hands. It's head was horribly smashed. Everybody just looked at me. Finally my EMT buddy said there is nothing we can do. I set the poor thing down on the ground and walked away. The next day while pre-running the 3rd rider broke his foot. The next day while pre-running the 450's transmission again began to make concerning noises so we decided to make ol trusty Betty our race bike. The night before the race Betty's lighting coil stator burned out. We finally threw in the towel. It was a long quit drive home. My Baja racing days were over as was my relationship with my teammate. But 15 years later the ol enthusiastic guy came through the door of my shop and said I want to sell the bikes. But he couldn't see selling ol Betty to anybody except me and he couldn't see selling anything to me but rather to bestow ownership. The bike had been sitting out side leaned up against a dumptruck under 4 feet of snow. stripped of it's carburetor, birds living it ol Betty's air box. What a sorry sight but he knew I would bring her back to life. Welcome home Betty.

Hitting the big time

 So operation when you wish upon a star is well underway. It started with the delivery of the Champion XS bike a few posts ago. Or Maybe when John put me on his vintage BSA vintage motocross bike I posted about last june. Or maybe when I became good friends with John's brother Frank after he played jazz music over the loudspeaker while doing the race commentating at the flattrack races I started to attend in Denver when I got the flattrack bug from the Sideburn magazine way back when. Who fucking knows when or how or who the fuck'n fuckidy doo dah it started. But I remember when I was a bursting into the scene pro off road racer and working for the Maxxis off road industry I once over heard the Factory Kawasaki team boss talking to my Maxxis boss about not knowing if their new team leader racer had just hit the big time or if the big time had just hit him. I have often thought of that conversation like when I found myself in Spain shaking down a 150 hp race only homologation Buell XBRR 1340cc monster bike on a MotoGP track and the thing was spitting off its chain, spitting out rags the mechanic left in the air box, and spitting off its 62mm throttle bodies when I chopped the throttle. I had hit the big time. And the i felt the big time hitting me back even harder. Hard enough that weeks later on that same spanish MotoGP engineered beast I felt like I was playing Russian roulette, dancing with death. As close to suicide as I ever plan to take myself. What a rush. If that is the big time- I don't want it. Expectations are for angry in-laws, parole officers, and some old twit at the fabled golden gaits. Luckily I dont have any of them characters in my story. What I have is the real grass roots grown bond of the Lambrick brothers; Frank and John. Like two school yard mates who have each other's backs. Us against all the rest of the world. Not only did John offer me up the beautiful XS Champion bike but he started talking about a 1989 Yamaha YZ250WR (wide ratio) bike he won in a Cycle Magazine raffle. Back in 89 the AMA in an effort to keep flattrack alive hyped up DTX (Dirt Track Conversion). They gave each major magazine a dirtbike to convert into a flattracker. The Yamaha was developed with the help of none other than Chris Carr and even crash tested by David Aldana. It took a year for John to take delivery on the bike and by the time he got it it was ready to race, despite Aldana's signiture crash marks. John raced it to a 4th in championships points that year. It eventualy got changed back to a dirt bike spec and now I have the suspension on my bench and I am turning it back into DTX. I also rebuilt the crankshaft. Kind of cool to rebuild a crank that has been flogged by so many others. More cool is that this June I am to go out to Illinois and flog this puppy myself. On a TT, Short track, Half mile, and A Mile. Yes sir, this June I am really feeling like I am going to be riding high, hitting the big time. GO TEAM NEWBOLD'S MOTORBIKE LAMBRICK BROTHERS RACING!

I love a bike with a story. And this bike has it's story. I am hopping I can add a fun adventure filled chapter to it. June will be here before I know it. Time to start rubbing crisco into my leathers to make my beer belly fit into them... I think it has been two or three plus years since I went roundy round racing. ....Where the fuck did I stash my hot shoe...?

Hashiriya Riders | Japanese Riding Culture

Pure. They have always done everything with way more style over there.

Project Rage Cage takes shape

 

After months of delay I finally van tripped over to Mona Gary to get the start of the chassis. He bent all the tube for me, built the jig, and started tacking it together. What an awesome buddy! I am sure if I would have kept delaying my trip out to get it, he would have completely finished the chassis.

Since this build is intended for Colorado Hill Climb racing I decided to lengthen it by 7". This made the KJ Raycing VF-1 plans a lot more difficult to follow but the plans are just that: plans; not exact instructions. 

Gary's bender could not do the acute bend needed for the nose so I was left with figuring out the best way to attach all the tubes at the nose.

Novella digs it!

Now, on to suspension, fitting up the Hayabusa power, and styling in the angles...

Award-Winning Rally Short Film...

Nice film here speaks volumes to me. It scratches at my itch of anxiously awaiting to get back in the saddle and go racing again. Pondering into the dangers of racing that seem more loud the wiser I become. Choosing to take the dangers head on, flat out, and without anything other than exacting precision. Yeah, flat out is a beautiful place to be. Also speaks to me about the especial uniqueness of those rare people who are navigators (co-drivers).

I don't like normal porn

https://www.facebook.com/groups/236617209748744/permalink/5823297031080706/?sale_post_id=5823297031080706

If I lived near chicago I would have a new piece of yard art slash trailer park neighborhood assault weapon go-kart to the gods of braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaap!