A whole bunch of fast people come from Ohio, and I'm convinced this place has a lot to do with that. Mid Ohio Sports Car Course is a legendary piece of the Ohio speed puzzle, and entire family legacies have been built on these grounds on two wheels and four. I've been to this track for NASCAR, IndyCar, IMSA, Grand Am, Moto America, and vintage events, and I've taken the Mid Ohio School, but I think the AMA Vintage Days for motorcycle folks might be the single best event at any track in the U.S. All
of those other professional series might have better on-track action, but AMA Vintage Days really brings the heat when it comes to off-track attractions.
There's dirt competition in the form of a motocross track and a hare scramble through the woods, the even has a concours judged bike show, an on-the-hour wall of death show, maybe the biggest motorcycle swap meet this side of the Mississippi, a burnout competition, barrel-to-barrel races, and several hours of drunken debauchery for the hooligans (like me) who camp at the track for the weekend. Even when the Midwest weather patterns hit you with 90 degree heat, corn sweat humidity, and half a dozen thunderstorms in a three-day weekend, tens of thousands of people take the opportunity to go have fun in the mud. These two-wheeled folks are resilient.
Without a doubt this was the dirtiest, wettest, scumbaggiest weekend I've ever spent at a race track, and I'm positive I need to come back next year.
Full Disclosure: I have accepted full-time employment at Land Moto as the company's Sales Director. I attended this event in an official capacity, and Land paid for my camping pass, provided me with six demo bikes to ride around for the weekend, and I slept in the roof top tent on the company's Mercedes Sprinter van. None of this changes my opinion of the event, I would have loved it regardless.
Read more: These Are The Cars Our Readers Wish Would Depreciate Faster
An Ode To The Wall Of Death
I have a lot more to say about the other stuff, but the Wall of Death was easily my favorite attraction of the weekend. A trio of travelling riders lock themselves in a wooden cask with a quartet of gasoline-burning machines and then rip them around the walls for 20 minutes to earn the tips of showgoers. There's an old-school carnival barker sideshow attitude here that feels straight out of post-industrialization America. Everything in this pop-up tent feels intentionally rickety and vintage, surely as part of the show.
As a rider roars by on his pre-war Indian the wall shakes, and with it the spectator viewing platform sways. Metal might be a better building material for stability, but wood has character. These folks know exactly what they're doing because they do it 10 times a day every weekend. These people are throwback showmen, they know how to elicit a crowd response, they know what tricks to perform to get the biggest tips, and they've crafted it over years of experience into a formula. If they had a snake oil for sale, I'm sure half the crowd would have bought a bottle. It's intoxicating from the word go.
This is among the most entertaining 20-minute shows you can get for your one-to-five dollar tip outside of a strip club.
The Swap
The AMA Vintage Days swap meet consists of hundreds of vendors over several acres of verdant rolling hills hawking everything from a $500 track bike (which I bought) to deep five-figure custom contraptions (which I did not buy), plus entire junkyards worth of parts, an entire e-Bay Motors worth of accessories, and all kinds of stuff that might make your significant other roll their eyes when you pull it into the driveway. It took me about four hours on Saturday morning to explore the entirety of the swap meet, and while I wanted to walk away with at least a dozen bikes, I managed to restrain myself and only buy one. I also picked up a nice keychain for my Ducati and a spare pigtail for my CTEK battery tender. Deals abound, especially for those willing to lowball.
This stretched Kawasaki had a pair of inline fours running in tandem and the seller was asking a robust $50,000 for the experience. Somehow I managed to walk away without so much as an offer. Would you ride it?
I wanted to haul this gorgeous Honda Elsinore home with me for $7,000 (it seems like everything was $7,000 this weekend), but just couldn't come up with an excuse for why I'd need to own it. I have nowhere nearby to ride it, nowhere to keep it nice, and very little experience with off-road riding, so I left it behind for someone else.
Conclusion
After a weekend camping in the mud, I think I've finally found the one way in which motorcycling mixes with day drinking. I went to bed each night hearing the staccato cacophony of two-smokers braaping around, and woke each morning to a scad of scooters and dirt bikes trundling off in search of a shower and a cup of coffee. There was so much to do and so much to see that you had to get started early, making sleep a secondary concern.
The grounds of Mid Ohio turned into a two-wheeled traffic jam for these three days, and every road felt like the chaos of a Southeast Asian intersection, with motorcycles going every which way in a giant jumble. With the roaring of motorcycle engines in every direction, some screams from liter bikes in competition on track, some braaps from vintage 250 two-strokes on the motocross course, and some grunts from 50cc runabouts just struggling to get up a hill. It was truly beautiful chaos.
I'm so glad I got to witness this coalition of fanatics come together over a common experience. We truly live in hell, but for one beautiful weekend, we were all just two-wheel loving passengers on spaceship Earth. It was a shared experience, and next year you need to be there. This was my Burning Man.
Want more like this? Join the Jalopnik newsletter to get the latest auto news sent straight to your inbox...
Read the original article on Jalopnik.
