Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There (23 page)
I shone my torch ahead of me and leant forward to look. ‘Why are the walls moving?’
‘Oh, it’s just a few roaches,’ I heard someone say behind me.
Everyone has a thing, it might be snakes or rats or spiders or poodles. Mine is cockroaches, because years ago I woke from a drunken sleep to discover I had one deep inside my right ear, and it made me crazy. I ended up in hospital screaming and twitching in time to its death throes while a doctor sat on me and a nurse injected oil into my ear.
Every hair on my neck stood up, my ear canals tried to close, film crews and squeezers were scattered and Mat got trampled as I fled towards street level. Now that’s what you call talent.
I’ll stop there—so much more happened, and that was just the first episode.
THE LAST TIME
I saw the BDM-SLS it was rolling back into its trailer on Corowa’s main runway in March 2012. I was so sure I would never see her again, at least not in the form of a motorcycle.
I was wrong; somehow, I don’t know how, she had remained intact, quietly tucked away in a corner for a full year. I had not heard from Colin, Rob or Ed; we had all been so busy with our lives none of us realised the Dry Lakes Racers Association was successfully granted permission to run Speed Week on the salt a month earlier than usual, and that the salt was in good condition. But more importantly, it had not rained in months and did not look likely to.
David Hinds from the DLRA called me to ask why he hadn’t heard from us and whether we were going to the salt this year.
I was sitting in my car about to drive out of a multi-storey car park in the city. I froze. ‘Yup, Dave, I’ll see you there.’
Several phone calls later the whole thing cranked into life for the third time. We only had two weeks to prepare, but after two years of trying to make it to Speed Week we had the prep side down to a fine art.
So Speed Week 2013 looked like it might actually happen this time. I drove out into the sun feeling euphoric; salt fever would arrive next like a freight train. Those two weeks passed fast: the boys dusted off the bike and reported nothing whatsoever was amiss; I filled out my paperwork, booked flights and pulled out the 25-year-old racing leathers Erwin had lent me last year and gave them a good rub down with beeswax and lanolin. I also pulled out my new gloves, replaced after poor Diego lost one last year, and of course that carbon helmet, now cleaned of Erwin’s manky dog’s urine. I had spent two weeks working on it only because I knew I’d be in trouble out there on the salt in 50-degree heat in a black helmet trying to concentrate on riding and not the acrid smell of dog piss. I walked about under the sun in my backyard with the visor down and the vents closed, smelling only cleaning chemicals that made me slightly dizzy, but not piss. It was completely pee-free.
The night before my early flight to Adelaide I carefully packed my gear into a big hold-all bag, going over everything. My kit was laid out on the floor in the garage so I could systematically check it, pack it and know it’d be ready when I needed it. Sid was quietly playing with my socket set as he often did when I was working on a bike or just tinkering in the garage. He had just turned two and was bang in the middle of ‘potty training’—or ‘helmet training’, because it made no difference to him where he took a shit—and he did, just like that. I was distracted 20 feet away with my head in a storage box looking for rechargeable batteries when the chain of events, which I’d lined up to let happen, joined the dots in my head.
First it was a little grunt, followed by the smell; I knew before I turned around what I was going to see. Take one post-spaghetti-bolognaise-fed toddler, place padded comfy-looking receptacle within range, in this case my clean lid sitting hollow side up and supported on all sides, for protection in transit, on top of my leathers and boots, then simply turn your back and let it happen. Sid was not wearing a nappy and, unlike his sister who was very good at announcing her intentions, he simply gave you a three-second warning before he defecated on the spot. So we always had his potty within his window, but this time his potty was not in the garage, so he just improvised and went ahead and backed one out in my lid. ‘Daddy, ka ka,’ his little voice came seconds later. I turned around and, yes, there he was, bless him.
I didn’t react, I just picked him up and carried him into the bathroom and cleaned him up. We walked back down to the garage together and he went quietly back to playing with my socket set while I dropped a thousand dollars of carbon-fibre helmet into a plastic bag and threw it in the bin.
On the final approach into Adelaide, I started going through all the things that would happen next: the phone calls, messages and emails telling me Speed Week was cancelled when I got off the plane. But not this time. This time Rob Dempster was there to pick me up and we drove over to his place near the city and spent the afternoon packing up his four-wheel drive for the four days on the salt. Rob was very generously taking his own vehicle, and thank god he’s a four-wheel-drive enthusiast.
I stood sweating under the tin roof of his man cave in the suburbs, slightly bemused at the amount of kit he began pulling off shelves. He handed me a cold beer as soon as I walked in then pulled out a checklist from his shirt pocket and scanned the expanse of his shed. ‘Mate, we can’t cop a squat out there can we?’ he asked. Picking up a twelve-pack of toilet paper and folding shovel with a flat face and a vicious-looking serrated edge, he snapped and twisted its parts together then urgently paced up the row of shelves, rather like a man in dire need of a poop or about to engage in some trench warfare. ‘Right, that’s the dunny.’ He slid a huge grip bag across the floor.
‘There are no toilets out there, right?’ he asked.
‘Well, as far as I know there’s toilets on the salt in the pit lane, but nothing in the camp, or perhaps there’s a couple in the camp . . .
He laughed. ‘Well, you’re gonna want to use this one—it’s a proper sit-down comfortable rig with its own tent and aircon.’
I suspected he was pulling my leg but was amazed nonetheless. ‘Really?’
‘Yup.’ He walked over with another grip bag. ‘Here, take this out to the car.’ Soon there were a dozen bags lined up, all clearly marked; the man had everything. Rob takes his off-road adventures seriously, as the inside of his Pajero revealed. He had the whole thing customised with storage areas, collapsible tables, bladders for potable and grey water, full comms, navigation, shade awnings, solar panels, fridges and a butler.
Several beers later we were packed. Ed and Colin were meeting us at the uni first thing in the morning with the bike and the Commodore to tow it, then we had to swing by Steve Smith’s place and pick him up before a four-hour drive to Port Augusta, refuel and on to Iron Knob another hour southwest. Just outside Iron Knob there was a turn-off on the right on a dirt road; another three hours down that and we’d be at the lake.
Steve is one of the machinists at the uni. He’s short with a round belly, a greying goatee and an impossibly funny nature, he’s an Aussie male in the old-school, man’s man sense.You know, he’ll build a car in his shed, weld something, gas-axe something else, bash something with a big fuck-off hammer, shoot something, mow the lawn, drink a carton, then jump online and move some shares around at a tidy profit all before lunchtime.
Steve’s man cave was just like Rob’s, full of cars in various stages of undress, classic motorcycles beautifully restored, and tools, so many tools. Their caves had the same smell, motor oil mixed with paint and musty canvas with a dash of whiskey, like catching a passing whiff of Old Spice while doing an oil change. It should be turned into a cologne called ‘Sure Root’ and put in a bottle shaped like a football. Brad Pitt should do the ad, wearing comedy breasts and tossing his hair while sitting on a Holden, and they should shoot the whole thing in Steve’s shed. Brad should do it for free just to get his man cred back from Chanel, except this time he won’t get to drink the product before they start shooting. I used to work in advertising, part time, and I never comment on ads, well, apart from almost everything in the chapter called ‘Advertising’, but that particular commercial and the millions they spent to ultimately shit on a wonderful product that my mother uses as well as poor Brad—well, it was just bizarre to watch. Like fly-kicking your grandmother, once is enough.
We pulled away from Steve’s place, Rob and I in his Pajero with Colin, Ed and Steve in the Commodore pulling the bike trailer. The cars had UHF radios so as soon as we hit the highway the banter started between Colin and Rob, and didn’t stop all the way to the turn-off outside Iron Knob. We hooked up the Pajero to tow the trailer and entered the 130-kilometre bush track full of anticipation.
The DLRA had their first meeting to race on the salt here in 1990; 25 people turned up with less than ten cars to race, and only two of the cars were purpose-built salt-racing cars. Now there are almost a thousand members and most of them were already at the lake when we arrived. This is a sport, a motorsport unlike any other. It takes real commitment, and you need to be focused and very patient—just getting out to the event is a massive effort.
Dry lake racing’s origins go back to the ‘hot rodders’ of the 1930s and guys who beefed up their cars to drag-race them, basically anywhere they could. This evolved into competitive drag-racing. In the post-war boom the money racers spent on their cars and motorcycles jumped up and as a result so too did their speed, leaving the Southern Californian Timing Association looking for an official venue big enough to race safely on. This became the first official Speed Week at Bonneville in 1949, but the place was used by racers way before that. The first race that’s remembered involved a car and a train. The train tracks cross Bonneville for more than 200 kilometres, so in 1927 a Salt Lake City local raced his Studebaker against a Union Pacific locomotive. Eight years later the British racer Sir Malcolm Campbell cracked 300 mph on the salt.
That first year of Speed Week must have been amazing, the thin mountain air in Utah’s northwestern corner crackling as the first racers put the hammer down. They just adopted a ‘run-what-you-brung’ philosophy that has now evolved into more than 70 different categories—just for cars, with about the same number again for bikes—and within those classes there are multiple subdivisions broken down through engine capacity, fuel, fuel management, frames, fairings, the list goes on. So you can stand on the salt pan and watch a 60-year-old woman set a land-speed record riding a 1950s Triumph that’s completely clapped out with a top speed of 100 kph, but in that particular class, it’s a new record. Then she can make some minor changes to the bike, re-enter in another class and set another record. It’s progressive and exciting, and soon there will be more: the world’s fastest lawnmower, golf cart, sewing machine, combine harvester—as long as it’s safe and there’s a motor in it, eventually there will be a class that fits the bill in some way, shape or form. So you don’t have to be some minted ultra-slick rocket-car-driving corporate giant, anyone can have a go.
Having said that, however, we didn’t fit in and were in a new no-man’s-land on the salt. We had a motorcycle, but it had a car engine in it, and we were also running our bike on bio-diesel so it fell into more strange uncharted areas as there was only one other diesel motorcycle at the event. No electric motorcycles turned up or other bikes running anything outside the norm in terms of combustion. So according to the rules we were officially ‘unclassified’, neither a car nor a bike, so whatever we did out there would also be unrecognised officially. I’m sure other bikes will be built and one day there will be a class we can fit into.
Rob let out a ‘Woooo!’ as we rounded a corner and got our first glimpse of the salt.
‘Fuck, it’s big,’ he said.
‘Fuck, it’s white,’ said Steve over the radio.
We pulled up at the entrance to the camp. ‘Fuck, it’s hot,’ said Colin as he got out of the air-conditioned Holden. We had a good look around the DLRA camp. It was right next to the salt, so we picked a spot near some trees, rigged up our shade and Rob’s James Bond toilet complete with aircon unit, night light, toilet roll holder and selection of reading material, all of which constituted the same 40 pages of fart jokes, photographs of drunk people vomiting on each other, visual puzzles that involved matching various augmented breasts to their famous owners, with the prize for the lucky winner a motorised esky with flames emblazoned down both sides, and a crossword puzzle Helen Keller could finish. We laid out our swags, disconnected the trailer, and opened the back to check on the bike.
The inside was completely caked in red dust; it looked like a paprika bomb just went off. So we cleaned it up, checked it over and cruised down to the salt for our first look.
IT WAS WINDING
down for the day. Everyone was off the salt at five and not allowed back on until sun-up, then the tracks opened at seven. The ‘pit lane’ was made up of two rows of team sites, one after another, about 50 metres apart, extending for a few hundred metres. It was a strange sight, these two parallel rows of self-made workshops sitting in the middle of a Dulux-white flat plain that extended into the horizon.