Monday Morning Coffee

By Billy Rainford

Happy Labour Day, everyone. Yep, another summer has come and gone. If you’re reading this now you’re likely old enough to also feel the effects of time as it speeds up more and more as the years go by. It’s getting downright frightening!

The older you get the smaller and smaller summer becomes as part of your overall time, so it makes sense that it seems shorter and shorter as we get older. It’s math, I’m told.

Did you get out and ride this weekend wherever you are? The weather was perfect here in Southwestern Ontario, but I didn’t manage to get out to a track. We had riders at the Baja Brawl at Baja Acres in Millington, Michigan, and we had riders at The Can Am event at Area 51 in Batavia, New York, to name a couple of the bigger Labour Day Weekend races.

You can check out live timing and results for both below:

Baja Brawl Live Timing

Can Am RESULTS

Speaking of Baja…

Baja Acres gets the nod as my favourite track I ever raced. I used to love going to Michigan back when Ontario insurance had gone haywire and all the doubles and tricky jumps were turned into tables or dug out entirely. We always joked that you could race with a kitchen pot on your head if you wanted to down there. It was just a joke at how seeminly lax the rules were.

As a youngster this seemed like a great thing, but as I age I start to wonder if there wasn’t a happy medium somewhere that could have been found between the CMA and District 14 AMA. But like I say, whe I was young, I didn’t really care about safety. I just wanted to go off some sweet jumps…

Anyway, when I think of racing there, I always come back to the late summer double-header event that I drove down to with friends Chris Barendrecht and Chris Humphrey (RIP). I know my parents came doen separately but I don’t recall the details. They never missed a race.

Anyway, the 2 Chrises signed up for the C class on the Saturday. It was a “run what ya brung” class and had 125’s, 250’s, and 500’s in it. I had been out with a screwed up knee for a while and wanted to race with them, so I signed up in the same class. I was still a Junior racer in Canada.

Anyway, it was the race I remember because it turned out I was definitely in the wrong class. I didn’t get a great start against the 250’s and 500’s on my KX125 but knew the track well and loved it, so I started making my way to the front.

I remember passing Chris B through a sweeper that lead to a nice uphill. I went on to take the first moto win by a good margin. When I saw my dad he was pretty quick to tell me it was “in the wimp class.” Harsh much?! I can still here his British accent saying it, actually.

I lined up for moto 2 and again didn’t get a great start but made my way through the pack pretty quickly and checked out to probably my biggest lead of my “career.”

As I neared the finish with just a couple laps to go, I started hearing other parents really letting me have it from the other side of the fence. Here I was having a Caddy Shack cant’-miss, golf-in-a-lightning-storm sort of day and all these parents were going to ruin it for me!

In fact, I distinctly remember one of them hitting me in the shoulder with a full water bottle telling me to get off the track! Things started to get a little heated out there, and it was coming from the wrong side of the fence!

I was split between enjoying a really nice win and feeling guilty for racing the “wrong” class. Either way, it still feels great to win and that’s my key takeaway here. Lol.

This is a photo from that actual weekend. Left to right: Chris Humphrey, Bench Press Malone, Chris Barendrecht. | Bigwave Senior photo

However, it was a double-header weekend, as I mentioned, so I did the right thing and moved up to the B class for the 2nd day of competition. And you know what? I wish I could say my 6th place felt as good as the runaway win, but it didn’t. Haha

I wasn’t in a points race or anything like that, none of us were. We were just there to have some fun and bang bars as 3 Canadians racing south of the border. But guess what, some of the local were and they weren’t thrilled with us coming down and racing the wrong class.

Do I feel bad about it? Not really. The riders in the B class down south have always been rocket fast! I just wanted to know what it felt like to win at an AMA race and I’ve checked that off my list. If I had grandkids, I’m sure I’d leave the specific class I raced out of the long-winded story.