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As with most things in life, you’re often better off not knowing what you’re really getting into prior to embarking on a new endeavour. This was definitely the case when we decided to get the CMG ZX-7 project bike up to snuff and ‘competitive’ for the VRRA Mosport Endurance Race earlier this year.
Still slightly bleary-eyed, the CMG “B” team made up of Ronn Moffatt, Editor ‘arris and myself converged at Mosport for the annual VRRA Endurance Race at the ungodly hour of 7:30am. As per usual, everything had come together at the last minute.
After a really stressful, but very successful weekend at Le Circuit Mont Tremblant, I was quite looking forward to this final, low-pressure weekend at Shannonville, Ontario. For those of you who haven’t been following my updates, I was coming to the final round of the 2004 Diablo SV Cup with the Championship already in the bag.
Motivation can come from the strangest places. After winning the shortened round 3 at Mosport (see previous article) and reading some of the posts on internet forums, I got a distinct feeling that some people didn’t think I “deserved” the win, and that the fastest SV racer was not the one leading the championship.
Team CMG’s Pascal Anctil managed to pull off a respectable seventh place in the first round of the Diablo SV Cup at Shannonville in May. But seventh just isn’t very CMG. You gotta either win, almost win, or come dead last (preferably after a spectacular crash requiring a long stay in the local hospital). With this in mind, our intrepid and fool-hardy racer packed up his cowboy hat, steak knife and ill-fitting leathers, and headed west to Calgary.
So here I am on the starting line in pouring rain, wondering what the heck I’m doing on Michelin S2 drys when everyone else seems to be on full wets. Hmhh, I think I should have bought that second set of rims, but it’s too late now.
With that AA-style confession off my chest, I’ll also admit that knowing Team CMG’s storied racing legacy of wrecked bikes, multiple fractures and last place finishes left me a little, uh … wary. To make matters worse, race organizers and promoters—Supermoto Canada—had rescheduled the Fort Erie round from mid June—when I had originally planned to do it—to mid August, leaving me an extra two months to stew.
For those of us completely enamoured with going fast on race replicas, the first time you get your knee down is a big moment. Having used up many a slider and viciously attacked my poor BWM’s heads on various racetracks (see Canadian Thunder Diaries), my fantasy was now directed at trying something completely different.
Long-term CMG readers probably thought they’d seen the last of Mr.Seck on a track after an ill-fated racing attempt on a BMW R1100S in 2001. My spectacular St. Eustache crash resulted in what was initially thought to be a cracked rib and a sprained hip.
The older you get, the faster you were: a pretty common joke among members of the racing group known as the Vintage Road Racing Association, or VRRA. Not always true, though, as anyone racing with the VRRA crowd for the first time will quickly learn. Just because you have a few years’ experience doesn’t mean you’re slowing down any.