Here’s an interesting looking challenge. Have you ever heard of the Hoka Hey Motorcycle Challenge? This 7,000-mile run starts in Key West, Florida, and ends on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. The race begins on June 20, 2010, and the winner will take home half a million dollars in Alaskan gold.

Hoka Hey, the organizers tell us, means “It’s a good day to die.”

“HOKA HEY” was the roar of every warrior that rode into battle with Crazy Horse. Join us as we ride into battle. As we put ourselves on the line to find out just who we are.

More from the organizers:

Known as the Conch Republic since the city seceded from the union in 1982; Key West reflects the rebel spirit of the Hoka Hey Challenger and we couldn’t think of a better place to kick-off the Hoka Hey Motorcycle Challenge!

Key West is said to be the southernmost city in the Continental United States. It is also the southern terminus of U.S. 1 and State Road A1A. The Southernmost point in the continental United States is claimed to be at the corner of South Street and Whitehead Street and this is where our adventure will begin on June 20, 2010.

About the destination:

Homer is on the shore of Kachemak Bay on the southwest side of the Kenai Peninsula. In fact, Homer is just 15 miles away from the westernmost point in the North American highway system at Anchor Point, AK.

Homer’s most distinguishing feature is the Homer Spit, a narrow 4.5 mile (7 km) long gravel bar that extends into the bay. And it is here that our Challengers will find the end of the road. Plus, when the Challengers arrive in here; they will be greeted by one of the most enthusiastic and endearing group of people you could ever hope to meet!

The event is a benefit for the following charities.
Paralyzed Veterans of America
Warrior Weekend
Disabled American Veterans
American Gold Star Mothers, Inc.
Vietnam Veterans of America
American Indian College Fund
National Multiple Sclerosis Society

This looks like one to watch for. If you decide to run in it, let me know and I’d love to carry your reports.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Buy that motorcycle now for this summer

Biker Quote for Today

If ya ain’t flyin’ ya ain’t tryin’!

The Motomarathon is back in 2010 with four events on its calendar. “The Motomarathon Association,” says founding Route Master John Metzger, “sanctions an annual series of four-day rides over the best roads and most scenic routes in the nation, and now with organized sport-riding tours on both coasts.” Its first season was 2009.

Here is the list of this year’s events.

• Southern California Motomarathon – March 26-29
• New England Motomarathon – May 13-16
• Centopassi Motomarathon – June 25-28
• Colorado Motomarathon – September 17-20

With two inaugural rides last season, only six riders completed all the checkpoints out of nearly 100 participants. “With four events scheduled for 2010, it will be a challenge to nail every check,” said Metzger. “This should result in a national champion to be crowned by the end of the year.”

For more information visit the website or contact John Metzger, 303-641-1062, john@metzger.com.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Top 100 motorsports dealers named for 2010

Biker Quote for Today

Ride Safe. Ride Hard. Enjoy the Ride!

Jason Hill and John Lowe went to Ensenada last month as J2 Racing to compete in the 2009 Baja 1000, but the race ended very early for them when John crashed and broke his wrist and other bones. That’s Jason on the right, John on the left.

While I quickly received, and passed on, the general information, Jason has now provided me with the full story, and what a story! I’ve started putting the whole thing up on Examiner.com in segments and you can read the first segment now. I’ll be posting the additional segments one per day until it’s all up there.

So what’s up next on my agenda? Well, when I initially made contact with Jason on the Adventure Riders forum I received a note from another fellow who asked if I’d be interested in covering the ALCAN 5000 via their team. Oh, OK, that sounds interesting.

In case you’re unfamiliar with it, the ALCAN 5000 is a team racing event with cars and/or motorcycles. They cover 5,000 miles (surprise!) and a good bit of Alaska and Canada. This particular team will have two cars and two bikes. The race isn’t until next summer so I won’t be doing much with it for awhile.

And then, asking Jason what’s next for J2 Racing, he says they now have their eyes on the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. That’s great because I had my eyes on that, too. And it looks like I won’t even have to go looking for a team. This could become addictive.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Seasonal giving displays the best in bikers

Biker Quote for Today

I ride faster than I should but slower than I wish. I know there is risk, but I balance it against skill and luck and that act is a big part of why I ride motorcycles and why I bother with a trip like this. - Neduro

I linked up with a team racing in the last weekend’s Baja 1000 and was hoping to be able to post frequent, up-to-the-minute reports on what they were encountering, how it was all going, and their general attitude/morale. Because I was not going to Baja with them, I was entirely dependent on them to feed me this information.

Frank Prince, of Big Magic Racing, during the 2007
Baja 1000. (Photo: Mark Hintsa)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hintsa/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Well, we all know about the best laid plans, and there was a reason television, in its early days, quickly switched from live programming to pre-recorded shows. When you’re on the air live and something goes wrong you can find yourself in a very awkward place.

I had discussed with Jason, one of the J2 Racing riders, just what I was hoping he could send me, and he had made it clear he would do what he could but he couldn’t promise the world, the race was his number one priority. I understood and accepted that. But I had hopes that he would find it no problem to update me frequently. And I told everyone I would be providing them with frequent updates. A bit of overconfidence on my part.

As it played out, preparing for the race became all-consuming and 36 hours after the race began I still had heard nothing. What’s more, the team had a GPS website that was supposed to show their location along the course, updating every 10 minutes. Checking repeatedly during the race the only thing it showed was that the GPS unit was in downtown Ensenada and not moving. Did something happen during the pre-running, knocking them out of the race before it even began? Did something totally unrelated foul up their plans and ruin everything? What the heck is going on down there? I really wished I was there.

Saturday night I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it, and figuring I owed my readers some kind of update, in my head I wrote the gist of the piece I was going to put up come morning if I still hadn’t heard anything. Basically, I was going to tell them just what I’ve explained right here.

But glory be, come morning there was an email from Jason. The good news was that things went fine leading up to the race. The bad news was that early on in the race, John, the other rider, crashed the bike, broke some bones, and the event was over for J2. I still don’t know what the deal was with the GPS.

So of course it’s a disappointment for the guys, although they still seem pretty upbeat just to have gone down there to live out their boyhood dream. And it will still make for an interesting story once I have all the details. I’ll let you know when it’s written.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
J2 Racing run in Baja 1000 ends prematurely with crash and broken bones

Biker Quote for Today

The further you lean the less distance to fall!

I will indeed be telling the story of a racing team participating in the 2009 Baja 1000 race, which gets underway this Friday. I just won’t be following the team I started out with.

The team I am going to be following is J2 Racing. The riders are Jason Hill and John Lowe, two dirt-bike riding buddies in their early years who were reunited just two years ago after an extended loss of contact. Here’s how Jason describes their decision to do the Baja.

As we began catching up, John asked, ‘Do you remember when we were riding as kids how we used to watch the Baja races on TV and always said we’d run it one day?’ ‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Well, it’s time.’ And that was that. It took some convincing, but I finally agreed that it was indeed time, so we began incubating a plan.

I met up with these guys on the Adventure Rider forum. When my initial plans to go to the race and report first-hand fell through I posted a notice on Adventure Rider asking if there was a team going who would like me to tell their story. Jason quickly replied and the deal was set. This time I made absolutely certain to make it clear what our relationship is. I am not a team member, I am an outside observer, and my position is not to tell a bunch of fluffy stories that paint the team as perfect, it is to tell the story as it really is, true to life. Jason is something of a writer himself so he understands that false starts and missteps are part of life, and how you handle them is sometimes the most interesting part of the story.

So anyway, I won’t be posting the reports of their adventure here; that will be on Examiner.com. I’ll post links here to those pieces and if there are any interesting side notes that don’t really fit into the main story, I will, as usual, be telling those stories here.

Additionally, you can follow the team’s progress during the race in real-time on their SpotAdventures.com website.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Reunited riding buddies will fulfill Baja racing dream

Biker Quote for Today

I’m sure I look a sight, with my filthy off-road gear and motocross boots on, drooling and staggering to the metal detector.

I’ve been telling you for awhile that I would be going to this year’s Baja 1000 race in Ensenada, Mexico, but that will not be happening. I had been following the Rsenal Racing team as they prepared for their first-time competition in the event and was going to be riding down with them to present the up-close story of their effort.

Unfortunately, when they read my most recent post on the ongoing story of planning and preparation, they seriously misconstrued what I wrote and informed me that they didn’t want me.

So I won’t be going to Baja but I’m trying to work out arrangements where I can still provide some coverage of the race, although obviously not through the Rsenal Racing folks. You’ll see it here if I’m successful.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Riding solo to the tip of South America

Biker Quote for Today

Motorcycles are better because: Motorcycles don’t whine unless something is really wrong.

“The road to Ensenada is plenty wide and fast” says Lyle Lovett but he wasn’t speaking about the preparations for the Baja 1000 currently underway with the race team I’ll be accompanying.

First off, if you don’t know what the Baja 1000 is you really ought to view this trailer to the definitive Baja 1000 movie, Dust to Glory.

I’m riding down to Ensenada, on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, with Rsenal Racing to write about the event and the team’s efforts for the variety of motorcycle publications I write for. The race itself starts Nov. 19 but we’ll be down there in advance to get ready.

Chuck Shortt is the driving force behind this adventure, and what I’m coming to understand about Chuck is that he is a big idea person who then frequently turns to others to make his big dreams become reality. If the dream is improbable but the person succeeds, that’s fantastic, they’ve really accomplished something. If they don’t succeed, oh well, good idea that didn’t work. Move on.

This is not a criticism of Chuck or a bad thing; it is something useful to understand about him.

For instance, when he first told me about this thing, Chuck told me they would have satellite uplinks and wanted to livecast the event via the Web. He asked me if Examiner or RumBum might be interested and able to carry the feed. I agreed to ask RumBum.

Happily, RumBum said they were very interested and their tech guy, Tobias, would contact me to work out details. In the meantime, Chuck told me to hook up with John, the team’s tech guy. Well, it seems that having a satellite hook-up was not in the game, but Tobias suggested that if the team could supply video segments periodically, that would be fine and even easier than a live link.

I figured that before I pushed this any further I needed to check in with Jeff and Sydney Mikelson, the photographers on the team, to see what they felt they would be capable of in terms of supplying RumBum with segments. Surprise, surprise. Sydney told me they had no video editing software, and were planning to bring their raw footage home and turn it over to a friend who is a video editor. So nothing at all available to RumBum unless they wanted raw footage.

Then we learned that the non-satellite internet connection Jack was hoping have set up was not going to be within the team’s price range so the whole matter was really moot. And then Sydney called me to say that she and Jeff had had to opt out of the trip due to financial considerations. Totally moot.

OK, so that’s where we stand. The rest of us are still going, and I’m hoping to have some great pictures and terrific stories to tell. Coming soon.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Harley rider covers 30K in 30 days for MDA

Biker Quote for Today

Competition, once it gets in your blood, you can’t get it out.

There’s nothing like screaming around a racetrack at 150 miles an hour while hanging your body out of the vehicle to get your blood pumping. I had the chance to do exactly that last weekend at Miller Motorsports Park, outside of Tooele, UT, where I went to cover the Bonneville Vintage GP and Concours.

    That’s me in the rear

The ride was a Formula 1 sidecar, piloted by Rick Murray, now the past-president of the Sidecar Racers Association-West. You can read about my ride on Examiner.com; this blog post is the back story of how this ride came to be, and almost never happened.

I was immediately drawn to the sidecar racers, just because what they do is so exotic, and so different from your basic motorcycle racing. You’ve got a motorcycle totally sheathed in aerodynamic bodywork, with one person driving and another person whose job it is to hang way over the side to provide counter-weighting to keep all three wheels on the ground. Sure, motorcycle racers wear pucks on their knees that they drag as they lean way over in curves. Sidecar passengers would need entire suits made of puck material, except their intent is not to drag.

Of course, at slower speeds the passenger doesn’t have to engage in quite such extreme behavior, and in fact the sidecar folks like taking others for “taxi rides” just to give them a feel for it. When I heard this I immediately asked where I should sign up.

It turned into a bit of dominos. The sidecar guys were all for giving me a ride, but they needed the OK from the American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association (AHRMA), the event organizer, to take me on the track. I went and spoke to the AHRMA people.

The AHRMA people like having the sidecar people give taxi rides because that’s good PR for the vintage racing event, but they needed the OK from management of the track. All this was on Friday.

On Saturday I checked back and there seemed to be issues that were not easily resolved, though I have no idea what they were. One thing was certain, however, and that was that there would not be any taxi rides on Saturday. Try again tomorrow.

Sunday came and I tracked down the AHRMA folks again and pleaded my case. Apparently, this very topic had just been under discussion “upstairs” and as much as they’d like to offer taxi rides, it wasn’t going to happen. There was no time to squeeze it into the schedule. No taxi ride for me. Rats!

So I went back up to the press box and was working on another story when I heard a guy a couple tables down saying he was going for a taxi ride. How can that be, I asked, I was just told they weren’t doing them. He said he had talked with one of the sidecar teams and they offered to take him. I explained what I had been told and we went to talk to the folks who said they’d take him.

I told the team what the AHRMA people had told me and they said, well, if that’s what AHRMA says then that’s that. No can do. But that didn’t faze this other taxi rider. He wondered aloud if some strings could be pulled, and we headed out to do that. I asked him if he had strings to pull and he said he certainly expected that he did, he was the Sales Manager there at the track and was responsible for bringing about $5 million into the facility each year. (I forget his name. Sorry man, I wish I’d written it down.)

We went and found the AHRMA people and asked if it was the OK of the track that was needed. Yes. He grabbed a walkie-talkie and called his boss and asked if it was all right for the sidecars to do some taxi rides. His boss said yes. Presto, we were in. In minutes we were both suited up and loaded into our respective sidecars and out on the track.

Does the term “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” ring a bell?

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Fowler Formula racing: Speedsters on a budget

Biker Quote for Today

Speed overcomes clearance–always!!

The coolest thing about building a career as a motorcycle journalist is getting to go to a lot of terrific events. I’ll be heading out on Thursday to cover the 4th annual Bonneville Vintage GP and Concours, in Tooele, UT, Sept. 4-6. Of course I’ll be telling you all about it.

So what exactly is this event? I’m still learning about it myself but I’ll tell you what I think I’ve figured out so far. It seems to be in essentially three parts, vintage motorcycle racing, sidecar racing, and a vintage motorcycle show.

The American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association (AHRMA) is sponsoring the race events. Motorcycle Classics magazine is sponsoring the show.

There will be a two-stage “Battle of the CB-160s,” featuring two-time World Superbike Champion Doug Polen. Polen also offers a racing school on Friday. Saturday and Sunday, the two main days, will both feature a “Vintage and Legend Bikes Parade Laps” event, after which the day’s racing begins. The vintage bike show is on Saturday.

The location for all this will be Miller Motorsports Park, just outside of Tooele. That means it’s about 30 miles from downtown Salt Lake City. The venue is billed as “the newest world class racetrack - the largest in North America - that will very soon . . . also be legendary.”

Beyond that, I can’t tell you much - yet. Stay tuned.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Demo riding the Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic

Biker Quote for Today

My theory, you only get one chance, go full fucking throttle, all the way, all the time.

Everyone who rides a motorcycle has heard of the classic movie, On Any Sunday. Produced by Bruce Brown in 1971, the film is the icon of motorcycle movies, depicting the joy of riding, whether in top-dollar races or around the sand lot down the street.

I’ve heard of On Any Sunday for years, and for years I have intended to rent it and finally watch it. Well, wouldn’t you know it, while looking for trailers for Dust to Glory, which is the film that inspired Chuck Shortt to enter the Baja 1000, I found On Any Sunday available for free online.

Now, you have to watch a few commercials along the way but I can deal with that. I finally get to see this movie!

You can too. Here’s the link. Enjoy.

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi2162491929/

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
Breast/ovarian cancer-fighting dirt-bikers roll to conclusion

Biker Quote for Today

They cannot be built any bigger or faster without leaving the road. — Thomas Krens