Passes & Canyons Blog

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.

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?

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Tags: racing sidecars

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 2:03 pm and is filed under motorcycle racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.