In this modern age of racing, we often take it for granted that despite all the safety improvements in riding gear, machinery, and racetracks over the years, motorcycle roadracing is still very dangerous. Grand Prix circuits now are relatively safe compared to decades ago, with plenty of runoff and any potentially threatening walls and other stationary objects moved from harm’s way. Technological advances in manufacturing, materials, and miniaturization have produced racing leathers with inflatable airbag systems in addition to superior impact-absorbing components; those same impact protection advances have made their way into gloves and boots as well. Despite power levels that push the limits of metallurgy and design, even machinery failures resulting in injury have become rare events.

If you’ve ever thought about riding on a genuine racetrack, now is the time to turn your curiosity into reality. And it’s never been easier: There are more than 60 clubs and riding schools that operate hundreds of track days on almost 70 road courses throughout North America. Contrary to conventional wisdom, track days aren’t scary. The racetracks are wide and grippy, everyone goes in the same direction, no cops, no cars, no ego-fueled racers or trophies.

Amateur roadracing clubs in America have been the backbone of a healthy and productive professional and international representation of U.S. racers throughout our history. From small grassroots clubs to bona fide giants like WERA, CCS, WSMC and AFM, the American club racing organizations have been a strong influence on the overall national and world racing scene. Virtually every top racer from the USA to grace the international racing scene started in a local racing club, developing the skills and talents to climb up the ranks to the professional arena.

“Wanna beer?” It’s not the first question you’d expect from the owner of a motorcycle riding school, but this was no ordinary riding school—and this was no ordinary owner.

If you think you’ve been to a big motorcycle show, you haven’t. EICMA, the annual collection of all things motorcycle on the outskirts of Milan, Italy, is so large and so comprehensive that you can spend days there and never see everything. You’ll find motorcycles (and scooters, which are especially popular in southern Europe) from every brand known to man. There are bikes, helmets, leathers and gloves from companies you’ve never heard of. There are race bikes and sometimes racers; Kevin Schwantz and Giacomo Agostini were there at the start of the week, Ben Spies at the end of the week. And one of Spies’ Yamaha YZR-M1 show bikes was there in the Yamaha display. How many Valentino Rossi Ducati Marlboro Desmosedicis were at various displays? Hard to say…they seemed to multiply.

When San Carlo Honda Gresini rider Marco Simoncelli was killed in a freak racing accident on the second lap of the Malaysian Grand Prix at the Sepang circuit in October, it unfortunately cut short the rapid rise of a growing star in MotoGP. The hard-riding Italian had his share of on-track controversies and disagreements with other riders over the course of his career, but his honest demeanor and accessible character off the track won him a growing legion of fans around the world. In an increasingly sterile world of shielded riders emitting press release sound bites, Simoncelli’s sincerity — perceptible even through his limited English — was a breath of fresh air. His amiable personality and strong family ties endeared him to the Gresini team as well, making the 24-year-old’s loss all the more tougher on them, including team owner Fausto Gresini, himself a two-time 125cc World Champion.

Video: Nicky Hayden and Valentino Rossi discuss the upcoming season at the opening press conference.

People acquainted with me know that I tend to be slow at acquiring newfangled electronic gadgets. Proof of this is the fact that I have a four-year-old cell phone and only recently started dabbling in social media. Although this could easily be explained away merely as stubbornness or laziness I prefer to think that I’m acting out of sentimentality, fearful that in adopting new technologies we risk losing some of the charms of the simple life. One such device I am having a love/hate relationship with is GPS. This technology, amazing as it is, threatens to abolish one of the time-honored traditions of motorcycling; getting lost.

Monster Energy Graves Yamaha’s Josh Hayes won his second AMA Superbike title by playing to his strengths and minimizing his mistakes. Hayes was consistently strong, he didn’t crash during the races, and he was faster in qualifying than anyone had been since Mat Mladin. He won every pole position but one, and scored a host of points by leading the most laps, even in races he didn’t win. Rockstar Makita Suzuki’s Blake Young won seven races to three for Hayes, but the AMA points structure is such that Hayes was able to deliver Yamaha its second Superbike title in a row; the final points were 363 to 358. Under the FIM points system, Young would have won 264 to 261.

Ducati owes a big thank you to Carlos Checa, as well as to Team Althea owner Genesio Bevilacqua, and his crew of mechanics, for making its controversial strategy to axe its factory Superbike team this season appear to work. Checa gave a new lease of life to the obsolescent 1098R model which had seemingly reached its sell-by date, and put Ducati back at the top of the World Superbike category by winning its fourteenth World Superbike Riders title. The chance to ride the Checa Ducati at Misano in early September, as Carlos mapped out his final push towards clinching the World title, gave me an opportunity to evaluate how he and the Team Althea men had achieved this. Well, with just a little help from the Ducati factory, whose bevy of engineers were in constant attendance at every race. Ducati Superbike boss Ernesto Marinelli insists that Checa’s victory was achieved with a motorcycle which anyone could buy for the princely sum of €135,000 (approximately $190,000) plus tax — the cost of an RS11 customer version 1098R superbike.

As each new sportbike debuts with some sort of electronic rider aid system, a rather vocal minority sounds their displeasure through internet forums and comment sections on website stories at the march of technology sweeping over motorcycling. They decry the electronic rider aids as defeating one of the popular mantras of motorcycling — that the rider truly makes the difference in how a particular bike performs. Another fear is that riders brought up on electronic rider aids will become dependent on them. Others reject the aspect of what they see as an electronic nanny that will always be there to spoil the fun. “Next thing you know, the motorcycle will be riding itself,” they bemoan.

The 2011 season was set to belong to Jonathan Rea — and Honda, with the return of the Japanese manufacturer’s iconic Castrol sponsorship that harkens back to the World Superbike championships of Americans John Kocinski (1997) and Colin Edwards (2000 and 2002). Rea’s third full season in World Superbike got off to a promising start, after the 24-year-old Ulsterman finished fourth in the 2010 championship on the Ten Kate Honda CBR1000RR with four victories, when a broken arm suffered in a morning warm-up crash at Imola ended his title charge. This year, after three top-six finishes in the first four races, Rea scored one win and a third place finish in his Dutch team’s home round of Assen. But then his luck turned, with a series of mechanical problems, crashes and injuries, culminating in a high-speed crash at Misano that left him with multiple fractures, the most serious of which resulted in a detached ligament in his right wrist. This forced Rea to sit out nearly three months of the WSBK season, dashing his championship hopes.

Big things were expected of Ducati’s MotoGP team for 2011. The much-publicized signing of nine-time world champion Valentino Rossi, and the resurgence of Nicky Hayden late in 2010, pointed to a promising year. But the team has moved from bad fortune to worse as the season winds down. Much of the blame has been pinned (mostly by the media) on the Desmosedici’s carbon frame providing little front-end feedback to its riders, but switching from the Ducati’s stressed-engine design to a more conventional beam-type frame is not a simple task.

There was good reason for expecting BMW to be a force in World Superbike racing this year, with its full factory two-rider team in its third season of competition, with 2010 championship runner-up Leon Haslam joining Troy Corser in a squad widely regarded as having the biggest budget in Superbike racing.

“There are no second acts in American lives.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

We often see racers flinging their bikes around, grabbing handfuls of throttle and making huge steering inputs. And on a big superbike or an ill-handling grand prix bike, those big inputs are sometimes necessary for quick lap times. But even though those movements and inputs are seemingly quick and exaggerated, they are purposeful and the result of years of practice and experience. Red Bull recently released a series of slow-motion videos, showing Casey Stoner, Andrea Dovizioso and Hiroshi Aoyama at 1000 frames per second on their MotoGP bikes. In the videos, you can see the riders muscling the bikes into and out of the corners, but their inputs are quite smooth and controlled, and — at the very limits of traction — relatively slow.

In 1953, science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury created a short story entitled, “The Murderer.” Set in the future, it is about a psychologist assigned to evaluate a man being held in protective custody because he has destroyed all of the communication devices in his life; telephone, computer, TV, wristwatch radio. During the interview the man even offers to destroy the psychologist’s telephone wristwatch. The man had simply been driven mad by the constant communication with his family, his friends, his work. Seeking some relief he had set about destroying every device that imposed on his peace and quiet. And for that he had been arrested.

When the massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake — the largest ever recorded — struck on March 11, 2011, off the eastern coast of Japan, the tremor itself didn’t result in a significant amount of damage. Unfortunately, the earthquake also caused a massive tsunami (estimates put its height as high as 100 feet in some areas) that swept ashore and traveled inland as far as six miles, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and immense destruction.

At a glance, designing and building a traction control system is easy: Monitor front and rear wheel speeds, and cut power if the rear wheel goes faster than the front. And from a safety standpoint — preventing a crash — a basic system is quite adequate. Traction control for performance, however, is a different story. Racers have long used wheelspin to help the motorcycle finish a corner, and it’s well known that tires provide more grip if they are spinning a certain amount. These contradictory goals of safety and performance have led to increasingly advanced systems, with additional sensors, feedback and signal processing aiming to provide both benefits in a single system for sportbike use. Recent patents and patent applications published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office show how various manufacturers have developed their systems for better performance as well as safety.

The late-to-racing son of 250cc World Championship runner-up Helmut Bradl had been hand-picked by Alberto Puig for the prestigious Red Bull MotoGP Academy. Being chosen for the intensive course is like winning the lottery, a one-in-a-million chance that doesn’t guarantee success — but it does make people sit up and take notice.

“I went to university in Bologna and at the end of my course I wanted to do a thesis on a four-valve water-cooled Desmodromic engine. At the time Ducati only made a two-valve engine, so I contacted the factory and asked if I could have some drawings of the motor for my project. They agreed and I created the idea which became the 851 engine.”

The stack of patents on my desk that were part of this issue’s traction control story (page 58) is at least three inches thick. It weighs enough that, stashed in the backpack slung over the back of my wheelchair, I have to be careful not to wheelie. Full of flowcharts, block diagrams and graphs, the patents are an indication of where traction control and motorcycle electronics in general is headed — infinity, and maybe beyond. And while that progress has resulted in amazingly good systems for sportbikes at moderate extra cost, the additional expense for racing seems to be spiraling out of control.

Early childhood notwithstanding, the majority of euphoria experienced in my life has arrived courtesy motorcycles. When you’re a kid the days are usually filled with nothing but happiness—unmitigated joy found in almost every activity. However, as we age, there is a dulling of the senses and those simple daily joys seem to ebb, reduced to just periodic flirtations. For me, when these flirtations do come, they often come while riding, as a sensation of elation bolstered by absolute lucidity. I refer to these all too infrequent brushes with clarity as crystalline moments.

The press release from Virginia International Raceway was stark in its brief and abrupt two-sentence statement: “No AMA Pro Racing event will take place at VIR in 2011. If circumstances are conducive in 2012, VIR looks forward to renewing its relationship with AMA Pro Racing.” This announcement came on July 11, only five weeks before the event was scheduled to be held at the Virginia circuit that has been on the AMA calendar since 2001. What the hell happened?

Ask anyone who has owned motorcycles what their third or fourth bike was and they may have to think about it for a second — juggling the proper order as they dust off their memory. Ask them about their first, and they can tell you without hesitation — usually accompanied by a fond, often forlorn smile. This certainly applies to me. The only other aspect of my life that holds that kind of lucid recall is women. You never forget your first.