Why We Ride Page #3

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- I was 16.

- Fifteen or 16.

- Thirteen years old.

- Twelve.

Eleven years old.

- Eleven years old.

- Ten years old.

- Six or seven.

- Five years old.

Five. It was just

a little minibike.

Minibike. Minibike. Minibike.

Minibike. Minibike. Minibike.

My dad hit it lucky in Vegas

and bought my brother a car

and bought me a Whizzer.

- CZ 125.

- S90 Honda.

- Suzuki DS 80.

- YZ 80 Yamaha.

- ATC 70.

- CZ 250.

- PW50.

- It's called a Taco.

- Honda 50.

- A little scooter, it was called a Corgi.

We weren't rich or nothing,

so I built a minibike

out of a bicycle frame

and a lawnmower motor.

With a lawnmower engine,

Briggs & Stratton.

Back in the day you put the rope

on it and pull it.

I don't think it had a name,

I think somebody built it

in their garage.

We need to rename what we

called motorcycles back then.

They should have been renamed, you know,

"the things that we hid from our parents. "

When I was young, my dad didn't want me

to have anything to do with motorcycles.

They absolutely did not approve

of me riding a motorcycle.

- "That's for bad people. "

- OK... but I'm riding.

My mom didn't know

when I bought my first bike,

I kept it at my friend's house down

the street. That's such a cliche.

I've run into so many people

that could tell that same story.

We're in the St. Helene's

parking lot, thank God it was a church,

and, uh, that's where

I popped my first wheelie,

because I hadn't

learned the clutch yet.

And I panicked, got whiskey throttle,

next thing I knew, I took off.

Boom-bity boom-bity boom,

across the field.

How do you stop it,

how do you stop it?

And the first time I got on it they just told

me to take off, so I took off, hit a tree.

Went wide open into the chainlink

fence, wrapped all up in it.

And it was a house down there,

and we hit the corner of the house.

It had no brakes. The only way

we could figure out how to stop it

was to run it into my

dad's work truck.

So we didn't have it very long.

He took that away.

I think it's like trying to

learn how to play a violin.

It's just hideous and then

all of a sudden it's like,

"Oh, my God, I know how

to ride this thing now. "

I mean, I literally rode

it for about a minute and a half,

and I went, "OK,

I have to do that. "

The first time

I rode that little minibike,

I just felt like

I could do anything.

I was so excited to know that I

was going to ride my bike the next day,

and I still feel

that today, every day.

I just hope to God that I can

always have the sensation,

and I guess when I'm not, I'll be talking

and dreaming about it all the time.

I'll be taking a lot of naps

just so I can see it in my dreams.

I met Bret and I went home

that day and I said,

"Just to let you guys know,

I met my future husband. "

Sharing my

passion with the person that

I'm gonna spend the rest of my

life with, means the world to me.

I used to race out

of Willow Springs WSMC.

I was out there

minding my own business,

and then he asked me

out to dinner and I said no.

But she was really hungry,

so she went.

So I relented when I realized

I'd spent all my money on tires,

and I was like, "Well, at least

I'll get a meal out of this. "

I actually met my wife

at a race track.

I met her at, uh, at Little

Talladega Gran Prix Raceway.

We met at the snack stand,

she was working there,

serving hamburgers, and I ate

about 15 hamburgers that weekend.

I took my then girlfriend, now my

wife, up in the San Joaquin Valley.

We stopped at a little stand

to pick some cherries.

As I'm riding down my motorcycle,

she's biting the cherry,

pulling the pits out

and feeding them to me.

I'll still remember that

to this day. Uh...

It was just one of the most

romantic things we've ever done.

Motorcycling has

a very bad reputation.

When my grandpa

first got involved,

they'd pull up to restaurants,

they'd pull up to hotels,

and they wouldn't be allowed in.

You'd pull up on a bike and

they'd turn the sign around.

Pretty much you were

considered an outlaw.

It goes way back to, what was that

movie, The Wild One, with Marlon Brando,

when bikers were bad, you know. You wore

black leather and you took over the town,

and you ran the sheriff off,

and attacked the women.

They didn't like the motorcycles

there for a long time.

And, of course,

along come Honda.

There was

a great PR campaign

that Honda did at that time,

and it was,

"You meet the

nicest people on a Honda. "

It changed a lot

of the image back again.

And that kinda brought

it more into the mainstream,

suddenly it's the moms and

dads, the kids next door,

and the neighbor

down the street.

People just

started buying these things,

because they were accessible,

they didn't have to go and buy,

you know, a six-, seven-

800-pound motorcycle.

They were smaller,

they were lighter,

they were nicely designed.

They were damn cute.

It was a good move, I think

somebody at Yamaha was like,

"We shoulda went with

the nice people thing. "

Everybody could ride a Honda,

a little Honda.

God.

Almost everybody that learns to

ride was taught by their friend or neighbor,

you know, and whatever false

information, misinformation,

bad habits that friend or neighbor had

are passed on from learner to learner.

We come equipped with a certain

number of survival reactions.

We do something like put our

hands out to cushion a fall,

whereas if you roll,

you won't break your wrists.

There are about eight or nine of these

responses that we have to situations

that are just a little bit

out of our control.

Each and every one of these are contrary

to what you should be doing at that time.

The California Superbike School

is a running research project

on how to understand

and control a motorcycle.

Now it's expanded into

about 50 different areas,

where we can make corrections

on specific areas of skill

and control of the motorcycles.

Street riding is great,

but track riding is way better.

It's so much more fun because you don't

have all of the distractions, restrictions.

A student we had up

at Sears Point, up in Sonoma,

26 years he'd been riding,

ridden 1.2 million miles.

At the end of the day he said, "You know,

I thought I had 26 years of experience,

now I realize I had one year

of experience 26 times. "

It's so fulfilling, there is no

other job better than this.

Motorcycles are what taught me

everything about how things work.

Tearing down the motor

on my first Honda CL-90

and not being able to put it

back together.

I had a handful of cafe racers, none

of which really resonated with me

until I built my first Indian,

and that was a 1926 Indian that

I built with my grandfather.

You nurture it, you love it,

it grows, you develop it,

you restore it,

and then finally it's done.

It was a great experience to hang out with

your grandfather and work side by side with him.

We started collecting motorcycles about

the same time we started making wine.

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