I had to pass this along. This is a really great read and its hilarious.
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A 12-year-old kid took me for two blistering laps of Road Atlanta on the back of his 175+ hp Suzuki GSX-R1000. It was, without qualification, the most terrifying experience of my life. It was sort of like riding on a roller coaster, except at three times the speed and with none of the safety features.
The 12-year-old kid piloting the bike was Chris Ulrich, seasoned road racer, pole-position and AMA Superstock race winner, WERA National Endurance Champion, and moto-journalist. Most people don’t see Ulrich as a 12-year-old, primarily because he’s not. But that’s how old he was when I first met him, and so that image has stuck in my head. You know what I mean. It’s the same for everyone, including, for instance, Moto GP champion Valentino Rossi; while all us racing fans see him only as a superhero, his uncle might see him as just a baby with poop in his pants who has somehow achieved a few other things of late.
Team RoadRacingWorld.com, Ulrich’s team at the time, had been offering journalists racetrack rides on the back of a Suzuki GSX-R1000 for a few years, giving journalists who have never raced or ridden a motorcycle an experience that could inspire a better understanding of the sport. And the program has proven to be hugely successful, enthralling, enrapturing and generally giving the willies to mainstream journalists all across America. It has well served to expand an understanding of motorcycle road racing to the uninitiated. The program continues now with Ulrich and Team M4 Suzuki.
Witnessing this made me wonder what the experience would be like for someone who intimately understands the dynamics of the experience. What would it be like to be a passenger on Ulrich’s bike for someone who has raced? What would it be like for someone who has crashed on a racetrack? What would it be like for someone who has raced and crashed on the very track where they are now going to be a passenger?
Well, with God as my witness, I can now say with absolute conviction, some questions are best left unanswered.
With me teetering atop the elevated passenger seat of his GSX-R, Ulrich accelerated towards pit out, doing a wheelie for a hundred yards or so, my arms wrapped around him, my hands firmly grasping the passenger grab bar his team had thoughtfully welded to the backside of the fuel tank. Within that short distance, I became uncontrollably overwhelmed with terror. All I could think of was how stupid an idea of mine this was. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I wanted off the bike. I wanted to go home and mow my lawn. We hadn’t yet reached third gear. We hadn’t yet reached the track. I nearly started crying. I was terrified and knew that it was only going to get worse.
It immediately got worse.
Maybe, before I go any further, I need to point out that I truly had full confidence in Ulrich’s abilities. I knew that he knows how to pilot a motorcycle. I knew he wouldn’t be a cowboy with a passenger on back. I knew he would not crash. I knew he had every measure of skill, experience and attitude necessary to bring me back alive with unscratched leathers. I knew he had done this with dozens of passengers before. I knew he had a pregnant wife at home. But since my hands were not the ones on the handlebars, none of this meant a thing.
While mainstream, non-biker, non-racing journalists tend to be frightened by riding on the back of a race bike at high speed, their fear is somewhat abstract. It’s a fear of the unknown rather than of the known. They’re scared simply because they’re going fast on a motorcycle, and that seems like it could be dangerous, but they don’t have a firm concept of exactly what the consequences could be. And, of course, they are going faster than they’ve ever gone in their lives, so that alone might be a tad frightening.
But for someone who rides, who has raced, who has crashed, the fear of being a passenger is concrete. There’s nothing abstract about it. My fear was specifically because of the things I know. I have a clear concept of the violence available. Sure, as I’ve said, there was basically no believable possibility that Ulrich was going to toss the bike down the track, but so what? My hands were not on the handlebars.
As we headed up through turns two through five, I watched with a desperately critical eye for where Ulrich braked, turned in, rolled the throttle back on, and so forth. I had definite expectations for his every behavior. I was grading him with a sharp pencil. He quickly showed that he would fulfill those expectations. This should have calmed me a bit. It didn’t. Nah, maybe it did a little. No, it didn’t.
By the time we reached turn six, I was emotionally used up and considered reaching forward and hitting his kill switch. I was completely drained and had nothing left inside to push me to finish this lap, forget about doing a second one. And we still had a turn to go before we reached Road Atlanta’s famous, long back straight.
If you’ve never been to Road Atlanta, there are three things you need to know about its world-renown back straight; it’s neither straight nor flat and it is long. Very long. It begins in a short climb up the front of a hump that drops so quickly on its far side that racers have to fight the wheelie out of their bikes, dabbing the rear braking, pushing their weight up over the bars. From there it stretches out, allowing a drive up through sixth gear. Then it crests a second hill in a sweeping, right-hand turn that falls away as the track heads downhill into the hard-braking zone for turn ten. In a race, on a GSX-R1000, that sweeper is taken at full throttle in top gear at around 180 mph. Or 185. Or at the speed of an atom smasher.
Ulrich accelerated hard out of turn seven. Though he short-shifted over the hump, to keep the front wheel on the ground, the bike still wheelied due to my extra weight out back. My weight, my sitting high in the wind, then caused the bike to continue wanting to point at the sky even as the track flattened out and Ulrich accelerated up through the gears. Reaching beyond triple-digit speeds, the wind yanked my legs out so I pressed them in tightly against Ulrich. More than any of the accelerating itself, it was the wind at high speed that I had to fight against the hardest. Since I was above Ulrich, the high-speed blast buffeted my head from side to side, so I pressed my helmet into his shoulders. I was hanging onto the grab bar as hard as I could, my arms in tight against Ulrich’s sides, my legs squeezing his into the tank. I was in a full-body hug against him, pressing myself into him from my knees to my chin. Ulrich was busy piloting the bike, I was busy being terrified, so there was no blushing.
Braking hard for turn ten not only didn’t allow me to lighten my embrace of Ulrich, it forced me even harder into his back, as I fought to keep my ass down on the bike and from ending up sitting on his shoulders. After a round on the mat, Sumo wrestlers are barely more intimate with each other than we now were.
Heading down into the final turn, I looked longingly over at pit lane. I thought, just one more lap. Then Ulrich grabbed another gear and the bike wheelied down the front straight.
By the time we reached turn six on our second lap, I was thinking, this is pretty cool. Maybe if we did a couple more laps the two of us can each get our knees down in the turns? After a lap and a half I’d become acquainted with Ulrich’s actions and was no longer compelled to pay a judging eye to his riding. My inability to trust him was eroding. I started feeling a sense of control and less like a victim.
Yeah, I don’t really believe that either.
During our two laps, Robertino Pietri, at the time a teammate of Ulrich’s, rode near us as an enhancement of the experience. The years of providing these rides has taught the team that a second bike hugely augments the experience, allowing the guest passengers to see a rider just inches away leaned over into a turn with his knee on the pavement. The second bike visually expresses the dynamics of racing that the passengers simultaneously feel in their asses; sort of like watching a horror film on TV while Zombies scratch at your front door.
But for someone who has raced, that part of the experience seems, maybe, silly. Racing teaches you to never actually look at the riders around you, unless of course your plan is to run into them. Racers only look at where they want to go, and the other racers around them are basically of no concern. The ground is flying by but the bikes they’re racing against are barely moving because they’re all going at basically the same speed. So I had to force myself to bother looking at Pietri. I could only giggle at his antics. But this is exactly why I’d ridden with Ulrich; to unearth these differences in perception and experience between someone knowing too little and someone knowing too much.
By the time we reached the end of the back straight on our second lap, my arms were pumped to the point of numbness. I could no longer tell if I was still hanging on. I had no sense of what position my fingers were in. My head was telling my hands to hang on but the only means I had for determining if I was still doing that was because I had not fallen off the bike. As a racer, I’d done hour-long stints on this track in endurance races and never had my arms gotten as pumped as during these two laps as a passenger.
Compared to all of my other experiences of giving up control to another, from riding in a car with my aunt Eunice, to being the third person on the back of stunt rider Gary Rothwell’s bike in a 70-mph stoppie, to flying in a commercial jet, this was the most terrifying of all. But, I stress again, Ulrich did an excellent job and the terror I had was only the same that any racer would have as a passenger. Maybe I should have offered him a couple laps with me sitting in front?
This experience brought me back to the electric state of living with fear. Because it had been a while since I’d felt such fright, I began this ride with a faded impression of it and I’d forgotten the visceral lust of a heightened state of terror. But racing is not about fear. Contrary to some popular myths, racers are not daredevils or thrill seekers and they don’t go racing in search of an adrenaline rush. Racing isn’t about being a passenger, it’s about having your hands on the handlebars. Racing isn’t about being a spectator, it’s about personal achievement. Racing is about a level of emotional, intellectual, and physiological control that can’t be expressed in words. The speed, the track, the violence available, are simply just the staging.
But this doesn’t question or diminish the value of this experience for non-racers. For them, the chance to be on a motorcycle, on a racetrack, to reach speeds they’ve never felt before, to feel the intensity of a modern sportbike’s braking and acceleration, to lean into a corner lower than they can conceive is possible, to have another bike brushing by them inches away while blasting down a straight at around 150 mph, is an experience of a lifetime. Although only those who have raced can fully comprehend what it’s all about, every inch closer that others can be moved towards understanding the sport is only good for all the rest of us.
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