Westbank Speed - Eastbank Blood

Good turnout for the Westbank Speed Festival

It's been a few weeks since I've logged anything here, so I'll be doing a bit of catch-up ... in reverse. Some months ago Michelle Ginsburg and John Crosby called to see if the club might be interested in putting on a race at the NOLA Motorsports Park.

Michelle has raced on and off for at least a couple of decades and John races cars and is somehow connected with the Motorsports Park over on the westbank, which is what everyone in New Orleans calls the "other" side of the river, which is actually mainly to the south. So one day Mignon and I went over there to meet up with John and Michelle to see what might or might not be feasible. We had done a few informal training type races there a fairly long time ago, but they were done on weekday evenings and the traffic difficulties involved in getting over there after work proved to be their undoing. Since then, the park has been somewhat improved and better marketed, and seems to get a fair amount of use. It isn't just some small local track. This is a full-fledged multi-million dollar facility with multiple course options, the shortest of which is 1.8 miles.

So we checked out the facilities and talked it over, and I made up a rough budget that included the per-rider track fee, USAC insurance fee, LAMBRA per-rider fee, officiating costs, etc., and concluded that we might possibly break even if we could generate at least $1,500 in cash sponsorship. With a typical local-level entry fee of around $35, the club would net $9 per rider, not including reduced entries to club members, lower fees for a couple of categories, etc., to help cover a reasonable prizelist and related expenses.

Car Trophy!

Frankly, I thought we wouldn't be able to do it, but on the other hand we have a recently growing group of riders on the westbank, a number of whom own businesses there and have been sponsoring their own clubs. So we put the word out, and right away Joe Amadee offered to shake the bushes over there. By mid-February we had the necessary sponsorship in hand, all from westbank businesses, and the event was officially a "go" for April 27, the only day we could get the track because they don't run anything on it that day because of the nearby Zurich Golf Classic and the noise issue. Never mind that we were already scheduled to put on the LAMBRA Time Trial championship the following week, and had barely scratched the surface for sponsorship for the June Tour de Louisiane, and by "we" I mean Mignon, Pat, Christian, and me. Joe kicked in a couple hundred extra so that I could get ten big trophies with cars on top for the winners, and we started promoting the Westbank Speed Festival at NOLA Motorsports Park as best we could. By Wednesday of last week I knew we would have a good turnout. The weather was going to be great, riders were anxiously talking about it, and pre-registrations were starting to come in. By the time pre-reg closed on Friday night we had 80-something riders registered, with many of them signed up for more than one of the overlapping-category races.

We got out to the track on Sunday around 7 am to set up and were surprised to find that the track crew had already placed pylons marking off the course for us, which saved us a lot of time. We had a lot of race-day registrations too, so we ended up with 126 riders registered for 172 races. The first race was the Cat. 4/5 race with 58 riders on the line, which was probably the biggest field we've seen for anything in a while. Anyway, the races went off great despite a few crashes, and everyone really enjoyed the course and venue that included a restaurant, go-cart racing, and real bathrooms. John, Michelle, and Joe deserve a ton of credit because the race would not have happened without them. Mignon, Pat and Christian did a lot of legwork on race day and also spearheaded pre-race promotion. Ricky Dunn came down to officiate, and along with Michelle, and thanks to the long course that minimized lapped riders, results were fast and accurate and everything stayed right on schedule. I was pretty exhausted by the time I got home, unloaded everything, cleaned up and posted results, etc. I'd brought my bike to the race but the Masters race was immediately after the big Cat. 4/5 race and I probably wouldn't have had enough warm-up time, if any, anyway.

Matt hit hard on Wednesday morning

The WeMoRi the Wednesday prior to the race had a little excitement when Matt and a city bus tried to concurrently occupy the same space on Wisner Blvd. and Matt, who was on his TT bike, went down pretty hard when the bus closed the door on him and he ran out of road. As usual, I had ridden out to the WeMoRi and since I was running a couple of minutes early I turned right on Lakeshore Drive and went over the Bayou St. John bridge, planning to loop around the traffic circle. Coming over the top of the bridge I saw two riders, who turned out to be Matt and Rob, flying by the other way, so fearing that the pack was right on their heels I went around the traffic circle backwards and right back over the bridge, fully expecting to be swallowed up by the group at any moment. That moment, however, didn't come until I was nearly to Marconi. Matt and Rob must have been at least a minute ahead, maybe more. So anyway, I get into the group and suffer at the back for a while as I adjust to the abrupt increase in effort level as we make the right turn onto Wisner and the pace starts to ramp up again. We come through the light at Elysian Fields and there's Matt on the grass with his bike still in the street and Rob hovering over him. Most of the group stopped, of course, and someone took off to go get a car because it was clear that Matt wouldn't be riding home that day. He had gone right over the bars on his TT bike, whacked his helmeted forehead on the concrete enough to suffer a concussion, and landed on his right shoulder and back. Could've been worse, I guess, but he was obviously a little disoriented and definitely in a lot of pain. (He showed up on his bike the following Sunday during the Giro Ride cool-down.)

New Tatoo

My own injuries from the crash a few weeks ago are all pretty much healed up, and I never lost much riding time at all, although I now have a tatoo on my left kneecap from three teeth of Keith's chainring as I road-surfed on top of his bike. I never could get all of the grease out of the wounds without doing a lot of painful additional tissue damage. The knee still  hurts a little bit, but that seems to be improving, albeit slowly. Otherwise, it's been a lot of routine levee rides with Giro Rides on the weekend and the  usual commute to and from work. The next opportunity for me to race will be in a couple of weeks, again on the westbank, at the Federal City criterium. That may be complicated by some officiating duties and also the fact that Danielle's graduation ceremony is the week before and she will be leaving that afternoon and will definitely need a ride to the airport, so basically it's all a bit up in the air at the moment. Situation normal.....