First, a note to the NBL. They should do up a bunch of T-shirts that says “I survived South Park 2006”. Yeah, it was that crazy.
I raced Friday night and yesterday. When I got there Friday my first thought was “Holy Sh*t, you gotta be kidding me”. My next thought was “and we bitched about the dubs at CJ?”. Finally, I thought “it’s time to retire (again)”.
Everything Ant wrote is 100% true, but you had to be there. Me and Chris Gulich were watching the Pros before staging for cruiser motos in the first round, and we just couldn’t believe what we witnessed. First, we saw Bill Madden’s wreck. South Park has a 30(?) foot gap pro section and I guess Bill cased his front tire and he went down in such a crumpled mess, it was just plain ugly to watch. He was unconscious for at least 10 minutes. His bike resembled one of those fold up bikes, when they are folded up.
Then a couple motos later, in A pro, the whole moto was just full out carnage. Going over the step into turn one, one pro lost control, and Jason Carnes just stayed out of that wreck as the guy bit hard. In the next turn, two pros hit the step into the turn, and as soon as you saw them take off, you knew they were going down in flames as they caught each other and went sideways, and Carnes couldn’t escape that one, and got sucked into the wreck. So the guy who got around all this comes out of turn 2, but not at full throttle, but because he’s a pro, has to hit the pro section, and 2/3 across, bails out and slams his body right on top of the landing jump. It was so ugly to watch that both me & Chris turned our heads at the sight of it. Yeah, he left on a stretcher too.
We saw at least two to three bikes get launched (no clips of course), and least 5 riders I saw get hurt in practice and had to miss the race (including Maninno). I was told that 8 ambulances pulled out of there yesterday plus I saw the two med-vac helicopter.
Rumor had it that the sheriff’s officer in charge got the phone with someone and then the announcer confirmed it as they were fixing the monster dubs in the second straight after the first round. A high ranking city official told Bob T. do something to reduce the wrecks or we are shutting you down. So, they went two motos (except UCI) and worked on those dubs.
Still, I saw at least one more prominent girl racer got out on a stretcher in the mains, along with several spectacular crashes. Still, there were some ballsy kids, as far down as 13 expert, who used that pro section to qualify in the semi’s. There were several crowd pleasing jumps that put people into qualifying position and drew ooh’s and aah’s and applause.
Oh, and how did I do? 7th in 35 Novice, but only because someone wrecked me in the main after I ran 2nd in motos. Now I gotta go rehab a shoulder. Ouch.
But, I camped and hung out with Chris Gulich, Legend and Lisa, Haller, Bellavista, the Tidey’s and some dude named Adam, and we had an awesome time. Thanks guys!