Ten days ago I didn’t have a team for the Legion SBK endurance race. I ended up on the podium anyway.
That’s not really a brag, it’s just how endurance racing works sometimes. On August 8th I raced at Legion SBK, the event I sponsor as part of my Legion Track Days partnership, my logo on their Audi R8 safety car and on the trophies handed out that day. My friends Orkun Krand and Giovanni Cruz, racing as Gotham City Cycles, won the featherweight 2-hour outright that morning, and I was on their pit crew. Then in the afternoon, my team, Procrasta-Racing, put together at the practice session the Friday before, finished third overall in the 4-hour and won our class.
The day started with the featherweight 2-hour, and I was pitting for Orkun Krand and Giovanni Cruz, racing as Gotham City Cycles (named after Gio’s dog, Batman) on Orkun’s Ninja 500. Tim May-Ellis and I worked their pits.
They qualified second and had a strong Le Mans start. For the first hour it was really just them and one other team trading the lead back and forth, first and second swapping hands over and over. A red flag around the one-hour mark bunched the field back up, and we timed their rider swap for about 50 minutes to go, bringing Orkun in and sending Gio out to finish. First and second were separated by two seconds after two hours of racing and multiple bike swaps, and Gio held the position through a couple of laps of real side-by-side racing at the end to take the win.
With that win still fresh, it was time for the 4-hour. I’d posted in the local racing Facebook group looking for a team. So had Erik Maxwell. We met up at Friday practice hoping to find enough riders to field an entry. Ryan Breckenridge, a fast rider who’d come up from Arizona planning to race the enduro solo, decided he’d rather do it as a team. That was the whole roster. Three guys who met the day before, registered the night before, and had never turned a wheel together.
The plan was simple: Ryan starts, since he’s the fastest, then we rotate on 30 to 40 minute stints based on how everyone’s feeling.
Legion SBK runs a Le Mans start, which is exactly as fun as it sounds, riders sprinting to their bikes across the grid. Ryan went from 10th to 1st through turn one. He was flying for two laps before signaling he was coming in.
I wasn’t even suited up yet. Erik had run to race control about a transponder issue, and I scrambled into my gear as Ryan pulled in with his shift lever hanging off the bike and the engine running hot. I jumped on my bike and did about 40 minutes while the crew, Ryan’s family and his tech guy Jeremy, worked on his bike in the pits. Erik went out next for another 40-minute stint. By the time he came back in, they’d gotten Ryan’s bike running again, so Ryan went back out, laid down five fast laps, then signaled again. Fuel flow problem this time.
I went back out. They kept working on Ryan’s bike. Erik went out again. Eventually we decided Ryan’s bike wasn’t going to hold up, so the plan became: I ride another stint, then Ryan finishes the race on Erik’s bike. We wanted to leave him about 35 minutes to close it out. The pit crew signaled the swap by opening an umbrella as I came past on the front straight. I brought it in, and Ryan went out on Erik’s bike, a litre bike he’d never ridden before, after spending the whole race on his own 600, for the final stretch.
All those bike changes cost us track position. We’d been running first or second overall for stretches early on, but by the time Ryan went out for the last time we’d slipped to fourth. On a bike that wasn’t his, that he’d never turned a lap on, he laid down 35 straight minutes of fast, clean laps and pulled us from fourth to third overall by the checkered flag. Class win, third overall, and Ryan closed it out on a machine he’d sat on for the first time with 35 minutes left in a 4-hour race.
I sponsor Legion SBK because I believe in what track days and events like this do for rider skill and safety, not just because it’s good marketing. But days like this are also a reminder of what I love about this sport. A normal track day is fairly solo, you and maybe your pit crew, everyone doing their own thing. Endurance racing is different. Teams are bigger, you end up making friends fast, I’d never turned a wheel alongside Erik or Ryan before that Friday. Everyone out there is helping everyone else, other teams’ crews pitching in when a bike’s in trouble that isn’t even theirs. It was 95 degrees on track that day. Endurance racing is a grueling thing to just finish, let alone win, and that shared struggle is what pulls a paddock full of strangers together.
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