Racing in the Rain
“That which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny.
Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures
have been brought on by none other than ourselves.”
― Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Sometimes it's important to hear the inner monologue of a Golden Retriever. Enzo, the narrator of the book, “The Art of Racing in the Rain” is one such oracle. Manifest what's in front of you. That might be difficult to understand, I know it was for me, and I have spent some time on a racetrack. For Enzo it was always about keeping his master Denny safe for what would come next. For Denny it was each next turn as he climbed the ladder to ultimately become a Formula 1 driver. His forte, of course, was driving a race car in the rain. And doing so, as one may believe required for winning, very quickly. It was an art form.
The twist I would add, is doing so on two tires. The Art of Motorcycle Racing in the Rain, adds a dimension Denny and Enzo did not discuss.
“Keep the rubber side down”, is one of those trackisms everyone says to one another in the pit, similar to the fatalism of “Break a leg” to wish you good luck in the acting profession. I'm assuming they say that, I was never in the acting profession. Keeping the rubber side down was something I was never good at. I'm not even sure how it's possible on two wheels in the rain. Physics supports motorcycle racing on a dry day. There's no such thing as physics on a wet day.
If you've ever watched motorcycle racing on TV the craziest, and to me the most exciting, is watching a motorcycle achieve a high lean angle. There are a lot of parallels to car racing with regard to entering a turn, having visual markers along the way, breaking hard on your way in, hitting your apex, getting off the brakes and getting back on the throttle, to push out your suspension, as you leave the turn. In motorcycle racing you're looking for all the same markers, around each lap, you're finding your marker and pushing a little bit further, each time, to scrub milliseconds off of your lap time. If you do it well enough, maybe you build to a dropping a second off your lap time and then another second until overall you're improving.
But a motorcycle doesn't have anything close to the same physics as an automobile. To take a turn on two wheels the motorcycle has to lean inward to stay on the track. Upright, there are two small patches of rubber touching the road, where the front and back tires meet the concrete. Racing tires sweep their tread all the way around to the rim, to keep rubber on the concrete as the bike begins to lean over. The rubber, and the coefficient of fiction between the sticky material in the racing compound of the tires, with the concrete of the track, push back against the forces of a turn that want to throw you off the track and into the hay bails along the sides. The weight of the motorcycle with you on it, provides the gravitational component, in the normal direction (straight down), as well as the bank angle of the concrete itself. The bank angle, if high enough, returns the tire to its upright rubber meets the road position. Most road racing tracks don't have high banking turns like the oval tracks in car racing where the turn is more like a wall and you don't even have to slow down, let alone turn. Take a look at the oval at Daytona. Cars and motorcycles can hit that turn at 180 mph and it's just a walk in the park…except for the G-Forces straight into the wall.
But turning is critical on a road racing track that winds all over the place with a normal bank in the turning surface. The good news is that a motorcycle provides some assistance in the turn from the two spinning gyroscopes you are riding a on. The lean of the motorcycle is actually quite easy to do because those gyroscopes are stable at speed. Using those two gyroscopes is one of the most amazing things about motorcycle racing.
Everybody plays with a gyroscope as a kid so you know you can spin one and it will balance on a string. Same with tops, get them spinning, and they create a reference frame of their own, and hang out for a while with their own life. Now jump on top of two of those spinning weights and try to control them. The way it works is counterintuitive. Using the handlebars, you turn opposite the direction you intend to move. If you want to turn to the right, you turn the handlebars to the left. It's easier than you think because you actually do it when you're riding a bicycle you just don't realize it. Not when you're rolling through a parking lot, but when you're cruising at speed or downhill. Don't think about it if you're riding your bike today…or even try to explore what I'm talking about. Just let your intuition ride the bike you learned how to do when you were four years old. And wear your God damn helmet.
Folsom Prison, where I still write to you today, is set up for the recovery of spinal injury as well as Traumatic Brain Injury. I'm an easy case in this place because I have my wits about me. Some of my fellow patients are nowhere near as lucky. Shaved heads where surgery has been performed to relieve the pressure through their craniums because they have school fractures and internal bleeding in their brains due to falls and other bad shit. When I see these friends in physical therapy with me, imposter syndrome is impossible to deny. Now of course, they have to wear helmets we're in the hospital, if they fall again and hit these weak areas of their cranium, it's going to be bad. It already is. Wear your fucking helmet. Scorch, Fog, Low Down, regardless of whether you are mountain biking or riding up to the 7-Eleven to pick up a Mountain Dew Code Red. Wear your helmet.
Obviously when you're motorcycle racing, You are wearing the best helmet money can buy. $450 bucks is what I spent on a helmet when I was in the jam and I had three of them. These babies are one time use. Hit it once against the concrete, throw it out. It's the carton meant to protect the egg inside. The material inside compresses on impact so you don't want to hit your head against that compressed material the next time.
When you're in a turn and the gyroscopes are in full swing you're in a different reference frame. Straight down no longer exists. The gyroscopes keep you stable. This is how those highly angles are achieved when see them on TV. The spinning gyros hold you stable at whatever angle you decide to lean the bike. Actually doing it on the track is a blast.
That's the basic physics to understand the concept of high lean angle. Where I was headed requires two more things. First, what happens if all this physics breaks, down and the motorcycle collapses beneath you like a folding chair? Also, what happens, when you remove the coefficient of friction and unlike Denny and Enzo, in their four tired F1 racecar, you have to race your motorcycle in the rain. Both are related because this happens when the tires lose friction.
The first thing that happens is the bike slams to the ground in the direction of the lean. An experienced rider will have their knee out, sliding against the concrete, using it as an outrigger. For yours truly it's just a useless appendage to be damaged when the bike slams against the concrete. An experienced rider, sensing the loss and friction in the tires, could use their knee to prevent the impending collapse. Now the collapse happens the bike slams against the concrete. The experienced rider, unable to save the collapse, we'll let the bike go. At this point both the bike and rider will be delivered via slide, off the side of the turn, and into the hay bales.
The inexperienced rider, yours truly, will try to hang on. The hang on, will jerk the steering wheel, along with the front tire, in the direction of the fall. As the steering wheel comes up, the front tire regains traction, and the entire bike has now been counter steered to turn in the opposite direction. What happens next is comical. If the rider hasn't released the handlebars yet, the massive bike, with its two spinning gyroscopes, flips completely in the other direction, taking its rider with it, and flinging them into the air.
I can still remember this moment like it's yesterday. Flipped over, looking at the sky, sailing through the air, awaiting impact with the ground. It was almost peaceful. I've never really considered concrete until this moment. Most talk of concrete had more to do with the adhesion of rubber. When you land on it, your discussion switches two hardness. Trust me when I tell you it's very hard.
The yellow flag comes out and the race slows down on your behalf. I was on the other side of the track, My bike was still running, I was able to get it back up on two wheels. My dad had come to the track on this particular race day and he was observing the race from over in the racing pits. Imagine what happens in the mind of a parent: a crash occurs and their kids number is announced over the loudspeaker during the yellow flag. That was a long 10 minutes for my dad before I was able to limp my bike around the track and back into the pit. And then all is well…but is it really?
My dad and I never really had a serious conversation about the what-ifs of a very dangerous sport. I went into the second season feeling fairly invincible. But hung it up after assessing the risks following the fatality during my warm up heat. I was on the track. I had already crashed my bike five times. My body was beat up to the limit. It was time to stop. I wrote an article for Road Racing magazine. It was never published.
The article contained a lot about risk analysis. Analysis is actually my profession. I thought I had done a fairly good job. As much road racing that goes at both amateur and professional levels in the two sanctioning bodies, WERA and AMA, there's only about one fatality per year in the United States…At least back in the '90s. It turns out it's actually safer to race motorcycles than it is to ride motorcycles on the street. That shouldn't come as a big surprise. Tracks are much safer because the surfaces are clean and if you leave the track you're not going to hit concrete or steel. Also everybody's going in the same direction…and there are no trucks crossing your path. In theory, the racers, are better trained motorcycle riders as well.
On the street it's a free-for-all, and it drives me crazy to watch amateurs ride their bikes on the streets and highways, splitting lanes, with their girlfriends clinging onto them from behind. Or vice versa…no judgment there. At least in Virginia everyone's wearing a helmet.
Back to racing in the rain, that's something the amateurs on the road do seem to avoid. Most of them are fair weather riders, and in particular those with racing bikes.
In the epic journey Pirzig takes with his son across the big skies of Montana, in his masterwork, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” rain does not enter his calculus. In his quest we have a collision of Western and Eastern philosophies searching for a quality that can't be defined. Science gives us math to provide an empirical answer to a measurement of something. It's a construct created entirely by humans. We humans just made it up. I'm always amused by my scientific friends who think there's an answer to life's questions somewhere hidden in the math. It's clever and it's useful but I've never found meaning in it.
Art, on the other hand, is strictly in the eye of the beholder. Or is it? I haven't met many people who have said that a sunrise or sunset isn't beautiful. Or looked out across a vista of mountains and reported back that they had a shitty view. Most people can find beauty in the cuteness of young animals as well as other natural things such as flowers and even insects. It certainly is not an empirical thing that we are calculating. We may call it subjective, but this tendency is seemingly universal. Young animals even draw the attention of animals not even in their species. Perhaps this quality is embedded in our human DNA.
Enzo implores us to manifest that which is in front of us. My friend Trump (not POTUS) has it whittled down too a more simple rule, look up from your text messaging, and deal with what's in the windshield. Since he's qualified to fly fast at 100 AGL I tend to believe he knows how to handle what's in the windshield.
All of this is harder in the rain. Rain takes all of the objectivity out of everything we do. Rain is subjective and turns a simple road surface into a random sheet of friction. Oil comes out of the concrete when rain appears. You're now riding on a sheet of ice. Ice is random but can be controlled with blades or in the case of motorcycle racing on the ice, large spikes in both tires for traction. Eliminating the randomness of having no friction is the goal. Yet even with spikes you slide on the ice. Same thing with a dirt road. Same thing when you're watching cars in a four-wheel drift. You're sliding but you're controlling the slide. You have to know where you're going in that slide. You have to manifest what's in front of you, as you enter a random event. This is no longer objective. This is subjective and it is a form of art.
The quality of art can no longer be calculated. It has to be felt. It has to be felt in the bones, it has to be felt from input coming in from all senses. Experience is the only way to gain the awareness necessary for the art to emerge.
I am sliding into a turn and there is rain on the track. There is no artist assisting my treatment and recovery. I cannot manifest anything before me because it is unknown. I'm alone with very little experience, as all of us are, guiding our own health care. The system has nothing in place but process. The process can treat us but it can't diagnose. If you're inside the checklist for a process that exists…you have a better chance of a good outcome, but that will come with very little humanity behind it. If you're off the reservation, as I am, careening towards the hay bails in some random slide, I need a House. I need a doctor to care enough to intervene and put their experienced art form into the game. A doctor who knows how to race in the rain. I need one of those.