Sliding Stateside: AMA Flat Track

Holy cow it is hot. The air con in our clapped-out six-litre Dodge Shitbox is about as effective as an ice cube in an oven and all winding down the windows does is give us an 80mph blast of sticky air. So we sweat it out thankful for our chilly bin full of 18 different types of coke (decaff, recaff, diet, cherry, berry, or good 'ole original anyone?).

And as one freeway gives way to another we slide south from Cuyahoga Falls (middle Ohio, middle of nowhere) to Thornville (Southern Ohio, slap bang middle of nowhere) and our final destination of the Honda Hills flat track circuit where we're hooking up with Larry Pegram and Marc Williams, two of America's hottest flat track riders.

The track itself turns out to be an unspectacular looking half-mile dirt oval which thanks to the unrelenting heat has a consistency better suited to a tropical beach than a motorcycle racing circuit as far as I can tell, but what would I know? This is my first face-to-face encounter with the world of flat tracking.

Flat tracking comes straight out of the classic American motorsport mould. It's simple (think drag racing), you can see the whole circuit from one grandstand (think NASCAR), and the bikes used are perfect for the job but not always the most technically advanced on the planet (think tractor pulling).

But beneath the simple formula (hack anti-clockwise around a dirt oval, first one over the line at the end of x laps wins), lies the need for a shedload of skill and balls the size of spacehoppers. After all, riding a bike sideways at 70mph on dirt is hard enough, but when you're doing it with minimal run-off and millimetres from 15 other blokes all after the same apex, you'd best have your wits about you. Oh, and did I mention the track changes with every lap as it wears, packs down, picks up rubber on the racing line and, at times, breaks up altogether under the constant pounding of bucking, slewing bikes? Because it does, so you're never guaranteed grip in the same spot every lap.

And for any of you still thinking this is just another American oddball sport, check out the list of stateside riders who started out on the dirt before storming GPs and superbikes. It includes four-time 500GP champ Eddie Lawson, three times 500GP champ Wayne Rainey, GP demigod Randy Mamola, American superbike legend Bubba Shobert, both Ben and Eric Bostrom, and current AMA upstart, Nicky Hayden to name just a few.

The man who started this trend for making the leap onto the world stage was a certain Kenny Roberts Sr who cut his teeth sliding around the USA's countless ovals before graduating to GPs, where he used all he'd learned about sliding a flat tracker at speed on the dirt to bring rear-wheel steering to GPs and took the first of his three World Championships. Suddenly everyone who was anyone needed to be able to do the same to stand a chance of being anywhere near the podium and a new era of riding had begun.

Kenny Sr's then virgin trail is well blazed these days as freckle-faced American kids fall out of their prams onto dirt bikes at the local flat track before they can walk, graduate to winning at local, state and finally national level all the while learning every nuance of sliding a bike perfectly while racing inches from the rest of the pack. With this lot behind them they make the switch to tarmac and superbikes in the AMA, and from here - potentially - the world's their ostrich. Sounds simple, and it is. If you've got the drive, hunger and talent for it that is...