Learning To Go Fast

[Nick]

Scenes From Behind The Bamboo Screen
Learning to Go Fast

A warrior must forget three things:
family, self and home.
--Samurai proverb

Saitama is to Tokyo what Oakland is to San Francisco, a rough-around-the-edges, blue-collar sprawl that makes no pretensions of being anything other than what it is: a working man's town. Saitama is where all those people live who work in Tokyo but can't afford to own there. Located northwest of Tokyo at the edge of the Kanto Plain, Saitama is the kind of place of which natives are either proud or ashamed; those who live there either brag about their roots or try to conceal them. "I live near Tokyo." is a common expression of the latter group. My friend Arai makes no such apologies. He was born and raised a Saitama boy and he's proud of it.

As usual, as soon as I step off the train at Minami Urawa I can see Arai waving to me from behind the turnstiles. He is of average height and build. His face is open, friendly, and his hair is dyed a fashionable shade of brown. He's wearing an expensive but understated sport shirt, slacks, and tan loafers. If you had to guess at what he did for a living, you would probably say small business owner. You would never guess that he is one of Japan's elite gamble racers. [For more on the arcane world of the gamble racers, see, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Racing.]

Every time I see him in civvies, I'm reminded of the opening scene in On Any Sunday when Mert Lawwill is strolling through the streets of San Francisco, just before the shot cuts to him power sliding his Harley dirt tracker off Turn Two at San Jose.

I make it a point to visit Arai whenever I find myself in Tokyo. He's the only Japanese I know who is as crazy about old bikes as I am and also knows something about them. Our evenings are usually spent eating, drinking and talking about motorcycles. Arai has a wealth of information about the finer points of tuning old British motorcycles, a skill he has honed to a fine art over almost 30 years as a professional racer. And when you earn the kind of loot the gamble racers earn, you take tuning a motorcycle very seriously.

"Hey, Nick-san! Genki? How're ya doin'?"

"I'm doing great. Where'd you buy that suntan?"

"I've been skiing up in Hokkaido. The snow was insane!"

Our handshake is accompanied by laughter, as if we are both privy to some inside joke. Although we haven't seen each other for almost a year, like true friends, we pick up our conversation as if we had only just parted. Arai knows how to live. When he's not racing, he's skiing, touring on one of his bikes or partying with his race buddies at a hot spring resort.

"What's the plan?"

"Well, it's still early, so I thought we'd go check out Okegawa."

The Okegawa Riverbed is one of the most popular off-road riding areas in the Tokyo area. There are enduro and motocross tracks, a short track, a small go-kart course which doubles as a Supermotard track, and a tiny road course where the scooter boyz get the gas on.

This is where many of today's young Japanese guns learned their craft. Our first stop is the scooter track; a tiny serpentine course no more than 100 yards long. Two guys are duking it out on stripped-down, souped-up scooters. Round and round they go, only inches apart, hypnotized by the need for speed and the search for a perfect lap. Trading paint, they lean the little bikes so far over that they practically drag their elbows in the turns. As if their riding wasn't gnarly enough, their scuffed-up leathers and deeply gouged helmets tell me everything I need to know about these guyz: no money, no fear and nothing to lose. Just the sort of guys you don't want to line up next to in your next race.

As we stroll through the pits, I'm overwhelmed with a sense of deja vu. This could be Anywhere USA—beat-up vans surrounded by tool boxes, ice chests and spare wheels; young guys squatting in the dirt as they re-jet carbs; bored girlfriends crashed out in lawn chairs. For the first time in weeks, I feel right at home.

Arai has Norick Abe's old short tracker sitting in his garage at home (Norick's dad races with Arai at Kawaguchi). All we'd have to do is pour gas in it. But, ironically, while we are both itching to get out there and bang elbows with the kids, Arai has a race week coming up and can't take the chance of getting injured, and I have a modeling gig for Yamaha the following weekend and likewise can't afford to get dinged up. In other words, we can't ride for fun because an injury would prevent us from riding for money. How weird is that? Perhaps that is how you know you're a professional.

A short stroll brings us to the short track. Jay Springsteen visited here a few months earlier to show the locals the finer points of backing it in. The guy out on the track now must have been his best student. Lap after lap, he flicks his Honda 250 sideways at the end of the straight, backs it into the turn, then gets the gas on, squares off the corner and blasts off down the short straight. He makes it look so easy.

In fact, going fast is easy, once you've learned how to. And this is one of the great ironies of racing: going fast is easier, and safer, than going half-fast. But it isn't until you've learned to go fast that you can understand this. Look at Rossi, Mladin, Lawson, Roberts or any other racer who wins with regularity. There they are, week in and week out winning races, setting new lap records, and making everyone else look slow. Yet they only seldom fall off. You'd think it'd be the other way around. Watching these guys ride takes me back to my own youth when I too　was learning how to go fast.

Some racers are born fast, others have to work at it, and the rest are riding around out there for other reasons. I was in the third group. Still, like everyone else, I was trying to go as fast as I could. Back then there were no riding schools run by famous ex-racers, no dirt-track training camps and no videos filled with pointers on how to make a motorcycle do things that few riders ever even dream of. And the sponsored-by-Daddy phenomenon was only just beginning. Basically, you worked your butt off to buy a bike, modified it like everyone else and went racing. To paraphrase some of the best ad copy every written: you just did it.

Then, as now, racers were judged by where they raced. At Jack Baldwin's, the Norton, BSA and Suzuki dealership where I worked as gofer/mechanic trainee, the line between the real racers and the wannabes was definitively drawn by four words: He races at Ascot.

Baldwin's was located on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, California. It was one of the last of the old-time bike shops. Jack's letterhead said: "From the desk of the Pico Pirate." Arriving for my first day on the job, Jack put his arm around my shoulder and told me I was to be the Head Mechanic. He then led me to the filthy toilet and said, "And your first job is to clean the head!" This was accompanied by much laughter from everyone else in the shop. The next day, I came to work wearing one of my favorite T-shirts, with the logo of another shop. Big mistake. As I was dutifully cleaning the cosmoline off a new Norton Commando, the manager and parts man came up behind me, ripped the shirt off my back then tossed me a new Baldwin shirt. Working at Baldwin's was definitely not for the thin-skinned.

Other, more enjoyable duties included driving Jack's van to the docks in Long Beach and picking up the crates of BSAs and Nortons, then assembling and servicing them. Or, my favorite: running paperwork to the DMV on one of the demo Commandos. "If you can start it, you can ride it," laughed Jack. At 135 pounds wet, I quickly learned the starting technique for the big British twins.

One of my more unusual tasks was jogging over to the diner across the street to pick up "Specials." Specials were Styrofoam cups filled with ice, into which Jack and his manager would pour Vodka. They sipped on these throughout the day, keeping themselves tipsy, without ever lapsing into full drunkenness. After closing, and after I had left, the floor was swept up for craps games held with like-minded customers. Stories were circulated about the ladies who frequented these parties and how much they were paid to attend.

Early on Sunday mornings we would load up the vans and head out to the Mojave Desert for a day of dirt riding. I still have vivid memories of sitting on an ice chest between the front seats of a Chevy box van (no seat belt, of course) where my job was to mix Bloody Mary's for Jack and his manager. This rather gruesome concoction, I was told, helped one recover from hangovers, whatever those were.

Compared with the rarified upbringing I was getting from my parents, this was all quite an education. In fact, before arriving at Baldwin's I had never even heard grownups use profanity. Still, throughout their conversations I kept hearing that word: Ascot. Though I had never even seen the place, racer wannabe that I was, I craved the status of having people say of me: "He races at Ascot."

Then, one Friday after work, the invitation came: "Hey, Kid, we're goin' to Ascot to watch the races tonight. Wanna come along?"

Ascot was located in Gardena, one of the seedier sections of that vast sprawl south of Los Angeles. When a famous European writer dismissed Oakland with the statement: "There is no 'there' there," she was also writing about places like Gardena.

Anyway, as we walked from the parking lot to the track on that first night, we got to our seats just as the first Novice heat race blasted off the line. But when the pack came off of turn two (with Roxy Rockwood calling the shots from the booth) and I saw the riders scream down the back straightaway, I knew, as surely as I knew anything, that I would never, ever race at Ascot. Those guys were insane!

Yet, a few years of desert racing, motocross and TT later, there I was, rolling to the line at Ascot on a Suzuki 250 twin.

Ascot. The very word makes the hair on the back of my neck start to tingle. Ascot was a knot in your stomach, a sour taste in your mouth, a nightmare that didn't go away when you woke up, a gnawing feeling that however fast you thought you were, it wasn't nearly fast enough. Ascot was not so much a racetrack as it was a temple of speed, a heretical outdoor church where the faithful gathered on cold, damp Friday nights to worship the gods of horsepower. And, if the gods were not properly appeased, there would be a blood sacrifice, guaranteed. The sense of danger on those Friday nights was palpable. Like fighter pilots in a time of war, we were all acutely aware of the potential for sudden, violent and not wholly unexpected injury or death.

This fear presented itself in many forms. Some riders took drugs like coke or speed, others threw up during riders' meetings, and some simply became very quiet (or very talkative) before a race. A few riders manifested chronic, debilitating, yet mysterious ailments that only appeared just prior to race meetings. And however much nervous horseplay went on in the pits, no one rolled to the starting line at Ascot without their race face on.

When I turned pro, there were three professional rankings: Novice, Amateur and Expert. Novices were restricted to 250s, and Amateurs and Experts rode 750s. If a rider earned enough points during a season, he was moved up to the next level. Most never made it out of the Novice ranks. I was lucky enough to stumble across a very fast bike for my first year: a Suzuki 250 twin. It featured an X-6 250 Hustler engine with GP barrels slotted into a Sonicweld rigid frame and was fitted with spool wheels (no brakes) and Ceriani road racing forks. Compression releases fitted in the heads were the only means of slowing it down. Lightweight and wickedly fast, the first time I rode the beast—down the street in front of my house—it scared me so badly that it left me weak in the knees. On the pavement, when that two-wheeled devil came on the pipe it would loop itself over backwards in the first four gears if you were slow to get out of the throttle. And the god-awful shriek from those unmuffled GP chambers was like the banshee wail from a diving Stuka. I soon got into the habit of closing the garage door after every test ride, because the cops were seldom far behind.

After my first hair-raising ride on this frightening machine at Ascot (dirt tracks only seem smooth until you ride one on a rigid chassis!) I ditched the Sonicweld for a swingarm Trackmaster frame, and the Suzuki began to handle like a normal motorcycle. With most of the other riders on 250 singles, having that twin was almost like cheating. I would roll up to the starting line knowing that the only bike that could beat me into the first turn was another twin (usually a Yamaha TD-2). In fact, the AMA soon sussed out what was going on, and the following year they allowed 350 singles to race against 250 twins. But by that time I already had my Junior license, and a hot 750 Yamaha was going together in my garage.

One of the dubious advantages of being too young to know how to tune a professional-level race bike is that most of your energies go into making your bike look pretty. My Trackmaster 750 was a beaut': chrome spokes, highly polished alloy cases and rims, a slick paint job with lots of gold leaf, and a matching helmet. Unfortunately, they don't give out trophies for the prettiest race bike. You have to know how to ride.

There is a way of riding a motorcycle as fast as it will go. Those who have learned this technique will always be at the front; those who haven't will always finish somewhere behind them. Either you learn how to do it, or you don't. End of story.

Real racers, because they truly love to go fast, learn these techniques very quickly. I learned to go fast in the most embarrassing way possible—I was shamed into going fast. The preseason started out well enough. I took my pretty new 750 out to the Corona half-mile and won a couple of amateur races. This filled me with unfounded optimism for the coming season at Ascot. The feeling didn't last.

The following week a kid named, I think, Dave Racine showed up. We had been first-year pros together. Like those scooter boyz at Arakawa, Dave was one of those gritty racers with no money but plenty of cajones who rode whatever anyone let him ride. Look around and you'll find him at most tracks. He's the guy with the scary-looking leathers and the badly scraped helmet riding the wheels off of some beater; the guy you see pulling tires from the trash in the hope that they've got a few laps left in them—the guy you're glad can't afford anything better because you know he'd wax your ass if he had some help.

Anyway, Dave turns up at Corona on a rigid frame Sonicweld Honda 305 bored out to 325cc—an antique, flower-power flat-tracker from the sixties. The poor little thing had only half the horsepower of my mighty (and very pretty) 750. I actually started laughing when he rolled it out of his van.

The laughing stopped when he beat me in the main event.

Over the next seven days, some of the most embarrassing of my life, I had ample time to consider my options. Give up pretending to be a racer, or stop playing games and learn to ride. I chose the latter.

The next weekend at Corona I ran my 750 down the front straight, left the gas on waaay longer than usual and stuffed it into the turn. As soon as both wheels started drifting, I got back in the throttle, put the rear brake on, squared off the turn...and won my heat by a straightaway. As I coasted into the pits after a plug chop I heard the announcer yelling about a new lap record. Somehow, my body knew what to do, even though I had been unable to consciously figure it out. Pushing the front wheel slows and turns the bike, allowing you to square off the turn, apex early and thereby lengthen the next straightaway. Getting on the throttle early and using a combination of rear brake and throttle rather than just the throttle to control rear wheel spin keeps the rear wheel planted and gives more precise control over the slide. Remember Doohan's thumb-operated rear brake? Remember how he left it on there even after his leg healed?

Anyway, from that night on I was pretty much unbeatable at Corona. The weird thing was that it was so easy! I was going much faster than before but was never even close to falling off.

Now, whenever I think of that epiphanic race I recall the words of legendary surfer Gerry Lopez, when he spoke of his mastery over the fearsome Banzai Pipeline: "It's a cake walk once you know how."

Later that afternoon, over bowls of buckwheat noodles, Arai tells me that he, too, learned to ride at Okegawa. "Of course, we didn't confine our speeding to the tracks," he said with a laugh. "By the time I was 15, the cops didn't even bother chasing me, they'd just go straight to my parents' house and wait for me there! I decided I'd better try out at Kawaguchi because I was just going to get myself killed on the street."

We're sitting in the 10-mat upstairs room of Arai's compact house not far from Minami-Urawa Station. In addition to Arai's wife and two young children, his parents are also living there. Like most Japanese homes, the interior is bland, functional, cluttered. There are no clever paintings on the walls, no expensive furniture, none of the adornments with which Westerners decorate their homes. This is because the home is a very private place, and the Japanese almost never entertain there. The Japanese home, like the Japanese office, is seldom beautified.

Most Japanese are embarrassed by their crowded and modest living conditions. The word they use to describe their homes is usagi-goya, rabbit hutch. In fact, only rarely will you see the inside of a friend's home or meet a man's wife. She, too, is to be kept hidden away. The word that Japanese men use for their own wives is kanai, which translates literally as: the one in the house. That Arai has invited me to his home is a sign that we are true friends.

"Check this out."

Arai pulls a large, framed photograph from a closet. Five Triumph-powered gamble racers are power sliding around a turn, spray shooting off the rear wheels. It's a shot of the old days of gamble racing, when the tracks were dirt.

"That is so cool! Why'd they ever pave the tracks?"

"Ahh, too many riders were getting hurt and killed."

Every young man wants to believe he has what the novelist Tom Wolff called, "the right stuff." Unfortunately, the price for such blinding self-knowledge can be very high.

On my desk is a photo of me leading a heat race into the first turn at the San Jose half-mile (I got passed coming out of Turn Two), and just behind me in the photo is Ivan on his 750 Triumph Trackmaster. (I'll leave out all the last names out of respect for the many friends and family members who are still alive.) Ivan was a fast Japanese-American kid who had ridden a Suzuki twin for Erv Kanemoto as a Novice. A week after that photo was taken he dove into turn three at Ascot, tangled bars with a rider named Danny and went straight into the wall. He was killed instantly. Then there was Tom, who worked at the Bultaco distributor, killed midway down the front straight when he slammed into a fallen rider's bike - his Triumph was torn into two pieces by the force of the impact. Rick, who rode an effetely pink Triumph (but who hauled some serious ass) whose Triumph threw him down on the back straight then caught on fire with him pinned beneath it. He lived, but was badly burned. Dwayne and Ted, top experts, killed on the front straight when they hit a fallen rider's bike. There was that young first-year pro who didn't last long enough for me to remember his name. Feet up, WFO and hauling ass on a super-fast Yamaha twin, he won every race he entered then slammed into the wall one chilly Friday night and was killed. Truly, the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

What made Ascot so dangerous, aside from its sticky, viscous dirt, was that it was, like most dirt tracks, essentially a car track. That is, it was surrounded by earth-backed wooden walls built to absorb the impact of 4,000-pound sprint cars - walls that could easily withstand the impact of a human body.

Was racing more dangerous in those days? I don't know, it sure seemed like it.

As if the racing itself wasn't dangerous enough, just as many of my contemporaries were killed off the track as on it.

There was Randy, a fast second-year pro who rode a Champion 750 Yamaha, burned up in a welding accident at work. A racing buddy I'll call Ken who was testing a Kawasaki Z1 at the shop where he worked when he slid out going around a turn and left the top of his head under a fence. There was John, a fast Novice without a ride who was a passenger in a van driving up the Pacific Coast Highway after the races when the van hit a parked car, turned on its side and caught fire - he and three others burned to death, probably because the van came to rest on its right side, pinning the side doors closed. Paul, a top expert and superb custom painter, found dead off the side of a freeway onramp, a bent Triumph by his side. Pat, killed in a traffic accident in Europe. The list goes on and on.

Was life more dangerous in those days? I don't know, it sure seemed like it.

As usual, Arai takes me to a very nice place for dinner. Pretty girls with eyes that sparkle like broken glass pour our saké from freshly cut bamboo carafes. We choose our sashimi on the hoof, as it were, from a huge saltwater aquarium. Between courses Arai reveals more secrets of the gamble racers: "You want to use stainless steel throttle cables, they have less friction. We lube the cables with kerosene, and then fit light return springs for the slides. This makes a huge difference in response and gives very sensitive throttle control."

As the saké kicks in we're soon giggling like mischievous little boys about all the near misses we've had. Arai tells me about the time he slid out and his glove got caught on his footpeg, dragging him in front of another rider. I tell him about my Suzuki seizing up and putting me on the ground on the first lap when I was leading a heat race at Ascot ("Hey Voge! My footpeg missed your head by about two inches," said my friend Rick after that one).

I'm tempted to ask Arai how many of his friends fell along the way but think better of it. What's the point? Some of us survive, others don't.

Yet in spite of the danger, or probably because of it, those were some of the best years of my life. Death is life's great intensifier. It is the proximity of death that makes life so much more meaningful. Too, there was something so pure, so noble, about risking one's life for the fleeting and intangible reward of being faster around a racetrack than the next guy. While others were obsessed with the vulgar pursuits of wealth or pleasure, we were ready to sacrifice everything, for nothing. Surely there is no greater idealism than that?

When people who should have known better cautioned me about the dangers of motorcycle racing, I always told them that a fear of death is nothing more than a fear of life in disguise.

Inevitably, of course, you come to understand that there is more to life than racing, and the time comes when it is time to do something else. That move can take just as much courage as rolling to the starting line at Ascot. But the mark of a life well-lived is recognizing that time when it arrives and moving on to the next stage of your life without looking back and without regrets.

Arai walks me to the train station in the chilly air of early autumn. We speak of banalities and make the usual promises to meet up again on my next visit.

"I hope to see you again," he says in parting.

Meeting, the two friends laugh aloud;
In the grove, fallen leaves are many.
Confucius