A yarn - 24 hours of scooter madness12-09-2007
This may not be an MRRDA race, however with MRRDA riders in it and a number of the series Partners helping us out, it only seems fitting to send out this yarn under the MRRDA and AMCN logo's. So, what do you do when a fellow MRRDA competitor suggests that its time to do an endurance race? Well if you know that one of the Sponsors is entering a bike in a 24 hour race, you see if you can get a bike to join in. Seems logical to me! Now if you're really lucky the Sponsor will be Arqin Motorcycles and your contact will be your team mate in the Formula 400's..Dale Corser. Of course this does mean that the endurance race is going to be on a scooter, but hey, its still a bike! 24 hours racing a scooter. Your kidding I hear you say. Madness I hear you say, and you'd be right. But you just don't know unless you try it. So we did. How lucky were we? Well it started out real lucky. I contacted Dale to try and get our hands on a scooter, happy to buy one for the event. Dale had other ideas. "We'll enter you as an Arqin team" he says. I thought he was joking until I got a call to confirm that he was not. Cool, so we are going to be factory riders! So the next call is to get a third rider in the team to reduce the pain a bit. Without hesitation my first thought was Kellie Buckley. Over the course of the MRRDA series I'd like to think that she's become a friend and as a good, light rider and AMCN journalist surely she's ridden a scooter or two in bike tests, so would be an ideal team mate. The email telling me that she wanted in as she'd been secretly keen to try out scooter racing arrived and we had a team. Well that was until the original team mate, Neil Orme, high-sided his 400 right in front of me at Wakefield, breaking his leg in the process. Fortunately VIC 400 team Captain Glenn Kettle jokingly said earlier in the day that he wouldn't mind having a go at scooter racing. So after hearing that Neil was broken, I swallowed my NSW pride and wandered down the pits to welcome Glenn, a Victorian of all things, to the team. It gets better....
Just to finish the picture, I'm chatting to Red Bull and no sooner have I told them what we are getting up too and a slab or two of Red Bull product turns up on my doorstep to keep the team energised throughout the hours of scooter madness. We knew we were going to need it too! That pretty much sets the picture. Come the weekend in question, Kellie and Glenn fly up to the coast of gold. Dale is already there visiting his local Arqin dealers. Taryn and I load the van with a generator, lights, a tent and plenty of bedding and drive up. We all gather at a hotel and it takes only minutes for us all to be dressed in Draggin Jeans, drinking beer and making plans. Dale's plan is simple, set off at midday on Saturday and ride through to midday on Sunday. Every 3 hours he gets either a 5 or 10 minutes break. Otherwise he only stops every 2 hours for fuel. You thought we were nuts eh? Our plan has a bit more substance. Each of us will do two 90 minute stints and then back it off to 1 hour stints to the end. We'll swap it around a bit so each of us gets a long break at some point to get some sleep. Well, it is a plan! Race day
As people seem to be buzzing around the track we do a couple of laps to check it out a bit closer. No sooner are we on there, we get yelled at to get off. No sooner are we off and we get yelled at that it's a practice session, so we get back on again. Much to the relief of Kellie and myself, Glenn manages to find the edge of the tyres in practice and is the first to kiss the tarmac. Well, no one wanted to be the first to drop it! He quickly picks it up and gets going again with nothing but a minor scuff on both bike and Draggin Jacket (which was my jacket, but he now owned!). Our bug eyed scooter seems a bit down on power out of corners. Could this be so? The start is supposed to be a Le Mans start or "Le Minz" as they call it. During the riders brief it is decided that there are too many riders for that, so we'll split into 3 groups around the track for the start. When the start actually comes around everyone kind of gathers around the refueling area and someone shouts "Go"! OK, so it's going to be like that is it?
We're into the 9th hour, how the hell is Dale doing this on his own. Kellie appears from the tent looking ready to go right back to sleep, but she's due out there, so she zips up her leathers, pulls her helmet on and off she goes. We may have a stock scooter compared to these hotted up beasts that the other teams have, but that won't stop this team. Yep I used the word beasts and scooter together. It's all relative! During my next stint, Dale and I go side by side down the straight. I'm on the inside so I'm going to try and hold him out as it was one of my aims for the weekend. To my surprise I hold him out for the left hander and the uphill right and as I start to punch the air with glee, someone crashes heavily coming out of the long sweeping right and people gather on the track to tend to him. (punching of air and crash not related!) No medical team, no flag marshals, hardly any track to ride on due to the crowd around the crashed rider. What do we do? Apparently keep racing. When you get to the crash, slow down a bit and then keep going. Well there's no ambulance to worry about! The rider and crowd seem to disappear and it's business as usual. I heard that the dude bust 6 ribs and had a suspected punctured lung. Not sure how he got to hospital. Someone later joked that he drove himself! I doubt it though. Midnight comes around and Dale gets his second 10 minute break. He looks absolutely knackered and he claims to be getting delirious out there. That's 12 hours of trying to ring the neck out of an under powered scooter. I feel bad enough and I've only done 4 hours. I get an hours kip and go out again. The Draggin gear is really comfortable and as we can't get the scooter over far enough, there's no worry about knee sliders. Well, Dale can as he's kitted his bike out with some Michelin Pilots with tread all the way around and no lip, so he's in his leathers. The Draggin gear means that I can comfortably get off the bike and wander around or lie down without getting changed. Glenn's practice stack proved the protective element of the Draggin jeans and jacket, so I reckon we had the best gear for the job with the tyres we're running. Plenty of riders have a chat and ask if we're from Draggin as they too are wearing their Draggin Jeans. Other's see us with a slab or two of Red Bull and ask for a can. We're getting popular!
Everything hurts after only a few laps. Maybe it wasn't such a bright idea to sit on the back of the seat and try and tuck in. Oh well, might as well keep it up. The timing screen shows that somehow I manage a 49.005 and then a 48.733. The sun starts to rise and we're on our way to the end. I tell Kellie about the lap times as Glenn puts in a good effort and then I go out again. Kellie decided to show me a sign that she has the fastest lap time out of the 3 of us, so I put my head down and go as hard as I can. Kellie goes out in the next stint and I check out her claims. She was egging me on, so I give her a pit board signal that I still hold the fastest time amongst us. We must be getting tired! The race between Dale and a young dude for the solo effort is heating up, Dale lost a lot of time at the beginning of the race due to the young dude having a faster bike. As the laps wear down, so does the other rider and Dale starts to pull the laps back. His riding into the double left and uphill rights was simply impressive. He's on a scooter for gods sake! Sparks are flying and he rides around the outside or up the inside again and again. We simply don't have the tyres to pull off those moves. Glenn seems to be going really slow and he pulls in with a problem. We tinker a bit and I have another go on it. It's worse than ever. We can't even get it up to 40kmh. Back into the pits and Glenn finds a kinked fuel line which he fixes and off I go for my last stint, giving a big thumbs up past our pits to show that it was back to its 60kmh best. We're down to the last 3 hour session. Glenn goes out and I talk to Kellie who is looking more than a tad weary and offer to finish the race off as a double stint with Glenn. I could see that she was tempted, but she wanted to do her part for the team, so declined the offer. Due to the earlier big crash, the sessions seem to have got a bit mixed up and the last 3 hour session is actually a 130 minute session. Kellie sets out on her last stint. We're now up to 12th. Unfortunately this is where the story ends. Shortly after starting the stint, a rider misjudges his move around the outside of Kellie over the start line and tags her front wheel as he sweeps in front of her. Our scooter goes into a tank slapper and out of Kellie's control. With nothing that she could do, the Scooter piles head first into a tree with Kellie still on it. Kellie gets thrown high into the air and as we all race to try and help her, she pops up arms in the air to let us all know she's OK. The closest thing to a clerk of the course arrives to give Kellie a medical check. Fortunately there does not appear to be any broken bones although Kellie's knee is very sore and she is definitely shaken up a fair bit. The bike is a different story. A scooter no more, the pile of bits is not the way that our scooter deserved to finish the race. Sure we were frustrate with its lack of acceleration , but only compared to the hotted up other bikes. It took everything that we threw at it and just kept going. I was starting to really like that scooter. It wasn't the fastest but it had guts and character. The last I saw of our little green bug eyed friend it was being loaded in the back of a van, destined to be dissected for parts. It didn't deserve that.
Would we do it again? Glenn was talking about a return before the final chequered flag was waved (they had one of those). So yes we will be back. Unfinished business! Unfortunately I do have to make a comment about the dude that caused Kellie's crash. He came up to chat to Dale and the rest of the team and when it came to light that it was him that had hit our scooter, he asked if Kellie had any broken bones and that was it. There was that deadly silence as everyone waited for him to say sorry or at least show some real signs of concern or remorse. Nothing. I'm sure that he didn't mean to hit Kellie but just because it's racing it doesn't mean that common courtesy has to go right out the window. There are names for this guy that I shall not repeat here. Kellie and Glenn had to walk away while I looked at the guy in amazement, tempted to say something that only awareness of being tired stopped. A big thanks to Arqin for our green bug eyed scooter. It may have gone to the great parts bin in the north, but it will be fondly remembered. It was great under brakes and as a stock bike, it performed a great job against highly "Tweaked" competition. Thanks to Draggin for the gear that kept us safe, stylish, comfortable and warm for the entire race. Thanks to Red Bull for keeping us focused on the race. Thanks to Steve and Taryn for their help throughout the entire race. Finally a big thanks to Dale for getting us into the race and congrats to him for an awesome effort. I still do not know how on earth he did that race on his own. Now about next year... We might have to have a word about Ambulances and things, but of course they have to be careful not to lose the spirit of the event. Too many bikes and too much officialdom will definitely do that to it, but I think some safety aspects have to be looked at. We'll be there though, hopefully decked out in Draggin Jeans, drinking Red Bull and on another green bug eyed Arqin Scooter with a bit of legal tweaking of our own. Cheers Woody |
While visiting Draggin Jeans to see if there was any way that the MRRDA could do anything more for Draggin Jeans through their Sponsorship of the series, the Scooterthon gets a mention and we get an offer to fully kit out the team in Draggin Jeans, Jackets, T-shirts and Caps. Gob-smacked at this generous offer, of course I accepted. Who wouldn't? Their gear is awesome and the crew at Draggin are real good guys.
We meet at the track and see our race bike for the first time...its green and has 2 headlights, that goes well with the camo Draggin gear. We pitch a tent and quick shade then check the track. OK so its tight, bumpy and yep, it's got drainage grates in the middle of the back straight and the first corner. There really isn't a pit area as everyone sets up around the edge of the track. There's no medical team, no structured practice or qualifying. There's even a couple of trees a couple of feet off the edge of the first corner, but we'll get back to those.
Kellie is on the bike for the start and it quickly becomes obvious that the other teams have spent some time preparing for this one. If the race was going to rely on getting your scooter out of the corner, we were going to be in trouble. Guess what, a large part of the race is all about getting your bike out of the corner! There's a long right hand corner where you just wind the bike up to go down the straight. Half way through the corner you have to choose to stay in tight and to the right of the drainage grate in the middle of the track or go wide and to the left of the grate! If we got it right we could get up to a bike shuddering 60kmh down the straight. At the end of the straight there is a hard double right around the back of a shed, where you brake hard on the way in and get on the gas at the first apex. The bike winds up down the next straight keeping far right to avoid the drains in the middle of the track, for a run into the double left. You're then quickly into a double up hill right back over the start finish line. Kellie gets away OK but soon gets left behind as the lack of go juice out of corners becomes more than evident. Lap 2 and down she goes on the uphill double right. This confirms Glenn's practice crash theory that it is far too easy to roll the bike off the tread on the tyres. Quickly up, Kel hops back on the bike and sets off again. As the stint runs down, other riders crash, pick up their scooters and go again. This is definitely a different race! After 90 minutes Kel comes in, we fuel up and off I go. How bad is the lack of acceleration? Bad. As the quicker bikes try and get around you they give you a double beeb on their horns to let you know they are coming. As they go past out of corners they give you a beep or two in thanks or whatever and you give a beep back. My thumb seems to be constantly beeping that bloody horn! I get demoralised and start to wonder what the hell am I doing here racing a scooter. Who's bright idea was this? Dale rides by again and again and toward the end of the session pulls alongside and yells at me to try racing the thing if I want to have fun. I hand over the bike to Glenn and sit down to sulk. While I'm waiting for my next stint, Dale's words of wisdom sink in and I discover a new determination to make the best of it. We're in 18th out of 24 after the first 3 hours. I know we can overtake at least 2 of the other 23 bikes down the straight and just about hold them out down the next straight. So there has to be a couple of other bikes who have had problems if we're in 18th. We'll take it!
Into my second 90 minute session I'm going to get my bum on the back of the seat, elbows in and head down to get as much speed as I can out of this thing. I'm going to find that line through the corner and the edge of the tyre tread. All of a sudden there are other bikes to chase down and actually dice with. This is more like it, Dale was right. Sure the bulk of the scooters are still flying past out of corners and down the straights, but at least we're trying. At the end of 6 hours, we're up to 15th and we've all dropped our lap times. My elbows and knees are hurting. My legs are hurting. 
Another break as Kellie heads out for another stint with Glenn to follow and then Kellie again, so I've got enough time for a 2 hour sleep. It's hard to sleep even when you're tired when just a few feet away there's the constant buzz of scooters going past and then there's that beeping of horns that accompany over taking and the boof boof of the music over by the Blokes World pit set up. Some how I got to sleep and woke up again with 15 minutes before I'm due out again. Time for a quick visit to the gents, a can of Red bull and put the helmet and gloves on.
So we only made 22.5 hours. Dale crashed just before us and his fight for the solo title crashed out with him. He got going again but only after his faithful mechanic Steve had ran some repairs to get him back out there. We didn't win the race, we didn't finish the race, but we did get to12th and I believe finished 13th even with an hour and a half lost at the end, which shows that our scooter was holding up bloody well compared to some of the others. The Red Bull was keeping us on the mark and the team was riding about as hard as we could.