March 2, 2006
The “other” Sport
Yes, I think college football occasionally gets jealous of this one 
This past weekend, my other favorite sport kicked off the season. I spent about a year unable to really follow it, as I didn’t have a DVR (and it’s showed at inopportune times when I’m usually busy), but now I’m back.
Of course, I’m talking about motorcycle racing. In my mind, it is the most fun of all motorsports. I give it the slight edge over rally because of wheel-to-wheel racing, while rally is all time trials. For the time, I don’t think there are any races more exciting than motorcycle racing.
There are a lot of races that are wonderful to watch, each with their own special appeal. Drag racing, of course, is a pure testosterone fest. Races last less than 10 seconds each, and the fastest cars go from dead stop to a blistering 300 mph in a mere 4 seconds of sound and fury. But I can’t get into it. I’m sure it might be fun live, but the experience loses something on TV. Then, there’s NASCAR. NASCAR is more of a team sport than nearly any other racing (again, with the exception of rally), and the levels of strategy employed are amazing. Tire strategy, pit stop strategy, fuel strategy, as well as inter-team “alliances”, make it a very complex sport. It’s played out like an episode of Survivor, only at 200 mph. A lot of people love NASCAR, but I want racers to turn both directions, not just left. Last, there is Formula 1. This has it all. High levels of technical acumen that makes an engineer like myself drool. Braking forces and acceleration occur at mind-blowing rates, and the cars have enough downforce that they could drive upside down! But there’s one thing missing: competition. I remember watching a race, where there were absolutely no lead changes whatsoever. The levels of technology have hit the point where all the cars are so highly engineered that the best car with the best driver qualifies in front, leaves the pack, and that’s all she wrote.
Nope. Motorcycle racing is where it’s at. The technology present is pretty crazy, with 1L engines spooling up to 18,000 RPM and making 250 horsepower. All this on a motorcycle that barely weighs 300 lbs. To give an approximation of the power to weight ratio, imagine that your 1-ton family sedan had 1200-1500 horsepower, instead of the 180 it currently has. Yeah. It’s fast. But there’s more than just technology. There’s wheel-to-wheel racing. There are times where two riders will actually touch on track. Passes sometimes occur with only inches to spare, and many races are tightly-fought battles, with the lead changing once a lap. Even when one racer walks away with the race, it’s rare that you don’t then see a pack of 3-4 riders all battling intently for 2nd place. The diminutive size of a motorcycle requires less space to make a pass, so the different lines each rider takes through corners, and the different places passes are attempted and made make for exciting racing.
Motorcycle racing has one other advantage over cars. You see the rider, and you see him moving around on the bike. The rider makes up a significant portion of the weight of the machine, so seeing a rider “hanging off”, as in the above photo, dramatically affects the handling of the bike. You actually get to see how certain riders use their body to affect the bikes. And that doesn’t even account for the harrowing moments you occasionally see. When the time comes that the bike doesn’t do what is expected, you see what happens to a rider. Often, what happens is that a rear tire will break traction and then regain, and a rider will noticeably pop out of his seat. Usually, it’s just a reminder of just how hard they’re pushing the bike, but occasionally, you get to see treats like below! (FYI, I believe this was Valentino Rossi, a couple of years ago)
When you watch motorcycle racers, they do everything they can to make it look easy. It seems like they’re flowing through corners. On TV, it usually doesn’t even look like they’re going that fast. But then you realize they’re braking to the point the rear wheel is off the ground coming into a corner, cranking the bike from upright to a full lean at anywhere between 60 and 150 mph, waiting until the suspension settles and getting onto the gas as early and as fully as possible to accelerate away quickly. If you’ve never tried to lean a bike over at 100 mph, you don’t understand the forces involved. Motorcycles are incredibly stable vehicles at high speed, due to the gyroscopic inertia of spinning wheels, and trying to get an upright motorcycle to lean over at 100+ mph takes serious effort.
When you realize just how incredible it is to watch these riders pilot a bike under normal circumstances, and then when you see them coming into a corner sliding wheels, or smoke pouring off the tire as they spin up the rear on corner exits, and you get a whole new appreciation for just what a razor’s edge they’re balancing on. And all in the name of entertainment. And then when you see the intangibles (like in this weekend’s World Superbike race, where on the last lap the second-place racer and first-place racer both crashed due to an ill-advised passing attempt), there’s not much that will get you into motorsports quicker.
I’m not a basketball fan, I don’t watch hockey, I can’t stand soccer, and baseball makes me more want to sleep than watching golf. So when I need excitement in between football seasons, it’s a steady diet of World Superbike, AMA racing, and MotoGP for me.
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Yeks! How in the world did he get back on that bike? It’s a wonder he wasn’t killed. Do you still have a new bike coming in the future?
Yeah. Freakishly amazing…
As for me, it might be a while. But that day will come!