The two riders fighting for first place in the photo on this page are not a pair of AMA pros going at it on the curves at Mid-Ohio or Laguna Seca. Believe it or not, they're just two average-OK, slightly above average-street riders settling a long-held grudge about who's the fastest wrist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And, as you can tell by the centerline snaking along the pavement, they're settling this score the old-school way, out on the road-only this street race is 100 percent legal. How'd they manage that?
It all started when a group of local sportbike riders started attending a popular vintage car race held in Pittsburgh each year at, of all places, the Schenley Park golf course. While racing high-performance vehicles in a golf course sounds about as goofy as running a 'Busa across a corn field (Biker Boyz-style special effects not withstanding), check this: Pittsburgh's naturally hilly topography means the roads crisscrossing the golf course are more twisted than Bobby Brown's brain-and just as tough to negotiate. The allure of these particular streets hasn't been lost on local speed freaks, including a young Keith Code of California Superbike School fame who admitted to, um, "cleaning out his carbs" in Schenley Park on occasion as a kid growing up in Pittsburgh. Ask anyone with a sportbike in the area, and they will say this is the place to come after-hours, with riders challenging each other to hot laps through the park almost nightly.
Anyway, back to the car race: A group of well-heeled vintage sports car enthusiasts shared the bikers' unique appreciation of the park and somehow convinced the city to close the course to traffic one weekend a year to allow vintage auto racing. That was nearly 20 years ago, and since then it's become one of the most popular public events in Pittsburgh, raising some serious cheddar for charity as well as drawing in the sort of crowds an NFL franchise would be proud to have.
Regular readers know that I'm a big proponent of taking our more spirited rides out of traffic and into a legal space. So four years ago I started lobbying race officials to allow a short sportbike exhibition during the Vintage Grand Prix. Hey, bikes rail through Schenley Park all the time anyway! So, as long as the streets are shut down that day, why not give us one slot each year when we can do it legally? After a few years of badgering them, the organizers, eager to attract a younger crowd, finally accepted our deal this year, and a few weeks later, a dozen or so of us found ourselves lined up on a starting grid alongside Ferraris, Benzes, Porsches and other exotics usually not seen outside of an episode of "MTV Cribs" taped in Jay Z's garage.
Crowds. Curves. Fast Bikes. No cops. Does it get any better than this?
Though a few guys showed up with full-blown track bikes, the rest of us made do by taking off our mirrors and taping over the headlights. We sat on the grid and tried not to smile too hard at the prospect of cutting a fast, legal line through a place where we'd flirted with lost licenses for years. The crowd was mostly composed of vintage racing fans, the type who considers a wicker picnic basket filled with wine and cheese part of their race kit. But when the bikes blew through the course at well over 100 mph, the response from these upright citizens was beyond anything a bunch of scruffy street riders could have imagined. The audience response was so overwhelmingly positive that we were invited back for next year's festivities. The organizers say the bikes were such a hit they'd like to see 30 or 40 riders take part in 2006. Could the Schenley Park Motorcycle Grand Prix turn into a stateside version of the Isle of Man TT race?
Speaking of racing, how did the grudge match mentioned at the beginning of this story turn out? Keith Reed (on the race-prepped number six GSX-R600) and Big Rich Lewis (on the GSX-R1000 streetbike) gave it all they had, bouncing relentlessly off the rev limiters as they raced past trees, stone walls and Jersey Barriers, with Reed just barely eking it out in the end. But both guys felt like winners afterward when they were congratulated by the crowd on their street-run grudge race and not hauled off to jail, as would have been the case on probably any other day in Schenley Park.