#umra

Late last year, the MOron crew participated in yet another 24-hour minibike road race, this time aboard the Benelli TnT135. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, but we got spanked – like bringing a knife to a gunfight spanked. Not surprisingly, the winning team consisted mostly of kids who couldn’t reach my head even with their arms fully outstretched. Surely their power-to-weight ratio helped, but we’d be dumb to think the kids weren’t also very skilled at their craft (and a lack of fear helps, too).

You’d think we’d learn our lesson by now with these darn 24-hour races. Our Grom debacle was a serious test of our resolve and had us questioning why we even rode motorcycles in the first place, while our time aboard the Kymco K-Pipe we also rode around the clock didn’t present us with any problems, but boy was it ungodly slow. Maybe in my attempt to recreate the sense of accomplishment that comes with being the first electric team to complete a 24-hour race, I’ve tricked my MO cohorts into thinking racing little bikes for a whole day is fun. Thankfully, being MOrons, we clearly don’t learn our lesson.

Never again. That’s what I told myself after the debacle that was Team MO’s attempt at the inaugural United Mini Racing Association’s 24-hour race last year aboard our diabolical Project Honda Grom. I was done with this crap. Never had I been so mentally and physically exhausted in my life, and it was all from wrestling around the worst handling motorcycle all of us on staff had ever ridden while trying to save face for MO’s reputation and not completely embarrass ourselves (the jury is still out on whether we succeeded).

Last year, the mighty men of MO participated in the UMRA’s 24 Hour Endurance Race at beautiful Grange Motor Circuit in Apple Valley, California. Their highly modified but lightly tested Honda Grom carried them to a less-than-stellar finish but yet a satisfying sense of accomplishment.

If you’ve been following MO for a while then you might remember the tale of woe that was our experience racing a Honda Grom for 24 hours, wherein we obtained a Grom, ordered up a ton of parts for it (the monetary sum totalling more than the bike’s original cost), slapped them all on, and went straight to the racetrack the next day to race with our friends at the United Mini Racing Association (UMRA) with visions of glory. Instead, it took mere minutes to discover our “modified” machine was nearly unrideable, dashing our hopes for victory and killing our spirits in the process.

Close MO readers will have figured out that, between the six-day Sport-Adventure-Touring ride and the actual publication of the shootout, we took a tricked out Grom and raced it for 24 hours in a UMRA event. I won’t step on Troy’s story about the event by giving away any specifics, but I will say it was… an adventure. This was my third 24-hour endurance race (You can read about my second 24-hour race here), and in the hours after each one, I vowed that I will never do anything this foolish ever again. Of course, over time, the itch returns, and hopefully, after an appropriate length of time for my family and myself to forget the pain associated with a 24-hour, I’ll get another opportunity to scratch… on the track… at night.