Simmons Racing

I've created a monster.

Last Christmas I bought a couple of old 4-wheelers (circa 1988), fixed them up and gave them to the boys.  They both claim it was the best Christmas ever.  It was something I had wanted to do for several years, thinking it would be fun for them to ride at their grandmother's place out in the country.  I was right...and wrong.

I did not see the racer hiding inside my oldest son's body, waiting to come out.  It started with a request to ride at the motocross track.  By his birthday in March, he wanted racing tires on his atv.  By summer, he needed a new atv and was willing to spend all his money to get it, even if it meant delaying getting his driver's license and a car.  Then he wanted to go ride with the racers during warm-up rounds.  Today, he's surfing the internet for any quad race in the state of Texas and checking my calendar for openings.

I am now, apparently, the very shade-tree mechanic for Simmons Racing.

Jacob comes at all of this very naturally.  My dad was a drag racer when I was a kid.  I can still remember waking up before sunrise on race days and trying to get my parents out of bed so we could drive to the track. One of my favorite records was called "sounds of the drags."  I actually sat there and listened to the sounds of cars drag racing...and liked it.  But I never raced.  Like so many other racers, I suspect, my dad became a spectator as the demands of a family took away all the discretionary money and time.  But the love of racing, and cool cars, and working on cars, it all stayed with me.  And I'm afraid I've passed the bug on to my kids.  I wish I'd picked up more of my dad's mechanic skills.  The atvs are much simpler than cars, so they fit my mechanic's abilities, and both Jacob and I are learning as we go.

We're David among Goliaths at the track.  We arrive with our old beaters on a borrowed lowboy trailer, to be greeted by custom toy haulers carrying race shop-built quads.  We couldn't even afford the clothing, but got lucky one day and found motocross pants and jerseys on closeout.  We buy used spare parts off of craigslist and ebay.  We have a few hundred dollars invested in a rich man's game, where tens of thousands can be spent without flinching.  To me, that's the beauty of it: figuring out how to compete with someone else's checkbook, not just his quad.  Jacob is learning about budgets as well as racing.  He's figuring out how to improvise and strategize, not just spend and ride.

Last night I spent a couple of hours with him in the garage, pulling the clutch plates out of a '92 Suzuki LT250r that will become his race quad in a couple of weeks.  He loved it.  Truth be told, so did I.  I watched him figure out how the clutch works, that the drivetrain engages as the friction between the plates causes them to stick together.  We found that several of the plates were permanently stuck together, which was why the quad lurched into gear instead of steadily engaging.  And we spent two hours together, just the two of us.