Sob Story!
Published: 08th May 2008
Author: Words by Steve Matthes Photo by Steve Cox
Long hours, missed meals, endless travelling and prima donna riders – life as a factory mechanic sure sucks…
With the Monster Energy AMA SX series winding down, the riders and teams are pretty much thinking about redemption and whether or not it will come in the form of the outdoor motocross series.
For the riders - unless you’re Chad Reed or Kevin Windham - the supercross series just really didn’t go your way and you need the outdoor season to go well for you so that nobody repos your Lambo and you can keep on living the good life.
As a mechanic for 12 years (five of those being for factory KTM and Yamaha) I hated this time of the season. You’re still travelling to the races and doing regular maintenance on your SX bike but now you have the task of building an outdoor machine and going testing during the week. Let me take you guys through what your average factory wrench goes through in a week of SX/MX…
Thursday - fly across the country (because at this point, the southern California races are done) and put your watch three hours early. The time thing is important here in a little bit. Elbow a little lady out of the way to get your bag that’s filled with parts that you are bringing to the race for stock in the semi - it only weighs 70lbs, no big deal. Take monorail from airport to rental car place, wait in line for your car, then walk to your car which is always as far away from the counter as humanly possible. Your arms are killing you from the bag of shocks and forks that you’re no doubt carrying. Get to your hotel and have a bit of supper there. After supper go outside and unload semi and strip your bike down to the frame and soak all your bolts and decide what you need to do tomorrow. Remember what I said about your watch? Well the time change makes it hard to fall to sleep and you eventually drift off around 3am…
Friday - …only to awaken just a few hours later to go and start building your motorcycle! With your body all whacked out with the time change, you stumble out to the truck and start assembling what you hope will be the winning bike the next night (very unlikely unless your rider’s first name is Chad and last name is Reed). As you build your bike this might be the most at peace that you’re at all week (not at the shop where people are bugging you and yelling at you for some dumb thing you did, not at the track where it’s always hectic), just you and your bike and all the free and new parts you need! As you throw things away that would make your local riding buddies sick, you make a note of what you need to do in the coming weeks to stay on schedule with everything. The day wraps up around the 10-hour mark with the wiring of the grips. At least that always ended up being the last thing I did on the bike.
Saturday - the day of the race and it’s a very, very busy 16-hour day with lots of changes to the bike when your rider, seeing himself well off the pace, declares his bike “unrideable” and you have to be the monkey to his ringmaster.
Sunday - your day off (if you count four hours of sleep, an early morning flight and another three-hour time change as a day off)! When you do get home you’re so beat from the night before that you just lie on the couch like a zombie from 28 Days Later.
Monday - go to the workshop and prepare your outdoor MX machine for testing on Tuesday with your rider. When you finish the three or four hours of prep and get all the parts together that you need for the next day’s testing, you now have to rebuild your brakes from the weekend, grease the linkage and keep up on your SX schedule. This is not so bad - only nine hours or so.
Tuesday - get up at the crack of dawn and get down to the race shop so that you can drive the test truck to some track that’s out in the middle of the desert. This track is so far out in the middle of nowhere that if your truck broke down it wouldn’t be long before the coyotes and mountain lions got you and somebody someday would find your skeleton with a fanny pack on. Your van is already loaded with everything you need and when you finish the drive you immediately unload everything because the rider is due at the track at 10am. So you wait and then wait some more because one thing I’ve learned is that the riders will pretty much show up when they want. In all my years of being a mechanic and testing, David Vuillemin is the only guy that always showed up at the planned time. So as you sit on the bumper and think about all the extra sleep you could’ve had, the rider rolls up in some sort of vehicle that’s worth more than you make in a year. They don’t drive to the track though - the wife, girlfriend, gear guy, man-friend drives while they get precious sleep.
They ride a little bit and you guys go through the day trying out all sorts of things that looked good on the dyno and on paper but in the end it’s all “unrideable” and the rider goes back to the settings that he has always liked. So after a day of accomplishing very little outside of the fact that you’re dirty, smelly and hungry (the rider ate his lunch while you worked on his bike, you never got a chance) you head back to the shop to see that the motor that you shipped back from the supercross arrived and now you have to go through it and ship it back tomorrow. You grab a can of Monster because you know it’s going to be a looooong night. This day usually ends up being 15 hours.
Wednesday - Another beautiful day of outdoor testing that begins at the butt crack of dawn and it doesn’t matter that you were at the shop rebuilding your motor until 11pm, the rider needs to get going on settings that will, inevitably, suck poo. So in the hot sun you go and you have your stop watches ready to figure out whether or not your settings actually work. This is really the only way to tell if your rider is enjoying your settings. The problem being is the track changes so fast and often that when you do make a change in the morning, the track is totally different by the afternoon.
All in all I hope one thing is clear here - you really have to love this sport to do it and all the mechanics should get their heads checked.