With Friends Like These..

Matt Newman is a great guy.

It was Wednesday, and I was on my way to Road Atlanta for the 2006 WERA Cycle Jam. Matt had taken delivery of the non-functional TL1000R only a few days before, and his mission, which he chose to accept, was to swap the motor for a used one he sourced for me locally. This sounds pretty straight forward, but it involved going to get a complete, smashed salvage bike, stripping it down, removing the motor, then removing the motor from my bike, and installing the new/used motor. Matt has a full time job, and rebuilding my race bike isn’t it.

Oh ya…I forgot to mention that his own race bike was in a state of disassembly, and he was racing at Cycle Jam too. By the time he was able to get the crashed bike to his place, he had four days to do all of this work…and by ‘days’ I mean nights, after he was done with his day job. Keep in mind that I didn’t know Matt at all. He’d seen a post on the WERA forums talking about how my motor had given up at Talladega, and he contacted me with the offer to help, knowing how important Cycle Jam is to everyone (me included). Having no other prospects, I accepted his offer.

The plan was that Matt would finish up the bike just in time for our mutual buddy Dennis Garber to pick it up Tuesday night, and he’d deliver it to the track on Wednesday. On Tuesday evening, my phone rang. It was around 7:30pm, or about an hour before Dennis was scheduled to pick up the bike. It was Matt…I think he said something, but I couldn’t make out what it was, because he was revving the TL and holding the phone next to the pipes.

After entertaining both of us for a minute or so, he turned the key to ‘off’ and the bike was silent once more. By choice, silence is a perfectly good sound for a bike to make. When enforced against one’s will by mechanical calamity, such as was the case for me the previous weekend at Talladega? Not so much.

Matt told me that the bike ran great. He’d ridden it up and down the street a few times, and the multiple unintended wheelies he experienced told him that the motor was strong. He told me that the bike was 100% ready to race…fresh oil, all safety wiring done…he’d even changed my gearing so that it would be appropriate for Road Atlanta. It was ready to go, and Dennis was on his way.

Dennis got to the track before I did, so he left the bike with Stickboy. When I arrived, I went straight to the bike, turned the key, and after a moment of anticipation, I hit the starter button.

Matt Newman is a great guy.

More to come…

It's Better to be Shot Out of a Cannon...

“You live more in five minutes on a bike like this going flat out than some people live in an entire lifetime.” – Burt Munro, ‘The World’s Fastest Indian’

I didn’t know Chris Stevenson. To hear people tell it, he was the rare sort of person who brought genuine joy to all those around him. I’m aware that this is a cliché, but not having known him personally, I can only describe what I’ve heard and read over the last couple of weeks, and using that information as a reference, the statement is both accurate and insufficient.

If we’re lucky, we get to experience a person like Chris at some point during our lives. I’ve talked to some of his friends, and I’ve heard story after story about how Chris personally affected them. It’s unfortunate for me that I won’t ever get to know Chris myself, because he died on Sunday July 2nd as a result of injuries suffered in a crash in turn 5 during race number 3.

You might notice that I didn’t say that it’s sad that he died, nor did I refer to his death as “tragic” although both of those things apply. I left that out because having talked to people who knew Chris, and having read pages of Internet posts about him, I feel like I did actually get to know him enough to know that he wouldn’t want some guy writing in a blog to dwell on the sadness or tragedy of his passing. But, I am sad nonetheless, because I would have liked the opportunity to get to know him. I am also sad because I want to think that doing something you love to do can only bring about positive results, and this is evidence to the contrary.

I suspect that Chris would remind me that we all know the score when we grid up, and we do it anyway. We do it anyway, because that’s what it means to live; find something you love to do, and do it. I suspect that Chris would want us all to either remember, or imagine, this joy with which he approached his life both on and off the track. Judging from things I’ve read about Chris’ family, I suspect that they too might want the same.

Maybe someone who knew Chris will read this someday and let me know if I’ve got it right.

Goodbye Chris.