Just a quick note. Because I got a new helmet and need a new mount for my camera, I don’t have many pictures to share of my travels recently. I reckon most of you just scroll through and look at the pics anyway, so why waste time writing about things if there’s not photos to keep you on the page for more than 30-seconds? But hey, I did have a great week.
I went down to the Barber Vintage Moto Fest, or whatever they like to call it. It’s AHRMA, one of the clubs I used to race sidecars with, since they have classes both for modern and vintage three-wheelers in their program. The race at Barber is unique though, with the turnout being larger than the MotoAmerica national series for Superbike racing. Yes, seriously: more people come to check out the vintage racing at this event than the modern racers when they come to the same venue and put on their event.
I know why, being a diehard race fan. The racing nowadays sucks. It requires too much money. You’re only allowed to modify your bike in prescribed ways using approved parts from approved suppliers. The classes are basically five different versions of sportbikes, and the oddities of the Hooligan and King of the Baggers classes.
So basically it’s a bunch of crotch rockets, then a bunch of oddballs, then a bunch of hyper-fast touring bikes. It isn’t really a pathway to becoming an international racer like it once was. Heck, it’s even becoming rare for international talent to step down to our national series when they lose their top-tier ride. That isn’t the case with AHRMA though.
John Surtees, the only person to win a world championship on two wheels and four, has this display dedicated to him at the Barber Museum. His championship winning MV Agusta motorcycle and Ferrari Formula 1 car are both there.
There are bikes from the 1930’s out there racing. There are post-war machines and the British twins of the 60’s. There are the Japanese and European machines of the 1970’s, then a few early sportbikes from the 1980’s. On top of that, there are modern classes for crotch rockets that don’t fit into the normal classes. Basically, there is something for everyone, and for the racers it costs a lot less to run an older bike.
That means 600 entrants instead of 100. The old bike attract old-timers who remember when they were new, as well as younger folk who recognize that you can actually work on old bikes without a laptop and a bunch of expensive tools. That means a massive swap meet also comes with the racing. The large crowd then hits a critical mass, and there are enough people that vendors want to be there, manufacturers bring their demo bikes out and set up entire BMW or Triumph specific areas and compete to have the best party.
The museum spans from the late-1800’s to the modern era, with a wing just for street-going and racing bikes of the board-track era. before the Depression, motorcycles were still a common form of transport and manufacturers would battle on high-banked tracks made of wood. Nothing more than bicycles with paint-shakers for engines, they were breaking 100mph top speeds on narrow tires with basically no brakes.
All that happens at the Barber Motorsports Park, which is home to a world-class museum and a gorgeous racetrack in the Alabama hills near Birmingham. Great viewing, plenty of paved parking and grass camping, multiple places to get food or a shower, art sculptures all around the course, and of course that museum.
A ride worth remembering
I did the run down to Barber from Lexington with my buddy Kenneth, who is a former AHRMA raver himself. We took highways, so even when it was 4-lane and straight it did provide an occasional town to slow us down and give us something to look at besides sound walls and cloverleaf interchanges. Hwy 31A was most of it, along with 231 for awhile.
There was even a section of genuinely twisty stuff — proper 2-lane that let some sparks fly raised the heart rate just a touch. That was all I’d get though, as I was only heading to Barber to visit some friends from my racing days, not do any racing myself. Still, it was great to visit friends again, even though I only recognized about six of the roughly twenty-five people there racing sidecars.
Art imitating art.
It still gave me a chance to “talk shop” about racing, sidecars, motorcycles, and just life in general with old friends. Kenneth was a great guy to have along too, since he still knew a bunch of people from his days racing AHRMA, and we had no shortage of people to chat with whether we were in the paddock or the swap meet.
The quick jog west
After my time at the races, I took mostly interstate to get out to Austin, TX. This is the home of Motorcycle Missions, who I am trying to get more involved with. Since they have events happening most of the month of October, and they center around their home base in Austin, staying out here makes sense.
They have a track day happening which I can help with as a coach and just a general extra set of hands. They have a welding class which I can benefit from as a participant. They also should be running their Hayabusa at the Texas Mile, which as you might guess is a standing mile race, so like a combination of drag racing and land speed racing (LSR).
Basically in LSR you get several miles to get up to speed and in theory are already at terminal velocity when you hit the timer, then get timed over one mile, and have several miles to slow down. Drag racing is almost always a 1/8 or 1/4 mile race from a dead stop, with the shortest time winning.
Mile racing is basically an attempt to set a speed record, but it is from a standing start, over 1-mile. That means you need both the horsepower to get up to speed but also the rider skills to launch the bike from a dead stop, since there is no long run up like in LSR.
I may not be going to that event but I hope to… we’ll see. I’ll try to get plenty of pictures either way, but I didn’t have room to bring my camera and I am still using my worn and abused cellphone, which has lost its ability to properly focus under most light conditions.
A new phone is in order and long overdue, but I’m simply not in a position to make big purchases. If I were actually a paid travel writer it would be more important, but I just can’t justify investing in equipment to share my travels with a few dozen friends and a few hundred online friends. The Motorola phone I have used to take great pictures, but two years of vibrating on a handlebar has done in its image stabilizer and , in turn, its auto-focus.
A quick observation
If I manage to get some work done on my book, then get caught up on blog posts I promised for Motorcycle Missions, I’ll then be free to do a little work for hire. If I can get even one job in, I should have enough for a new phone through my cell provider. Heck, two or three paid gigs and I could even get one of those Insta360 cameras that friggin’ everybody seems to have now.
I swear over 80% of the vehicles I pass on-trail have at least one, and you can’t pass a group of Harley’s without one or more of those things poking up in the wind. The problem is a long standing one: the easier you make the tools of art to use, the more people who will try to create art. The end result isn’t really more art though, but more half-assed or uninspired art.
I suppose porno has benefited from it a lot, but other art forms I’d say suffer more than they gain. Even at the top level, I’d rather see en entire second unit working together to create a cool explosion and people running around. That is a better end result than the green screen and a small team slapping together the basis of the scene, and a CGI team putting everything else together in post.
I don’t mean to lament or complain though. I just wish fewer people would smash their tits together and sit poolside and call themselves a travel vlogger. Ditto with people taking a week off work to ride to Yellowstone and suddenly they’re an adventure travel vlogger. We used to have thought leaders because they were the people immersed in a subculture. Now it’s the gal with the best eye make up or the guy with the money and time to invest in an intro theme song and graphics for their video.
I don’t like an elite “cool kids crew” of gatekeepers trying to decide who fits in the club, but I’d rather have that than hundreds of poseurs biting into an image until that image is as fake as they are. That’s a big part of why I don’t do anything with my YouTube channel. If I were to start making films, even shorts, I’d want to put proper effort into them, and I lack the time to put that much effort in.
Making quick unedited vlogs or time-lapse videos with an older GoPro though? Doable. So alas, you will not be seeing any vignettes or docu-series’ coming from me. I do however wish I could provide more pictures. My DSLR (as in professional) camera just takes up a lot of damn space. I even have a drone, but it shoots low-quality stills and I’m not interested in pulling screen grabs from its video camera.
All that work, at the end of a day on the road, means taking entire days off to sit and edit, clear data cards, compile and organize… it’s just not interesting. It’s much the reason I usually have landscape photos or pictures of my motorcycle. Pictures with humans in them are much more relatable, but when I’m talking with people I don’t want to stop and take a picture: it completely changes the moment.
That’s all for now. Mostly that last bit was a note to myself, reminding me that I need to focus my attention on my book, and not on travel blogging. I already have my next book laid out and want to start on the research for it, but I’m only about 10% done with the initial draft of my first book. Being a writer involves a lot of writing, but being an author is definitely more than one rung higher on the effort scale.
Johnny Killmore 