Each year on Father’s Day weekend tens of thousands of motorcyclists head for the wooded hamlet of Loudon, New Hampshire, their machines locked on to a homing device buried under a traditional tribal ritual site approximately one hour north of Boston, Mass. The effects of the wettest June on record didn't seem to dent the enthusiasm of the crowd track, estimated to be 39,000. They came to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the oldest motorcycle race in America, the Loudon Classic.
This year saw six AMA National Road Racing Series events attract more than 150 racers competing for $119,000 in prize money. New Englanders get only one chance a year to see Factory Superbke Teams from Honda, Ducati, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Yamaha, and Harley-Davidson, and I’m one of the guys who uses Father’s Day as an excuse to get there.
There are really two motorcycle constellations coexisting on the Loudon galaxy: the Weirs Beach scene and the track itself some 20 miles south in the tiny town of Loudon. In the past, Loudon’s reputation was clouded by the outrageous and sometimes destructive party biker element that made Weirs Beach infamous, and nearly extinct. In 1965, with the local police ordered out of town, the National Guard lockstepped in to regain control of Arcade Alley , where they used rock salt packed shotguns to rid the streets of the “one percenters” as they were called in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The Man has been in control ever since then, with intensive police patrols and cruiser presence covering the countryside and intervening like crazy to keep tempers cool. Mostly.
On Sat, June 20, 1998, history repeated itself at Weirs Beach as thirty-five State police limped away from another rumble with 20 Hells Angels with fractured skulls, concussions, and bruised riot-wear egos. The Angels sported colors from as far away as California. In a an article appearing the next day in the New Hampshire Sunday News , State Police Capt. Mark Furlone stated," When you have people in a compact area like that, alcohol consumption and warm weather, you have the potential for an explosive situation". Furlone concluded, "For a Friday night, it was slower than normal".
With a record setting attendance of three hundred thousand potential cash cows itching to unload their hard-earned greenbacks on any and all local thirst quenching establishments, a few punches, kicks, and thumps were nothing that an individual bail charge of $500,000 couldn't fix.
Motorcycle Week organizer Charlie St. Clair gave the bad press the old one-two punch with this classic damage control respone, “How people are going to react to this? I don’t know. How do they take any violence that happens? Violence happens every day of the week all over the United States. This has nothing to do with Motorcycle Week”.

I have been riding to the track on Father's Day some fifteen years to attend the motorcycle races, and decided to swing by the Beach this year. It was stinking humid hot and after a two hour crawl glued into a traffic jam that made Boston rush hour as mild as Ivory soap, it may well be another 35 years before I go back. The vendors didn’t get much cash out of me Saturday, but I gladly dug deep for a dollar-fifty twelve ounce bottle of water. Shutting down the engine on my air and oil cooled BMW and coasting down the hills and duck paddling the straights help keep the motor from frying, but for what? Mostly to get out of there. What's there? Motorcycles, tens of thousands of them. All the usual suspects in the world of motorcyle aftermarket vendors: Corbin, Accel, Harley-Davidson, Manny’s Leathers and much more. This year saw the inaguration of the Hooter girls up from Boston waving you into their beer tent. Mostly it was long lines of scraggly looking bretheren hoping to score on suitcases of beer, and everyone looking for a place to land with No Vacancy and No Parking signs stretching to infinity.
If you had a motel reservation (preferably with a pool) and enjoyed some fried dough with your brew of choice and didn’t have anything much planned for the next 36 hours it might have made a memorable weekend.
I did find a patch of sand that looked like I could fit my bike in to pull over and gawk.
“Cost you five dollars to park here, buddy.”
“Um, I was just leaving”.

The cool, serene Credentials building at New Hampshire International Speedway late that blistering Saturday afternoon was my ticket back to the land of the living. I picked up my media pass, was whisked through the gate and cruised down through the flooded tunnel that led to the infield. At the Media building, my body quickly settled into the orderly, air conditioned comfort of a space surrounded by closed circuit television coverage of the races, with clear turn-by turn announcement of the action. Me and my palmtop computer parked by the free soda and juice machine.

At NHIS, your twenty-five dollar ticket gets you a chairback seat in the 75,000 person grandstands high above the 1.63 mile road course. The track has been rebuilt by the Robert Bahre family over the past several years and boasts a 65 foot wide, 1500 feet long straightaway . Turn one is banked 12 degrees and is the scene of sliding rear wheels and dragging knees as the racers haul their machines down to the left anticipating another quick turn to the right as they set themselves up for the the deep bowl and hilled straight on the back side of the course.
Featured events for Saturday were a couple of heat races for the 250 two stroke machines, the Formula Xtreme 24 lap Final and the 750 Suspersport 24 lap Final. The wet conditions resulted in cancelling the second qualifying run of the Superbikes. Sidecar racing was moved up to the afternoon slot to help dry out the track.
The Pirelli Formula Xtreme Series is the newest class, featuring big bore motorcycles such as Suzuki GSXR1100, Honda CBR900, Kawasaki ZX-9, Yamamha YZF1100, and other similar models. This class is restricted to motorcycles which are produced for street use and available in the US through retail dealers. Engine modifications are allowed and slick tires may also be used. These high horsepower bikes are built for more wide open tracks than the Loudon configuration, with drivers here making constant adjustments to keep the awesome power under control.
Pole-sitter Eric Bostrom won the Formula Xtreme by over 8 seconds, with Tray Batey and Tripp Nobles III running just behind him. Bostrom and Nobles ran Hondas with Batey on a Suzuki.
Jason Pridmore won the 750 Supersport final on Saturday afternoon. With Suzuki taking the top 12 spots in the race, Kawasaki and Honda salesmen are going to have a lot of expaining to do to any potential customer who saw what I saw of the Suzuki domination that afternoon.
Pridmore had this to say after the race, “I want to thank the HyperCycle Crew. This is a team effort. Having Nicky get in there in third is really good for the team. All the guys have been riding well. There’s a lot of competition. I’ve got the best bike out there and I just want to keep on winning. Thanks to the fans for sticking around. My thoughts are with Miguel (Duhamel), Thomas (Wilson) and Brett (Metzger). I hope they have a speedy recovery”.
Headlines in the Sunday newspaper sport sections the next morning featured some interviews that were not a part of any official press releases from NHIS that I received. Some of the top riders, angry about Duhamel's turn one Friday practice crash plus two additional turn 1 crashes, threatened to boycott tracks such as NHIS where concrete walls sit close to the racing action. Team Suzuki’s Matthew Mladin and Aaron Yates both were talking future boycott. NHIS places banks of used tires in front of the concrete walls that contain the apex of outside turns. Maybe crashing is an occuupational hazard that has something to do with putting 160 horsepower in a 350 pound machine. But a flying mass of speeding motocycle can part those clumps of rubber fairly easily, and the combination of slippery conditions and seriously injured racers would have any one look for increased rider safety options. It should be relatively easy to commandeer a couple of loads of hay bales from one of the local dairy farmers, but the wettest June on record may not have produced any local organic crash barriers. I do have a hundred bales of hay that should be coming off my hayfield later this summer, if the track wants to head over to Maine for a load.
At ten thirty on Sunday morning, the stands were still empty .There were thickening clouds, and that pesky Weather Channel warned of deluge rainfall reruns. Fans in the know made for the one place in the grandstands where the rain won't touch them- the top ten rows of seats beneath overhang of the VIP press box 6 stories above the track. But for now, SPF 30 in a tube is the only thing standing between healthy skin and permanent blotch sunburn tatoos.
By 1:30 PM, the stands were less than a third full, with the true motorcycle brethren laying hope to the invocation of the race chaplain, "Good Lord, deliver us from boredom". Amen.

A blind man can tell when the 250 Elf Racing Fuels Grand Prix is running. The unmistakable high pitched whine of the ultra high revving 250 race machines is aurally unique. This year saw Roland Sands take the number one slot on the Performance Machine Yamaha, with the legendary Kenny Roberts’ son Kurtis
Number Two on his Erion Racing honda, and crowd favorite Randy Renfrow on the Erion Honda’s second machine running number three.
Kurtis had some interesting comments after the race. “We’re certainly getting the Honda to work good. Everybody on the team has worked hard on the bike. I’ve got my own riding style of hanging off the bike. Some people don’t seem to like it but it’s the only way I can seem to get the bike hooked up-- expecially on the uphill section”.
“I had a harder tire compound on the rear, maybe it was too hard. It took a couple of laps to get past Renfrow. It seemed that everytime I closed in on the front two that traffic would hold me up. That, and having Chuck Sorensen highside in front of me, didn’t help my charge. I thought I had a chance at Roland, but he got by the traffic and I couldn’t as quickly”.
AWKWARD BELOW
The double compound fracture of his left leg sustained in an incident during Superbike Timed Qualifying on Friday by current MBNA Superbike Tour points leader Miguel Duhamel effectively eliminated him from the title chase. Superbike is the headliner class in AMA motorcycle road racing. These bikes are motorcycles that are modified versions of four-stroke machines originally made for street use. These monsters may look like yours on the outside (if you overlook the dozens of sponsor decals), but on the inside they have highly modified tuning and suspension modifications. The class is primarily made of 750cc four cylinder machines, with rules also allowing twin cylinder units up to 1000cc engine displacement. The final race for these machines covers 100 kilometers in length.
The machines are either getting faster, the riders more fearless and talented, or a combination of both. The entire Superbike front row of Mathew Mladin, Ben Bostrom, Aaron Yates, and Chandler put up practice times that were faster than Doug Chandler’s year-old track record.
Final results were Aaron Yates in first on a Suzuki 750, Jamie Hacking in second on a Yamaha 750 and Anthony Gobert on a Ducati 996 in third place. Doug Chandler has been running in third place pushing Hacking’s second pace position right up to his lap 38 turn one skid that dropped him to 9th place.

Chandler and his Muzzy Kawasaki won the 600 SuperSport Final, with Aaron Yates in second on the Yoshimura Suzuki and Ben Bostrom’s Honda in third.
Yates had a big day. After the race, he gave the faithful the gospel, “I like to come here because the fans are great. I was riding as hard as I could. It seemed like I almost crashed a number of times on every lap. I pushed it really hard chasing Ben (Bostrom). I finally tried to stick it under Ben (in turn 12) and almost lost the front end. Once I got by (Ben), I tried to get Doug as hard as I could. Finally, there was nothing I could do. I tried to stay close, but he got through traffic at the right time better than I did.”
At the end of the day, with the stands empty, I intercepted Aaron Yates, weary but still accessible. The light at the end of the day was through clearing skies , and the shadows in the pits finally brought out the colors that had been dull in the ovecast haze and spit. I congratulated Aaron on his success here in New England, and he responded by signing my press pass. Below his name was some form of squiggle, that I think looks like what the Chinese character for speed would look like. Speed and courage. It’s what the fans here in this corner of the US return for every Father’s Day weekend. YAY,BON! GREAT WORK!