In early summer, when most children begin to slump at their desks,
overcome with the dull heat of lower education, tired of the constant
tedious uploading, bored with the same silly faces, desperate for the
fleeting freedom of a teenaged summer, there are some kids who have a
hall pass of epic proportions, and the only slumping they do is in a
lounge chair, trackside.
Like the select youthful skiing protégées of the Roaring Fork Valley,
these kids are home-schooled half of the year, set free to roam the
land at eye squinting speed, chasing one another around twisting road
courses dressed in hardened leather, somehow adhering to tricked-out
super bikes. Sponsors have festooned them with their own custom
leathers, helmets, gloves and enough bull bile to keep their active
minds spinning for months on end.
Here at Laguna Seca Raceway, in the pastoral oaken hills inland from
the Monterey Coast, I am surrounded by gnat-like speed fiends, 13 year
olds who walk like spacemen in their molded racing leathers. They carry
with them 32-ounce squeeze bottles, big as their heads, full of Red
Bull and heartily pull from the crooked straws like milk starved pups.
But what the hell? I have my coffee, I had my Danish; who am I to
besmirch this international band of tiny bikers their morning fix?
After all it is they, and not I, who will be streaking by this garage
wheel-to-wheel at over 150 miles an hour in just a few minutes. I would
want all the energy that I can pour into my wee body, too.
The production team - a top- notch gang from Denver mixed with a few
locals (I am not sure of which tribe I ascribe) - loaded in overnight,
and now we are just getting our cameras, mics, lighting and backend
gear together for a day of filming. If all goes well, our team will
produce a winning pilot - the AMA Red Bull Rookie Challenge, which will
be picked up by a network and become a reality series. If we falter,
then we produce a winning pilot that doesn't get picked up, and nobody
gets paid, other than in Red Bull and Danishes. Muscled producers in
T-shirts covered in garbled script and dragons are running in all
directions. Every minute someone new introduces themselves to me ("HEY
YOU!") and requests that I perform my duties as production
assistant/cameraman with great haste ("GET OVER HERE AND &^%E THE
%& DARNED TRIPOD, NOW!"). It is intoxicating work, which is true
even when you aren't stowed away in an unventilated back room with
thousands of gallons of jet fuel, transferring P2 video cards and
checking in on day two of your fantasy baseball draft.
These kids are fast as all get out, and filming them feels like seeing
history come to fruition. This is the future, somehow, of racin' - at
least on two wheels, from what I can tell. The future comes on the bull
wings of young riders named Jo Jo, and Squirrel, and Emo. They ride 125
cc bikes, wear unsightly braces, and look like they are about to grow
two feet taller during the course of our interviews. They are becoming
men at a speed normally considered unsafe for any driver, unlicensed or
not. One gets the feeling that back home, where they go to school, when
they go to school, that they are probably pretty cool, perhaps even
kingly. But here together in the dawn of summer, they are a bunch of
goof-off teenagers, making fun of each others' sisters and parents,
dodging homework, drowning themselves in liquid sugar, competing.
One by one they duck into the darkened garage to interview for the
pilot. Out on the track their competitors zing by like jetted bees,
drag racing hornets. Every now and then a radio chatters news of a
rider down, and each time all recording stops until the safe and clear
is sounded. These kids fall off of motorcycles going in excess of 100
mph fairly regularly, a shocking fact. But they tend to bounce on up,
and there exists a racer's code to laugh off all fear of permanent
wreckage.
The goal of the Rookie Challenge is to be the best underage rider in
the world, and thus secure a hold on an AMA super bike factory ride,
which is similar to getting a guaranteed contract in team sports.
Factory riders have to be 16 years or older, and so many of these kids
will race this series as "rookies" with several years experience. Our
TV show is introducing the element of social Darwinism (or is it
Burnettian?) to this shy cult of rocketeers. By voting one another off,
a champion is left to ride alone as the series champion after visits to
various famous race tracks. They seem a calm and agreeable lot for now,
but I can feel the cliques magnetizing around me. Very soon, this whole
show is going to get catty. Jealousy and self-preservation will take
hold, and those who were once simple competitors will become necessary
villains.
You can see the seriousness of the undertaking in the faces of their
parents. Full sponsorships don't come along all that often, and the
price to keep a growing boy in racing gear and out here on the track
equipped for international competition is enough to call the whole damn
thing off after a bad finish or two.
The day moves by in a series of heats, until a red sun begins to sneak
in low beneath the marine fog. I ingest P2 cards into a series of Macs
all day and keep tabs on the track, shooting an occasional shot with
the Sony Handycam that was assigned to me. Mostly I just take it all in
and enjoy the day, remembering what it was like to be 13, to be able to
fly ever faster, to catch someone faster than you using wind resistance
and cornering, to wipe out and fall hard and shake off the violent slap
of the hard, black road. OK, so my memories are of a certain Mongoose
BMX bike, but ain't it the same?
Corby Anderson writes Hang Time for the Aspen Daily News from a
former shelling range near Fort Ord, Calif., where he has taken up
metal detecting and Zen levitation in earnest.
