Devil's Ridge Attacks!

We were off to Devils Ridge in Sanford, NC for the next AHRMA race. It was Max's second, and my first. We had been poking around the woods a bit and I was feeling better about dirt riding. Max was improving by leaps and bounds and was on his way to getting pretty darned good on his Triumph. He was already miles beyond me in riding ability. This would also be the first race for our friend Jay from North Carolina. He had managed to get together a 250 Triumph T25 he called The Field Pig. We made a helluva sight at the start, Max and I in our black BDU shirts and crummy, homemade number plates. I decided, for some reason, I needed to wear leather-friggen pants for protection from...stuff. I didn't know what I was doin', they nearly gave me heat stroke. Jay was properly dudded up in his leather road riding jacket, road helmet and jeans. None of us had camelbacks. It was a warm day. Bad, bad, bad.

We must've looked like a circus act to the other riders. It was still some ways off before the AHRMA regulars realized we just LIKED these kinds of bikes, and were quite serious about wanting to do well on 'em.

 

For me the sighting lap was a rude awakening. This wasn't woods riding, this was hard. I was the last out of the woods and wasn't sure I was going to be able to line up for the start. My front brake lever had come adrift and between that and already being beat to death on the Sighting Lap(!), all I could manage was slurred words and heavy panting. At camp Max was busy stealing a footpeg for his bike from a friend who had ridden his Triumph roadster to watch us race. Another friend, Alex, got my brake lever sorted, and with my brain still fried I got on my bike and lined up. We soon realized that's just what you did, you got to the line and got to work. It became pretty natural...but at the time I was convinced I was gonna die on that course. I made it around the first lap by repeating in my mind "one lap, just get one lap". One lap done, I started telling myself "one more lap, just one more lap", and on it went like that. Which was another thing that never really would change; no matter what, no matter how bad you feel, for some reason you just keep going until they tell you to stop.

 

Towards the end I didn't have much left. I stalled the bike trying to get out of the way of a faster rider and couldn't restart the bike because I had a death grip on the clutch and was too puddle brained to realize it. Eventually, a lone brain cell got jiggled loose and I dropped the clutch, got it started and managed to finish. Jay had gotten himself off course and was in a ditch, but also managed to get his bike across the line. The lack of camelbacks meant we were dying of thirst, but our Carolina friends were lifesavers, handing us bottles of water during the last part of the race.

But we survived, and oddly...really enjoyed it.

As I recall, Jay's words were something like "I feel like I've been beaten with boat oars by a bunch a' merchant seamen".

Dammit, that was a good day. And I never wore those leather pants again.

The Good Days Out Begin

So Max had his first race under his belt. I was both excited and nervous about joining him, having never been on a dirtbike of any kind ever...in my life...ever. Despite the abuse he had subjected himself to at Hardrock, Max was really, truly hooked. With his pushing, I managed to get my bike done and we started poking around the woods near St. Augustine. Which leads us to the next pic. See if you can spot the two bikes in the photo which are completely unsuited to Cross Country racing

As expected, I was horrified by riding off of roads. But it was fun, too damned much fun. Looking back now its amazing how wrong the bikes were for what we were planning to do. They were geared, umm, creatively. Among other eccentricities, mine had a standard full width iron front hub laced to a steel 19" rim. Max's seat cover was sewn up from a flannel shirt he had lying around. Mine was painted with high dollar bass boat purple metalic rattle cans. Max's was painted with truck bedliner black on the tank with a stenciled star to make it go faster. He dubbed mine the AJS Stomper, his was Smokey Bacon.

I mean damn, look at how happy this man is to have his bike stuck up to its axle in the mud. Photos just like this were quickly to become a common thing. How could you not want to be out there?

And just look at this comfy seat. Plywood, 1/2" rubber padding, and some craft store pleather...who wouldn't want to sit on there for a few hours and peen their bunghole shut!

But the clock was ticking and our next race, my first, was approaching.

Essay on origins etc.

Lets just get started. I had in mind this grand explanation of why I started this blog, touching on who we are, how we got into old bikes, blah, blah, blah. I tried writing it twice and bored myself to death both times. So I'm going with the short version. My name is Scott, a couple years back a friend of mine, George by name, realized that though Florida may have crummy roads for riding, it also has a heap of woods, and that maybe we should get ourselves some vintage dirtbikes. Our other friend Max was the first to get into the woods on a converted, road bike based Tr6. George followed with a Tr5t, but a destroyed foot from a wreck on his Ducati kept him from riding and racing for a while, and I got a cheap, loosely assembled T100. Almost immediately, Max was entered into an AHRMA race, the first of the season, at Hardrock Cycle Park. And that began a long journey we are still on today, generally abusing vintage Brit bikes for amusement and competition. The purpose of this site is to have a photo album of sorts. Plain and simple. Other vintage stuff may be posted occasionally, but mostly this will be about the three of us and our bikes, friends, and the things we do to old bikes out in the woods....which sounds kinda dirty, but...well, lets just get into it. I'm going to be posting things in mostly chronological order, so for a while its going to be older pics till I can get us up to the present.

The first pics are from that very first race.Here's what Max started on. You may notice several lurvly flourishes on it that are more style than "butt kickin' CC bike".

In particular, you may ask yourself "whats holding up those massive, rudder-like number plates back there"? Good question.

The answer is an old timey style lunch box held on with a leather belt. This was fine, it matched Max's boots which were cool, but decidedly the technology and protection level of a previous age.

If we'd known Hardrock back then as well as we do now, we could've gotten some better race pics, but even for spectators it was intimidating at first. Plus, George was still on crutches, so we stayed pretty close to the start finish. Here's your typical starting grid,

Max on the off for the sighting lap, completely unaware of what's waiting for him,

Which proved a pretty rude awakening,

But despite the shock of a course at Hardrock, he lined up and started,

And mostly finished, though you might notice a few differences to the bike in the next pic compared to the first,

Mainly, the broken 'bars that ended play, but also the missing lunch box/number plate structure, which meant that not only had he lost a perfectly good belt, but he had no place for his sammiches. Not that any of that mattered, look at the smile, the only way you could get a bigger grin on that boy is if you gave him more teeth. And that, children, is where it started.