AFM Round 3, May 7-8 2011, Infineon Raceway
This…is the honey badger. Watch it run in slow motion.
It’s pretty bad ass.
I was thinking fondly of the honey badger Saturday afternoon, as I was pushing my mangled motorcycle back to my garage. Like the honey badger is focused on eating, I was focused on winning.
Randall’s flaming narrative was in my head as I was walking. Like when the honey badger braved bee stings to get at the larva inside the house of bees, he narrated, “it’s hungry, it doesn’t care about getting stung by bees. Nothing can stop the honey badger when it’s hungry.†I was pushing my broken bike, no tail, no helmet, laughing about the honey badger, and I passed a group of guys eating lunch in their race car garage who must have thought I was nuts.
So not only did I highside just an hour and a half before my all important Formula AFemme women’s race, I had also broken my motor in practice the day before, replaced it with another one, and then still set down personal best laptimes in Saturday morning practice.
It was a good day. I was already feeling like a honey badger for having rallied my team and sourcing a spare motor from the angelic and lovely Lisa Wallace, all without it slowing me down. It was such a good day, and I was feeling so fast and filled with racing brilliance, that I even felt it appropriate to share riding tips with other racers. Exactly the kind of behavior that tends to precede a highside crash.
Earlier on Saturday, I was running around with a group of guys and kind of wondering what the holdup was. A pass here, a pass there, and I was in front. Coming up over turn 2, I saw a 1:47 click through on my laptimer and I screamed, in my helmet, all the way to turn 4. I’d seen 48s already and was excited about those, because those are typically only achieved by me during races, with 1:50s happening during practice. But a 47? Damn. I was pretty sure I’d be racing MotoGP by next spring.
Coming off the track I saw that I had a good tear along the right side of my tire; typical, as most of the turns at Infineon are right handers. I had Chris and the awesome boys over at CT Racing and Pirelli flip the tire for me, then I was back in business.
Second to last practice session, again, fighting my way through some slow pokes in practice group 4. With the tear now on the left hand side of my tire, I should have reminded myself to take it easy on the throttle coming out of left hand turns, but I didn’t. Coming out of Turn 9, I turned the throttle, the rear slid out to the right, regained traction awkwardly as is typical of a highside crash, and my twisted up bike bucked me off of it like an irritated bull.
I landed hard on my bottom, bounced and then landed on my head, and then rolled off the track with my bike almost chasing me, sliding and crunching along the asphalt. I was concerned about getting run over by Sam, or some other guy I’d just passed, so I scurried off the track once the tumbling stopped.
There was a turnworker who righted my bike, asked if I was okay, and then motioned for me to take my bike so he could get back to work. He pointed at the door to exit the track. Yeah. Thanks for making a mess of my turn, now take your bike and your broken tail section and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!
Thus began the walk of shame.
About half way through the walk I tried to start the bike again and it fired up. I sat where the seat would have been, right on top of the battery, and rode it back to the garage. Honey badger don’t care. When I got to my garage, it was all business as we assessed the damage. It was fortunate that I had not only Jason Hauns there assisting, but also Lisa Wallace, in addition to my usual rocket scientist mechanic, Ross Embertson. Nikki offered me her bike for the race, and I told her thank you, but that’s stupid and you’re racing.
We needed a new windscreen, new clip ons, new number stickers, new brake lever, a new vortex footpeg, and we were also dealing with a bent rearset plate, a broken but usable upper fairing, a broken but usable fairing stay, a broken but usable tail section, and an exhaust canister with a big ass hole in it. We frantically sourced parts and fixed and replaced things. The bike had to pass tech inspection again before I could race it, and once it was all done, we had warmers on and ready to go thirty minutes before the race.
Although I was kind of riding a wave of adrenaline and courage, I was also incredibly embarrassed about my crash. I knew exactly why it happened. Not the mechanics of it, although I pretty much know how that goes too. But the psychology of it. The cockiness of it. Like Icarus flying too close to the sun, because, well, he just felt that awesome. I was appropriately humbled, but knew I had to focus on the race ahead.
Joy was absent from the track this weekend, and this made me sad. She’s my carrot. I adore and admire her, but I want to beat her. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But it’s always fun to try. AMA National SuperSport racer Shelina Moreda was here, practicing for next weekend’s pro race, but she must have still been getting used to her new bike because her lap times were pretty off pace. Still, she’s courageous and aggressive enough to sometimes make six second gains from practice to racing. Sometimes that concerns me a little, so I prefer to stay as far ahead of her as possible.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to try to jump out to an early lead and lead the whole race, but with a probably twisted up bike and shaky confidence, I also considered hanging back and waiting for a good time to pass her.
As we gridded up, I don’t think anyone but Jenn knew that I had just crashed just a short while before. Even crazier, Nikki had crashed in turn 9 during her Clubman Middleweight (a co-ed race for novices on middleweight bikes like GSXR-600s, R6s and the like) race just before Formula AFemme, so she was gone.
The green flag dropped, and I was gone. Occasional sideways glances coming out of turns 7 and 11 informed me that Shelina was dropping further and further back. My ass ached with every turn, and I counted down the laps until the race was over. I’ve never done that before…but god that was the longest race ever. I got the checkers with a 20 second lead and immediately knew I’d sit out Sunday’s races. I was in a lot of pain, and I think my bike was too because it complained in a weird way every time hit bumps or let off the brakes. Maybe I was out of adrenaline, or just, the urgency of getting my bike fixed required more adrenaline than it actually did to race. But I really wanted some champagne and a vicodin.
Sunday, while everyone else raced, Ross and I had Gerry Piazza measure my bike for straightness. Have you ever heard the term called “dogtrot?†Like, kind of running sideways? Cars do it when their wheels are out of alignment. Me and my bike dogtrotted to the win Saturday, basically, eking out 1:50 laptimes to get the job done.
Whatever the opposite of a honey badger is, maybe a sheep, or the aptly named chicken, that’s what I felt like Sunday as I watched the races. The honey badger in me felt like a chicken for not getting out there and dogtrotting around with all the other crazy racers, but I kept reminding myself that my whole garage, most especially me and my motorcycle, had had extremely bad luck the entire weekend (even the rocket scientist mechanic crashed on Friday) and that I shouldn’t push it. Many motorcyclists like to remind others to listen to these gut feelings, but then I look at truly bad ass racers and I’m not even sure those feelings ever occur to them. Why do they happen to me?
So many people helped me make lemonade out of the weekend’s lemons. Thanks go out to Lisa Wallace for loaning me her motor, to her boyfriend Greg Olson for agreeing to it even though I wanted to beat him on the racetrack with it, to Joel of CT Racing for helping us with the motor swap, to Chris Maguire of CT Racing for agreeing to let Joel off for the afternoon so he could assist us, to my sponsor, friend and brilliant mechanic Alex Torres of Fastline Cycles for supervising the motor swap and helping at critical points, Jason Hauns for also helping with the motor swap and crash repairs, and of course to my team, Ross Embertson and Nikki Nienow. A special mention as well to Leo Vince Exhaust Systems for subsequently sponsoring me and setting me up with a new Corsa full exhaust system.
I know we’re not curing cancer or doing anything truly miraculous over here, but it was a pretty good weekend. Sometimes simply surviving is a miracle; even the honey badger can get bitten by a cobra and still come back to be a bad ass for another day.
