The worst of all four letter words.

The worst of all four-letter words.


So I am sitting on a stool in my basement staring at the inanimate object in front of me and just hating it. I mean really hating it with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns and wondering what in the heck I was thinking getting involved in a sport that required me to be a mechanic. I have never in my life had my hands inside the engine of anything two-wheels or four, when I was in my early 20’s I was learning how to work a crowd fronting rock bands. If you want to know how to handle a lackluster biker bar crowd on a Wednesday night I am your guy, taking apart engine components and re-assembling them successfully is not my strong point. It is funny because the very word that was on my mind as I was sitting there was to be the subject of some controversy in a conversation I would have on the track.



“Your son is using four-letter words out there on the track.”
This came to me as I was standing in the fenced spectator area at Winchester Speedpark watching Jake slog through another of the endless early spring mud races for 2006. Our friend Barry Stacy was working the track and had come over to where I was standing to deliver this bombshell. I couldn’t believe it what could he have possibly said, I have never even heard him utter anything remotely close. As long as Jake has been alive I have been painstakingly careful about watching my language. Not that I don’t have my own share of colorful vocabulary words as do we all, reserved for those wonderful moments we all encounter throughout our lives. I am certainly no saint but I just always thought it was better not to use that kind of language in front of Jake indeed I have been pretty successful with just a couple exceptions. The mountain bike versus the Jeep incident immediately pops to mind but that is a long story and nobody needs to hear about me losing a battle of wits with a canvas top. So you can imagine what was running through my mind on hearing the news that Jake was spewing out four-letter words during a race. My mind was literally racing with possibilities if you will forgive the pun but I put on an admittedly weak smile and asked Barry a reluctant question. “What is up, did something happen out there…..what did he say?” I replied with more than a little dread. “He got stuck in the mud coming out of the turn up the hill and he told me “I can’t do it!” was the begrudgingly funny reply.
Can’t…..as in “I can’t” which although I will admit is better than what I thought he might have said and restored my faith in my decision to bite my own tongue frequently but it was still troubling.
Jake has always had a pretty good attitude towards what happened on the track and this year especially we have been to some races that have tested his patience with the ups and downs of racing. I on the other hand have been getting a crash course in the ups and downs of being an 85cc mechanic something which I am not sure that I have handled with the same optimism.
We decided this year to get out and ride a little earlier with Jake running on the bigger bike it seemed smart to not wait for the season to start before we hit the track. We did a trip down south to The Landing MX as well as running one of the venerable Jack Frost series races which had the distinction of being the first race we have ever gone to when it was snowing.
This year Jake also decided that he wanted to run the Loretta Lynn’s qualifier at Southwick to see what it was like to line up with the real big guns in New England. Except that while practicing following the race at Middleboro we noticed that the right-front fork had rivulets of greasy liquid stranding down to the bottom which I actually knew from previous experience meant that the fork seal had gone. OK that was no big deal we are sponsored by Factory Connection, they would certainly be at the Loretta’s qualifier weekend and since Jake wasn’t racing Saturday it should be no problem. Except that I had to take the fork tubes off so they could do it, which I found out at the track that Saturday. Suffice it to say that although the unnamed national hotel chain we stayed with probably doesn’t normally have a guest use their room as a garage it was that or nothing. After only a few missteps and one instance when the front brake pad fell out onto the carpet causing Jake and I to look at each other while he intoned a somber “that isn’t good” all was re-assembled and ready for race day. So the following morning in practice Jake was heading down the sweeping turn out of the woods as I watched from the mechanics area when he was suddenly bouncing and pitching over the bars the bike following him over and rag dolling him to the ground. As I sprinted down the side of the track towards where he was lying motionless on the ground with the medical workers knelt down next to him one thing kept running through my mind like a freight train “I screwed up the front brake and it locked up on him”.
Well all’s well that ends well as they say, Jake was fine albeit a little sore in the knee from getting tossed, the brakes did not lock up on him he just got a bad bounce down the hill and went on to run a pretty respectable couple motos, one of only 3 novice riders in a field of fast A&B riders.













Well things go along fine and then the bike starts to develop a bit of a late spring cold, acquiring a coughing pop and in general not running right. The general consensus was that I should take off the carburetor and clean it out to make sure that wasn’t the issue. “It’s easy” was the usual advice I would get as I laughed to myself, thinking that they obviously didn’t know who they were talking to.
Which brings us to where this story began as I am sitting there hating the carb and muttering to myself “I can’t do this.” That’s right the very same four letter word that Jake had finally been frustrated enough to let slip from his mouth after a month of mud racing had come all too easily out of mine. It was at this point I remembered a conversation we had when Jake was trying to work up to jumping some bigger obstacles and one double in particular, I told him there came a point where he just had to hook onto someone that was doing it and go for it.
“Dad I can’t jump that though”
“You mean you can’t jump it…yet.”
Well he laughed and we agreed that was the way to look at it and now he can jump that double, so I sort of laughed to myself and decided to get going on fixing the carburetor.
So from now on we have a deal there is no can’t do it, there is only can’t do it yet…
Oh and by the way it wasn’t even the carburetor after all but with “a little help from my friends” as the song goes at least I got a chance to take my own advice and stop using that four letter word.

All about the pride.

Labor day weekend 2006...The second annual New England Regional Championship series.

I knew before I even stepped foot on the property at Winchester Speedpark that the 2006 New England Regional Championship was going to be something incredible. You might ask yourself how I was able to ascertain this information; could I possibly have psychic powers? Nope it was when we rounded the final bend in Route 10 and looked down the road at an incredibly long line of vehicles waiting to make entrance to the park well in advance of the scheduled gate opening. That was a 2 and a half long mile of RV’s, trucks and trailers loaded down with bikes, equipment and eager racers to be exact. After sorting out my employment status with the fine representative of Winchester New Hampshire’s law enforcement community we squeezed into line on pit road and made our way in to survey the scene.
I wrote that last years Regional was like driving into the pit area at any pro national and this year was even bigger not to mention the fact that it already looked to me like the pits were as full as the previous year and there was still that pesky massive line of people awaiting entry. We staked our claim to a parking space as our base of operations for the weekend and got busy checking out how awesome the place looked and who had come to throw down for the weekend. It was pretty much a who’s who of New England racing from the perennial crafty veterans John Dowd, Pat Barton and Mike Treadwell to some of the fastest up and coming young guns like Mike Sottile, Matt Fisk and Honda’s newest poster boy Justin Barcia. Making the trip to the New Hampshire hills for the first time were Pennsylvania’s Ronnie Stewart along with New Jersey’s Nick Desiderio and Ryan Blizzard. Stowe Mass’s Robby Marshall was supposed to be off running the Outdoor Nationals but had some issues with his race bike so he loaded his practice ride into the pick-up and came out to play too.
The racing kicked off with the 125 Youth A class and it was New Hampshire’s own Cory Eaton who came away with the holeshot as Marshall struggled from a near last place start managing to salvage an impressive third while Ronnie Stewart went on to take the moto win. The rest of the weekend belonged to Marshall though as he took wins in moto’s two and three to snap up the class championship.

Robbie Marshall carves a tight off-camber turn.

Image courtesy http://www.buckleyphotos.com/ do not reproduce.

The first day of the weekend went off without a hitch but as night fell Mother Nature decided to make things a little interesting for day two and poured what felt like a foot of rain down on the assembled racers. To say that the second day’s motos were a whole different type of racing would be an understatement but incredibly the competition was just as fierce as any sunny day. Marshall had his podium hopes dashed in the 125 expert with a DNF in the muck even the Junk Yard Dog struggled a bit in the 250 class moto and had to settle for third that day. Dowd was pursued all weekend long by another young standout, Litchfield New Hampshire’s Chad Charbonneau but Chad couldn’t seem to get around Dowdy most of the weekend although not for lack of trying. Don’t feel too bad for John though he swept every other moto win for the weekend in the 250, 30+, 40+ and 125 classes in some cases against those same kids who weren’t even walking when Dowdy started racing. By the end of the race order on Sunday the track had deteriorated into a rutted swampy mess but still the racers took their gate drops and slugged it out as best they could. As my son Jake rolled off at the conclusion of his moto which was 31 out of 33 that day he summed it up best, after he spit out a mouthful of mud he muttered “that was NOT fun Dad”.
As day three dawned the sun actually peeked out in the morning and we were greeted by an impossibly good looking track. The crew from Winchester working alongside the men from Dirtwurx had indeed pulled a rabbit out of their hat and brought the track back into fine form. Possibly the most competitive class of the weekend was the 125 Amateur having had so many riders entered that there had to be 3 divisions to qualify for a spot on the 40 rider gate for the final day. Going into that gate drop you had Ryan Blizzard, Mike Sottile and Connecticut native Josh Clark bring in 1/1 scores and hoping to bring forth a holeshot on the way to a trifecta for the class. Rocketing off the gate to the first turn and spoiling everyone’s plan however was local favorite Greg Davis who put on possibly his best ride of the weekend in that moto and snagged a second place finish. It was Sottile however who worked his way into the lead by lap 2 and never looked back while Clark took a respectable 4th and Blizzard struggled to recover from a bad start having to settle for a 7th place finish.

Justin Barcia airs it out on his Honda ride.

Image courtesy http://www.buckleyphotos.com/ do not reproduce.

In the Supermini classes Matt Fisk took advantage of Justin Barcia’s only stumble of the weekend on lap 3 of the final moto in the 12-15 class to win after both entered day three with 1/1 scores from their division races. Meanwhile in the Supermini 7-11 Nick Desiderio battled fellow Jersey boy Luke Renzland all weekend to come away with the top spot on the box.
I could really go on and on about the fantastic racing we were treated to during the 2006 Regional weekend but there were a few stand out moments that really sum it all up. For me the word that best describes why everyone showed up to put it all on the line is pride.
Pushing it as far as they could and in some cases pushing it too far for no other reason then to say that they gave their all. In the Four Stroke Open class it was Mike Correa pushing it so hard into the finish turn midway through moto 3 that he overshot the turn, climbed the side of the finish line jump slamming into the post holding up the finish banner and knocking the crossbar bolts off which brought the bar crashing down. Correa ended up on the side of the hill facing the wrong direction, promptly jumped back on his bike and took off to finish his race. Then you had Robby Marshall who with no hope of a championship after DNF’ing his second moto of the 125 class due to the mud still put it all out on the track trying to dive under the Junkyard Dog in the final turn before the finish. Marshall flew into the inside line of that final turn at an impossible speed showing Dowdy a wheel but couldn’t hold it and put himself on the ground. Robby picked it up and finished 2nd but his pride wouldn’t let him just settle for it so he rolled the dice hard trying for that win. The best example for my money though also came in the final moto for the 125 expert class. Billy Ainsworth wasn’t having his best weekend and going into the first turn it got even worse as he got held up behind some riders who tangled, crossing the finish line on lap 1 he was running 22nd. Pride had to have kicked in hard because Ainsworth proceeded to blaze through lap 2 laying down the fastest lap of the weekend, an insane 1:38 which was a full 12 seconds faster than Dowd who was leading the moto. When Billy crossed the finish line on lap 2 he had moved from 22nd to 8th, passing 14 of the fastest riders in New England on one lap…..pride is the only explanation for that kind of drive. It isn’t about the trophies or the contingency; it is all about looking yourself in the eye and knowing you have done your best. So what will the 2007 Regional Championship bring? I don’t know but I do know that I will be proud to be a part of it and wouldn’t miss it for the world.