Usually, one of my favorite parts of my work is riding to a weekend of MotoAmerica racing, covering the races for RevZilla, and riding home. I did that this past weekend, the first opportunity of 2020 in the pandemic-delayed season, but it was not like any other race weekend I’ve experienced. In fact, it was a surreal experience that left me feeling unsettled on the entire 500-mile ride home. And beyond.
MotoAmerica was the first professional motorcycle racing series to get back on track, beating Monster Energy Supercross by a day, and it was able to do that by holding a race weekend at Road America with no fans in attendance. Even with only race teams, MotoAmerica officials, track workers and a TV crew on the grounds, there were still many precautions in place to try to prevent the potential for spreading the coronavirus. Everyone had to fill out a form in advance confirming they had no symptoms and everyone’s temperature was checked as they came into the track. TV reporters kept social distancing while conducting interviews and race teams were strongly encouraged not to mingle outside their own groups. Face masks were required in the pits, where social distancing is hard to maintain, and were encouraged elsewhere, as appropriate.
Then there were the empty hillsides and bleachers. On a typical year, Road America, about 50 miles north of Milwaukee in the heart of the Midwest, a region that has been a center of motorcycling in the United States since the invention of the internal combustion engine, draws one of the largest crowds of the year. The motorcycle parking area is filled with an impressive diversity of motorcycles. Hillsides and bleachers fill up and lines form for the local brats. (A Johnsonville facility is just a few miles from the track.)
This hillside would be full of fans, any other year.
But not this year. Race bikes roared through the four-mile course, past empty hillsides and through quiet woods and the occasional lonely TV camera operator. And that was all.
Racing while the world’s on fire
And yet that wasn’t the strangest part, at least not for me.
I rode to Wisconsin, the first trip on my new COVID-era sport-tourer, through showers on Thursday, but Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the track were beautiful, the best of early summer in Wisconsin with temperatures in the 60s and full-blast sunshine. Since there were no fans, everyone inside the 640-acre facility was there to do a job. Racers and team members are like any other professional athletes. They don’t make it to this level without single-minded devotion. Everyone was focused on a task, happy to be back to racing after months of uncertainty about when that would happen, but serious about getting the job done and competing.
Cameron Beaubier had no difficulty maintaining a safe social distance from his competitors as he won both HONOS Superbike races at one of his favorite tracks. See my articles at RevZilla to hear what people had to say about racing with no fans or you want to know what happened on track. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
Meanwhile, 300 miles away in Minneapolis and in dozens of other cities around the country, people were protesting, police were alternately kneeling in empathy or assaulting demonstrators with tear gas, while the inciter in chief stewed in his bunker in Washington, showing no empathy and vowing greater force. And there we were, in the glorious artificial bubble of a race track on a sunny, Wisconsin weekend in the countryside, protected (as much as possible) from the virus and insulated (to an unsettling extent) from all that was happening in the world beyond the fences.
Never before has the work I so enjoy made me feel so disconnected from the world. Oh, sure, there were a few conversations about the pandemic that displayed the full range of reactions. The man recounting how he and his girlfriend were laid low by the virus and anyone who didn’t take it seriously was a fool. One man wearing a mask constantly, a woman wearing a mask but instantly taking it off when she saw a television camera pointed at her. A man talking about moving to Texas because he was so fed up with local and state authorities issuing restrictions.
There was no talk of the disturbances roiling away, at least none I heard. And to a degree, I understand that. Everyone was there to do a job and time spent talking about current affairs, even momentous ones, is time away from the work at hand. In the highly competitive world of racing, minutes spent on anything extraneous are minutes lost.
The podium ceremonies were far from typical at Road America. Racers kept a social distance (or were supposed to, though some forgot). No team members crowded around for celebrations, no champagne was sprayed and no “trophy girls” posed for the cameras. Photo by Brian J. Nelson.
Then there’s the issue of the whiteness of the sport itself. While the MotoAmerica field has a fair number of foreign competitors, for a national series, and a Mexican and a Salvadoran rider were among those hoisting trophies, there are few black faces in the paddock and none who are riders. (And when have you ever seen a black “umbrella girl” on the grid?) It’s something nobody talks about, even though it’s mainly what people are talking about everywhere else.
Maybe everyone was just doing what they had to do to get through the weekend, to get back to racing, to keep from going under and stay in business, to feed the obsession behind the passion. But it sure felt surreal. And not like any other weekend of racing I’ve ever known.
