JD's
Youth Scoop
Copyright 2008 - ATV Racin' Extra / www.atvyoungguns.com - All rights reserved
Old School
@ 17
I was hanging out in the offices in our home the other day and found some boxes full of old 35mm photos my father took of ATV racing back 5 or 6 years ago. I remembered some of the racers but a lot of them I didn't. As I kept looking through stacks and stacks of photos I began to lay out some of myself when I started racing. Man, things were different then.
There were pictures of me racing motocross and dirt track. My Suzuki LT80 looked so small compared to today's mini quads. There was one picture of me going over a jump at Bud's Creek in Maryland and I was at least a foot and a half off the ground. In those days in the mini classes that was considered "Big Air". These day I guess they would call it "Woos Air".
You have to remember that when I started racing you could only modify the engine and do clutch work. You couldn't run shocks or a pipe or do anything to the frame or anything else. There were maybe six or seven of us that ran the nationals and we broke more engine cases than you could load on a dump truck. It was sort of like racing a rocket that took off fast and landed like a lead balloon.
After I got through going through the pictures I had to put them away. I didn't like the way they made me feel. Especially, when I look at today's mini quads and how they're decked out from top to bottom. My best description of the way I felt was that I was "Old School" at seventeen years of age.
And...that ain't cool at all.
