by Paul Carter
Ed and Colin looked perplexed. With few words exchanged we put the bike in the pits and then I hit up every rider I could find over the next few hours, getting the rundown on speed and wind and salt.
The first question they asked me was always ‘What are you riding?’. After I told them, the same sympathetic face was pulled. I found Jeff Lemon, a big New Zealander, very experienced rider and record holder. Jeff knows salt lake racing; he does Speed Week both here and at Bonneville. With that classic, quiet, methodical all-in-a-day’s-racing calm about him, he jumps on his bike and sets a record as casually as I would nip down to the supermarket for a loaf of bread. Jeff was on the verge of cracking the ‘Dirty Two’—that means passing 200 mph—on a stock Suzuki. He smiled when I found him; he knew I’d just had my first run and had been waiting for the onslaught of questions. ‘When the crosswind hit you, did you go rigid and get the death grip on the handlebars?’
I nodded.
‘Did the bike slide to the left?’
I nodded.
‘Were you running down the centre of the track?’
More nodding; he talked and I listened.
‘When that crosswind catches you, don’t panic,’ Jeff said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t sit up—just a shoulder poking out from your fairing can throw your bike off balance and cause a fall. So just relax into it, crank your steering damper right up, tuck in and steer the bike, don’t go rigid and over-grip. That bike presents a huge surface area for the wind to push against and you’re running solid wheels, so you need all that track to get up to speed because it’s big and heavy. It’s a lottery: you either ride through it or you need a run with no crosswind.’
My bike had been granted an exemption for the solid wheels; just having solid wheels is enough in a crosswind to blow a bike off the track, as opposed to a spoked wheel which allows the wind to pass through it. The rules stated that front wheels had to be cross-ventilated by an area equal to at least 25 per cent of normal rim circle area, but my bike was outside the rules and required me to compensate accordingly out on the salt.
Jeff put his big hand on my shoulder and leant in to speak over the noise of V8 crackling nearby. ‘Start your run at the far right of the track and try to stay there, the cars and other vehicles are churning up the surface and dumping loose salt on the left side, that should give you more time to get speed before the wind just blows that huge mainsail with wheels off the track.’ He slapped me on the back and laughed. ‘Go and catch some wisdom out there as well as crosswind. Now get back in the queue.’
I went back to the pits and talked to the lads. First we put more air into the tyres, an overpressure of 20 psi; this would help any correcting lean against the wind. Jeff told me not to worry about there being less tyre surface contact with the salt as I’d have so much forward momentum keeping me upright. Next we cut off the back of the front wheel guard; it was creating drag. Ed buried his head in the computer fuel management system, tweaking the software around the extreme heat to get more from the hardware, and with that I was back in my leathers and sitting in the queue again.
I asked another rider next to me if he knew what had happened to Sean Kelly. ‘Heat stroke, mate,’ he said. So I drank another 600 litres of water over the next 40 minutes until I found myself at the pointy end of the queue again. Sean Kelly had been put in a special shower that is set up for racers to recover from heat stroke; he got out of there and went on to smash two world records, and drink 600 litres of water.
LIVING CRAZY TO
CATCH WISE
AS FAR AS Speed Week goes, it’s 90 per cent waiting and 10 per cent racing.
‘How’d you go?’ The starter at the GPS track yelled at me, smiling with his big hat on.
I smiled back in my helmet and gave him the thumbs-up. ‘Can I go over to the right?’
He nodded. ‘Crosswind?’
I shifted over slightly to the right, primed myself and the bike, gave the starter the nod.
‘Stand by . . . Visor down . . . Go!
’ Exactly the same thing happened again, at the same point: the crosswind collected me, but this time I held on the power, leant into the wind way past my comfort zone and held my breath, letting go on the power as the bike wobbled through the loose salt in the middle and slid towards the left edge. I remembered not to sit up or touch the brakes and changed down very late to avoid a compression lock on the back wheel. The result was 95.5 mph, 153 kph.
I rode in to the back of the queue. Everyone was suffering from the extreme heat and dealing with the wind in their own way. I sat there thinking about it: all the things I took for granted when riding this bike on the asphalt on that runway at Corowa last year were now amplified on the salt to a new and utterly frightening degree. That kind of speed on a factory racing bike, on a straight racetrack, is child’s play, but on a half-tonne, homemade, 4-metre-long behemoth, on this surface, with this crosswind, and the aerodynamics of a Sherman tank, I started to realise Jeff was right. This was a lottery, a flat-out gamble on whether or not I could hold onto the power through the wind and stay on the track long enough to nail it. It was that simple.
Salt fever was creeping in, that heady mix of adrenalin and fear; I now knew why these nutters kept coming back. Their source code was written, processed and hardwired into their brain the second they finished their first run. It takes years to get the feel for what you’re doing out there. Lake Gairdner is widely recognised as being just as good as Bonneville, the slightly fat but funny little sister of the queen of speed in the USA. As I rolled towards my third run, she reminded me that although fun to be around, and good to look at, she’s got gas, and can ruin your day if you don’t give her the respect she deserves. It was at this moment she blew one of her 30 kph crosswinds at the queue and half a dozen riders stack it, including me.
Embarrassed by this, everyone sprang up and immediately heaved their bikes off the ground. It took four guys to get mine back on two wheels and, unbeknown to me at the time, I had just fractured my L5 vertebra; that is to say, a half-tonne bike falling on you is going to hurt and it did, but I did what men do and ate painkillers to shake it off.
Half a box of Tramadol later I was back at the start line; the starter, still grinning, jogged over. ‘You again, we need to stop meeting like this.’ He leant in to remind me of the gusting crosswind somewhere after the first mile and asked if I was sure I wanted to make a run.
I nodded and flicked my visor down.
Pulling away off the line, I was racing myself; I’m my own worst enemy and always have been. My back spasmed as I tucked in, my movements through the clutch lever, gear lever, throttle twist now automatic. I wasn’t shooting fast glances down at gauges; I could hear the rpm, I could feel what the bike was doing. My death grip was now just a loose hold, and everything was focused on the vibrating horizon, its fixed, fully charged dark clouds colliding high above and sparking lightning across the windscreen. When the first mile marker blipped past my peripheral left I was flat out in fourth gear; any moment now that fucking crosswind would hit me. What do you do? Definitive moments, life comes down to them all the time. Fiddle with your comfort levels, your life, your sanity; if you don’t you will always wonder. I let out a high-speed torrent of abuse, shouting as hard and loud as I could while my mind dropped acid and decided to show me pictures of Lola and Sid hugging my father. The wind slammed into the side of the bike, the handlebars wobbled, and there was a sharp intake of breath as I made leaning corrections, pulling the bike over further than I dared and slipping into the mushy centre of the track.
My point of no return had already passed in third gear. I lost my battle as the wind relentlessly shunted me over to the left and that was it—by the time the wind was gone I’d run out of room again; there was no touching the brakes out there and I needed the remaining track to slow down using the gearbox. The second I rolled off the power I knew it was over, I was done. ‘Chalk this up to gaining experience, mate,’ I told myself. If there was a lesson to ca
tch, I caught it. I caught it between my butt cheeks.
Rolling into the back of the queue I was met with some big smiles—98.2 mph, 158 kph. Colin was beaming from ear to ear. ‘That’s an Australian record.’ He was pumped. I was getting closer to the world record on every run. It was four in the afternoon by then and the lads and I decided to shut it down for the day. Jeff waved to me as we left the salt for our camp and shouted, ‘Tomorrow, mate, you’ll crack it tomorrow.’
That night it was Simon’s Surprise for dinner, and the man can cook. His tent was big enough to hold an air show in; in fact, every single bit of kit he had was emblazoned with his employer’s logo, he had just grabbed whatever he could and bolted. The end of that first day of racing had wasted all of us. I fell into an exhausted, blank sleep.
The next day I was crawling out of my swag like Satan himself had put on an oversized ski boot and spent the entire night kicking my lower back. Rob’s Breakfast Surprise with a generous side of Tramadol put me in a lucid but slightly wonky state as I pulled on my sweat-soaked leathers in the pits and waited for the drugs to kick in.
There was that massive queue again. With just two tracks open, and most of us restricted to running on the GPS track, 330 racers meant you had to wait, a lot. By 9 a.m. it was already 45 degrees Celsius under that sun. Just as it’s getting hard and down to the pointy end, that’s when Speed Week will stop you in mid-conversation and leave you standing motionless with your mouth slightly agape while the hairs on your arms stand up as you see, for the first time, a magnificent race spec Streamliner at full tilt hurtling down the main track like a bullet through the heat haze. Its trajectory is bewildering against the white and red background of this place, salt blasted into a vapour trail behind this missile, its massive engine noise out of sync with the speed as you try to wrap your head around the physics and what the driver is experiencing at more than 250 mph. There was a momentary silence as everyone focused completely on this one event and collectively tracked the run, which relaxed only when the chute billowed and the engine noise was gone, then it was straight back to whatever you were doing. It was a definitive Speed Week moment.
‘Morning.’ The starter was chirpy.
‘Crosswind?’ I asked.
‘Yup, same place,’ he said.
Then we went through our little ritual that finished with him yelling ‘Go’, and so it went on for the rest of the day. I never got past my fastest run of 98.2 mph. By three o’clock my toe and back were fucked and we called it a day.
‘Can’t do it, Colin.’ I fell off the bike and lay on the tarp in our pits, undoing my helmet strap while prone.
‘Mate, you managed an Australian record,’ Colin said as he eased the helmet off my head. ‘That’s good enough for your first race meet.’
I lay there looking at the shade sail flapping in the wind. He knew what I was thinking: it wasn’t good enough, I wanted the world record. ‘Next year,’ I said.
Ed came over and pulled my boots off. ‘Well done, mate,’ he said as he threw my boots in the back of the trailer and helped me up. ‘Let’s go and have a whiskey.’
We loaded the bike into the trailer and headed down to the main track where only a handful of cars and bikes had qualified to race the full 8 miles. We pulled out deck-chairs and sat on the roof of the trailer with umbrellas, watching the show.
And what a show it was. One car flipped at over 150 mph; its nose lifting and swapping ends mid-air, it smashed its way down the track several times while we stood on the roof frozen. The driver was pulled out with only eight-ball haemorrhages in his eyes, other than that he was fine. The safety procedures at Speed Weed work. But I was amazed that his first bounce covered 130 metres in distance, and totally floored when the driver announced he was ready to get back in and do it again.
I watched other bike riders get hit by that potentially lethal crosswind and get the wobbles on, sliding all over the track at more than 200 mph, then regain control and hammer on. There were a few who came off, but they all walked away. Well, except for the two guys who came off their bikes on the way home; one broke his neck, the other his femur.
By the time the event was over there was a total of 641 runs logged, with 72 records set—38 new ones and 34 existing records broken—and 21 men joined the Dirty Two club. Me, well, I didn’t do what I intended to, but I got a good taste.
We left the salt the next morning. Jeff Lemon was standing in his bush shower as we drove past on our way out of camp, his head covered in soap. ‘Catch ya next year, mate,’ he shouted.
I looked at Colin, quiet in the back seat. ‘Will he?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we’ll work it out somehow, Pauli.’ He smiled. ‘But you need to ride like hell next time.’
LIKE CARTER,
LIKE SON
IT’S EARLY IN the morning: the kids are still asleep, Clare is in the kitchen making coffee. I hear the phone ring inside and walk in through the back door. ‘It’s your sister.’ Clare looks worried and hands over the phone.
My father is dying. His optimistic phone banter has been so convincing these past months, but now I’m listening to my sister tell me he’s losing his battle.
She is in tears, and reveals that my father is holding on to meet my son. Anyone in my position would drop everything, gather their family together and get on the next flight to London. I dump several things on Maximum Dave, both work and personal; he even collects the mail and mows the lawn while we’re gone.
The Olympics are about to wind down, introducing a state of chaos for everything from booking flights to getting a hotel room, so I give my good mate Shane Edwards—Fast Eddy—a call. As usual, he is spectacular; in a day he has the lot set up like clockwork, even transport from Heathrow to the Hilton, which he’s chosen for its location across the street from Paddington station and the train to Cheltenham where my mother and sister would pick us up. He has also squared away a car with child seats and a ground floor apartment just 2 miles away from my father’s house; how he does this in the lead-up to the Cheltenham horseracing season I don’t know, but that’s why he’s Fast Eddy.
We board our flight in a state of limbo, the beginning of what is basically a series of queues; for the next 36 hours we will be in a queue of one form or another. For once, our kids are controllable, Sid only occasionally throwing food at the other passengers, Lola happy to just sit and draw or watch the TV. By the time we land in London 24 hours later they are both exhausted and asleep. Eddy’s driver is there and soon we are all passed out in a hotel room.
The end of a long warm English summer has London’s streets bathed in sunshine and a few hundred thousand punters spilling in and out of Paddington station. We jostle our way through the ticketing machine queue while Sid decides to lick every possible surface his head can reach all the way to our seats.
Cheltenham lies two hours down the track northwest of London. Sitting there on the train, my blank face pointing out the window as rural Britain went by, the familiar deep green patchwork and ancient hedgerows blur seamlessly into the memory of the last time I saw my dad. Almost a year ago, standing in the Gloucestershire sun on the platform at Cheltenham station, seeing me off. He knew then that he was very sick, and I suppose I felt it, the sense that there was something wrong, but I let my life batter its way into my radar and scramble the message before I understood it. Now as we coast into the same station, in the same light, I can picture him there, waiting, his hands shoved into his pockets and a big bearded smile creeping across his face. This time, though, it’s my mother, looking fabulous, who I see first when we arrive, she’s there with my sister, France, my stepfather, John and my brother-in-law, Barry.
The scene is a happy one, but I know we’re going straight to my father’s house and I’m going to get a shock. Elisabeth, my father’s partner for more than twenty years, answers the door; she’s the most remarkable woman, not only because she was able to control my dad. She was also in the Royal Air Force and outranked him before retiring from a lon
g and distinguished military career. I think it is her resolve and inner strength that inspires me more than anything else while dealing with this, a parent’s death.You know that in the normal order of things this will one day happen, but you’re never prepared for it when it does.
Dad is up and smartly dressed, half his normal body weight and ravaged by the cancer, his face grey and drawn. He was a big powerful man once, now I can lift him off the sheets. He has two visits with us and the kids, soaking up every second with Lola and Sid; although drawn and sunken, his eyes light up when his grandchildren hug him and chat the way little children do. It takes every ounce of strength he has to get up and be there for us.
Five days later I’m there at the house. It’s late, past midnight, when I stir from my sleep on the couch and get up to check on dad. Elisabeth is in there with him, of course, as is my sister. I sit on the end of his bed and chat to him; he makes no sound other than laboured breaths. I don’t know how much time passes while I talk and Dad’s chest moves in a slow, uneven rhythm with his breathing. He leaves us very quietly, just a brief last look, then his eyes close for the final time, and all the while Elisabeth talks to him, her voice so soft and reassuring. After a life that had been at times fraught with danger and so much tension, of which I only know of fragments, he had a peaceful death at home surrounded by his children and his true love.
It’s only now that I can start to understand how close life and death are all the time, so much closer than my rational mind can process here in my safe, secure, free western democracy. It takes on a new parallel when it’s your immediate family; he was gone, just when our relationship was getting interesting. I step outside into the street with a glass of Dad’s Macallan; I found the bottle in his collection, one that I gave him thirteen years ago, still wrapped up, a 1969 vintage, the year I was born. The house is an old Georgian three-storey right in the centre of town, the wide street in the early morning standing deftly quiet. I pace up and down in the half light of a new sunrise and toast my father. I wonder if Sid will do this one day; my son reminds me of my father more and more each day. I’ll hold on to the thought that the soul lives on in memory and the next generation. Now I have moved up the queue, the big queue, that is.