chad502ex
04-29-2005, 07:10 AM
Mud Madness
By Darragh Johnson
DANVILLE, Va. Here in Southside Virginia, the redbud is blooming and the trees glow a delicate green. But on a sunny Saturday afternoon, over a distant duet between songbirds and a fuzzy radio playing country music, the clearest sign of spring comes when the ground begins to rumble and the mud starts to fly.
Over the red-dirt hills, the all-terrain vehicles swarm in a flash of color and a thunder of motors. Airborne, their fenders look like cobra heads, stretched wide and poised to strike.
In the middle of the pack, No. 17 is gaining speed. He shoots across the Snake Pit. He sails over Big Gulp's double jump. At the Tabletop, he launches skyward.
For five years, Wes Smith, a 21-year-old lawn guy from Fauquier County, has dreamed of making it big in the growing world of four-wheeled motocross racing.
They say that to "get a good finish, you have to get a good start." And today's start was lousy -- 15th out of 20. But he's chewing up the difference now, in 10th place as he fixates on the final hill.
Careening down and curling into a hairpin turn, Smith cuts the curve sharply and goes for the inside line, trying to overtake the racer ahead of him.
Cheering him on is his traveling fan club, who line the chain-link fence and watch from the bleachers: his father waving a dry-erase board that reads "FASTER!," his three North Carolina aunts bearing a picnic feast, a cousin, a handful of hooting college buddies, and Andrea Schaeffer, a family friend who also happens to be a medic.
Suddenly Smith's white Yamaha quad bumps the one he's trying to overtake. In a flash, Smith is motionless on the ground.
The ATV rolls. It's unclear whether the 350-pound machine has landed on top of him. Two riders pass, and somehow, Smith is standing. He's back on the ATV. He's gunning through the finish line and nails 12th place.
Ron Smith sprints to his son's side just in time to catch him as he climbs off the quad and collapses. Schaeffer is close behind. She elbows aside the track paramedics and demands smelling salts and a penlight.
She kneels at Smith's side:
"Wes! Do you know where are you are?
"Do you remember the accident?"
He doesn't answer.
Danville's Birch Creek Motorsports track is much closer to Winston-Salem, N.C., than it is to Washington, and here, all-terrain-vehicle motocross racing is a devotion. These bulked-up four-wheeled carts give farmers and hunters access to even the swampiest, rockiest, muddiest, most brambly and least-accessible areas (they aren't called all-terrain vehicles for nothing). And while trying to race a four-wheeled ATV is akin to racing a mule -- they are both heavy, utilitarian and ungainly -- that's also the lure. There's nothing like getting one of these boulder-size beasts to fly.
Central to the ATV experience is the mud. Though sun shines on this weekend, requiring a relentless spray from large water trucks to keep the dust down, on sloppy wet weekends these monster wheels churn up gory splotches of mud. Not long ago, on Smith's practice track in Culpeper, he went out on a rainy afternoon. By the time Smith finished his first lap, he looked as though he'd stood in front of a demented fire hose spraying muck.
Mud laminated his helmet, dripped onto his shoulders and congealed in thick, about-to-drop gobs from his formerly white boots. The ATV was a mud-frosted confection. Even his dad, who had been standing at the edge of the track, had globs of mud polka-dotting his Carhart canvas jacket and pocking his face and ball cap.
At one point, Smith pulled off goggles turned so muddy he could barely see. "D'joo bring another pair of goggles?" his dad asked.
"I don't think I did," Wes answered, spitting mud.
"How's that taste?" Ron Smith laughed.
"Good!"
At 8:10 this Saturday morning, Smith drives his ATV into the pre-staging area and is engulfed by dozens -- and soon a few hundred -- other spacesuited riders waiting for a final practice run.
It's a confusing setup, not least because it involves so many people. About 620 ATVs are here this weekend, divided into different classes that include:
· Six- to 11-year-olds on mini quads known as "bumblebees";
· The Senior 40-plus and Vet 30-plus guys, who may be graying or bald but remain fearless;
· Women whose long curling hair escapes their helmets, announcing that another gender has climbed aboard and mastered these menacing machines;
· The slew of guys in their late teens and early twenties who, when they're not donning fire-retardant racing suits, wear clothes emblazoned with company names that announce their jobs -- excavation, landscaping, contracting. Many also wear faded jeans, baseball caps advertising racing gear and goatees (a fashionable racing hazard, Wes notes, because "if it's muddy, you have to comb it out").
Into this throng, Smith has disappeared, and there's no one to ask where he went. The viewing stands are empty, except for a helpful racer from Delaware, Mike Estep, whose nylon jacket says "Estep Electric." Where in the heck, he is asked, are the riders in Smith's "265 B" class?
Estep's mouth goes slack. "You've never seen," he says slowly, "motocross?" He explains the lineup, but he can't shake the marvel of meeting a novice at a race like this one, just outside the last capital of the Confederacy.
"I'm . . . ," he finally says, "amazed someone's never been here."
He has a point.
Just a few years ago, a big race was 150 to 200 ATV competitors, says Doug Morris, director of the All Terrain Vehicle Association. Today, "if we don't get 550 to 600, we're disappointed." Spectators typically number in the thousands.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the ATV Grand National Championship has become a 12-race circuit that starts in February in California and continues every two to four weeks until the end of summer. Racers zigzag from Texas to Florida to Georgia, stopping in Virginia, then crossing the Potomac into Leonardtown. In May they head up to Michigan, circle back through Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New York and finish up in August at Loretta Lynn's ranch in Tennessee. They tend to appear in towns whose entire population could comfortably fit inside an NFL stadium.
The Consumer Federation of America hates ATVs and the dangers they present. They cheered when the Consumer Product Safety Commission filed a federal lawsuit against ATV manufacturers and succeeded, in the late 1980s, in getting a ban on new production of three-wheelers. The CFA has been trying for more strictures, although it has not yet succeeded in its attempts to get the CPSC to keep kids from riding adult-size four-wheelers.
Smith, meanwhile, ended last year's circuit in first place in the "265 C" class (it's complicated; don't ask) and got bumped up to "265 B." He is now six classes below Pro, and he must prove himself again -- and again and again -- until he reaches his goal:
Becoming a world-class champ of quad motocross.
Becoming a pro.
Pros. They're the ones who get paid to race, as opposed to the ones -- pretty much everyone at the track -- who must pay to race.
By Darragh Johnson
DANVILLE, Va. Here in Southside Virginia, the redbud is blooming and the trees glow a delicate green. But on a sunny Saturday afternoon, over a distant duet between songbirds and a fuzzy radio playing country music, the clearest sign of spring comes when the ground begins to rumble and the mud starts to fly.
Over the red-dirt hills, the all-terrain vehicles swarm in a flash of color and a thunder of motors. Airborne, their fenders look like cobra heads, stretched wide and poised to strike.
In the middle of the pack, No. 17 is gaining speed. He shoots across the Snake Pit. He sails over Big Gulp's double jump. At the Tabletop, he launches skyward.
For five years, Wes Smith, a 21-year-old lawn guy from Fauquier County, has dreamed of making it big in the growing world of four-wheeled motocross racing.
They say that to "get a good finish, you have to get a good start." And today's start was lousy -- 15th out of 20. But he's chewing up the difference now, in 10th place as he fixates on the final hill.
Careening down and curling into a hairpin turn, Smith cuts the curve sharply and goes for the inside line, trying to overtake the racer ahead of him.
Cheering him on is his traveling fan club, who line the chain-link fence and watch from the bleachers: his father waving a dry-erase board that reads "FASTER!," his three North Carolina aunts bearing a picnic feast, a cousin, a handful of hooting college buddies, and Andrea Schaeffer, a family friend who also happens to be a medic.
Suddenly Smith's white Yamaha quad bumps the one he's trying to overtake. In a flash, Smith is motionless on the ground.
The ATV rolls. It's unclear whether the 350-pound machine has landed on top of him. Two riders pass, and somehow, Smith is standing. He's back on the ATV. He's gunning through the finish line and nails 12th place.
Ron Smith sprints to his son's side just in time to catch him as he climbs off the quad and collapses. Schaeffer is close behind. She elbows aside the track paramedics and demands smelling salts and a penlight.
She kneels at Smith's side:
"Wes! Do you know where are you are?
"Do you remember the accident?"
He doesn't answer.
Danville's Birch Creek Motorsports track is much closer to Winston-Salem, N.C., than it is to Washington, and here, all-terrain-vehicle motocross racing is a devotion. These bulked-up four-wheeled carts give farmers and hunters access to even the swampiest, rockiest, muddiest, most brambly and least-accessible areas (they aren't called all-terrain vehicles for nothing). And while trying to race a four-wheeled ATV is akin to racing a mule -- they are both heavy, utilitarian and ungainly -- that's also the lure. There's nothing like getting one of these boulder-size beasts to fly.
Central to the ATV experience is the mud. Though sun shines on this weekend, requiring a relentless spray from large water trucks to keep the dust down, on sloppy wet weekends these monster wheels churn up gory splotches of mud. Not long ago, on Smith's practice track in Culpeper, he went out on a rainy afternoon. By the time Smith finished his first lap, he looked as though he'd stood in front of a demented fire hose spraying muck.
Mud laminated his helmet, dripped onto his shoulders and congealed in thick, about-to-drop gobs from his formerly white boots. The ATV was a mud-frosted confection. Even his dad, who had been standing at the edge of the track, had globs of mud polka-dotting his Carhart canvas jacket and pocking his face and ball cap.
At one point, Smith pulled off goggles turned so muddy he could barely see. "D'joo bring another pair of goggles?" his dad asked.
"I don't think I did," Wes answered, spitting mud.
"How's that taste?" Ron Smith laughed.
"Good!"
At 8:10 this Saturday morning, Smith drives his ATV into the pre-staging area and is engulfed by dozens -- and soon a few hundred -- other spacesuited riders waiting for a final practice run.
It's a confusing setup, not least because it involves so many people. About 620 ATVs are here this weekend, divided into different classes that include:
· Six- to 11-year-olds on mini quads known as "bumblebees";
· The Senior 40-plus and Vet 30-plus guys, who may be graying or bald but remain fearless;
· Women whose long curling hair escapes their helmets, announcing that another gender has climbed aboard and mastered these menacing machines;
· The slew of guys in their late teens and early twenties who, when they're not donning fire-retardant racing suits, wear clothes emblazoned with company names that announce their jobs -- excavation, landscaping, contracting. Many also wear faded jeans, baseball caps advertising racing gear and goatees (a fashionable racing hazard, Wes notes, because "if it's muddy, you have to comb it out").
Into this throng, Smith has disappeared, and there's no one to ask where he went. The viewing stands are empty, except for a helpful racer from Delaware, Mike Estep, whose nylon jacket says "Estep Electric." Where in the heck, he is asked, are the riders in Smith's "265 B" class?
Estep's mouth goes slack. "You've never seen," he says slowly, "motocross?" He explains the lineup, but he can't shake the marvel of meeting a novice at a race like this one, just outside the last capital of the Confederacy.
"I'm . . . ," he finally says, "amazed someone's never been here."
He has a point.
Just a few years ago, a big race was 150 to 200 ATV competitors, says Doug Morris, director of the All Terrain Vehicle Association. Today, "if we don't get 550 to 600, we're disappointed." Spectators typically number in the thousands.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the ATV Grand National Championship has become a 12-race circuit that starts in February in California and continues every two to four weeks until the end of summer. Racers zigzag from Texas to Florida to Georgia, stopping in Virginia, then crossing the Potomac into Leonardtown. In May they head up to Michigan, circle back through Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New York and finish up in August at Loretta Lynn's ranch in Tennessee. They tend to appear in towns whose entire population could comfortably fit inside an NFL stadium.
The Consumer Federation of America hates ATVs and the dangers they present. They cheered when the Consumer Product Safety Commission filed a federal lawsuit against ATV manufacturers and succeeded, in the late 1980s, in getting a ban on new production of three-wheelers. The CFA has been trying for more strictures, although it has not yet succeeded in its attempts to get the CPSC to keep kids from riding adult-size four-wheelers.
Smith, meanwhile, ended last year's circuit in first place in the "265 C" class (it's complicated; don't ask) and got bumped up to "265 B." He is now six classes below Pro, and he must prove himself again -- and again and again -- until he reaches his goal:
Becoming a world-class champ of quad motocross.
Becoming a pro.
Pros. They're the ones who get paid to race, as opposed to the ones -- pretty much everyone at the track -- who must pay to race.