Silverstone MotoGP Meetup 2011

Jumkie said:

Wilski will like this one...



Lesson #3: Know your time zone. If Lesson #2 is the high watermark, Lesson #3 is the must surely one of the more embarrassing ones. Let me back up a bit. After flying all night on a moments notice. I arrived in Newark, some four time zones away. I may have slept an hour or so, and though the local time declared 5:00AM, my body was saying 1:00AM. Maybe that’s why I carelessly forgot my cell phone on the seat of the plane; and without thinking through the possible consequences, I went back through a door that had a blaring siren and clearly read “No Unauthorized Personnel”. I suppose the siren was clue enough, but I opened the door anyway and went past the bright red sign, into the empty plane with the cockpit door wide open, and retrieved my cell phone. That was 5:00AM local East Coast Time, it wasn’t gonna be until 7:00PM, some 14 hours later, that I would be leaving for the connecting flight NYC to UK. Do you know what idle time at an airport can do to your mind? Well, it turns it into Jell-O. I get a call from Keshav who has taken the day off to take me to lunch and wants to meet the boys. But I don’t have a boarding pass, and I couldn’t muster enough brainpower to figure out a non-risky way of leaving the airport, and I wasn’t about to bother Levi to ask, as he was comfortably sleeping after a long shift. Next time Kesh buddy.



So, fast forward, the boys get to the airport; we get on a flight to the UK. Well actually, we sat at the gate, inside the plane for 3 hours on a weather delay. Did you know they don’t serve you drinks while delayed? Well at least not in economy coach, but Levi & Gator didn’t have to worry about that, as they were in first class, .......s. We finally taxi down the runway, 3 hours at the gate and the captain still has the balls to announce, we are about to leave, enjoy your 7-hour flight. Sure buddy, no problem. Another overnight flight, and I get about an hour sleep. (You wouldn’t sleep too much either if you had an old Indian .... elbowing your ribs for 6.5 of the 7 hours.) When we arrive, its morning, Gator gets a rental car and we scour the English countryside to find it. We may have had better luck just walking to Silverstone. Anyway, we finally find the “Voxoh” the brand of the rental Levi and Gator were so fond of saying for the entire hour it took us to get to Silverstone.



We go straight to the track. At which time I proceed to call Arrabi to arrange meet up as he has our tickets. My charm fails me to convince the kids at the gate to let me in, except I will say we later met the gate worker’s supervisor, a charming young .... named Sara. Levi is probably still dreaming about her right now. She actually was a fine understated little darling. Wow, that’s a lot of set up for this lesson, but I just wanted you to get a sense of the state of my mind after 2 days of overnight flights with very little sleep, finally arriving at the Pot of Gold. We finally see Arrabi, Wilski, and Little Red Rocket with our tickets. Sweet. I noticed Little Red Rocket had a Suzuki hospitality access pass around his neck, and I thought, hey, I know somebody in the Moto2 paddock, maybe I can get some behind the scenes access too. I know the former crewchief of Moto2 rider, Robertino Petrie, who formerly raced in the AMA. My contact, back in the US, had told me to call him when I was in the UK, so that he could call his contacts on the team to let me in. I remember this, soWilski, who I just met, hands me his phone after I ask him for it, I dial my buddy. Ring ring, a groggy voice answers. “Hhhhello??? …..” ’Poncho, its me, Jumkie, what’s up?’ “Jumkie???” (Immediately I think, wtf, he sounds horrible, I’m thinking, damn he must be sick or something) ‘Poncho, are you ok? You don’t sound good, what’s wrong? I’m here at the track in Silverstone, can you get me into the paddock? Btw, what’s up man, you don’t sound right. What’s wrong with you?’ He replys, “Ssssssseeping.” So I say, ‘What, why? Why are you sleeping in the middle of the day?’ (At which time I must have looked as White as my travel companions, as I felt all of the blood rush out of my face and down to my stomach). “Because I sleep at night.” At which I reply, “Oh my God, oh ...., I’m so sorry, OMG, I can’t believe I did that. Holy ...., I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize the time zone I’m in, I totally screwed up. I’ll call you later, go back to sleep.” Needless to say, I never called Poncho back the entire weekend. I didn’t have the balls. I felt like a totally ...... bag, a complete ...... Everybody around me starts laughing when I hang up. Wilski was greatly amused, and proceeded to remind me several more times throughout the entire weekend, he would holding up his phone to his ear and pretend to have a conversation that went something like this; “Hello, Poncho, are you ok, why the .... are you sleeping? …Uhm, because it’s the middle of the night .......!”

Click to expand...

Jumkie said:

My computer crashed!!!! It didn't survive the travel. Trying to retrieve data, I'm in a panic. I had 250 gigs of my life on that computer, only about 100 gigs backed up before I left. I don't know what I'll do if its all lost. Other than that, I'm still in a glow from this weekend.



Zombie back at work, not because I'm tired, but because my mind is still at Silverstone!



Ok, another Lesson. (Its a bit out of order, I'll post Lesson #3 later, here is...)



Lesson #4: Sometime, you just can’t avoid some crap. Under no circumstance should you buy a cheeseburger at the Silverstone track (Levi suggests the entire country). Well, it looked basic enough at the hamburger stand. Plus, the fries that came with the combo had already been approved with raving reviews (seriously the “chips” were fantastic, probably the best .... at the track). The mystery meat on the grill and the yellow cheese melting on top appeared familiar enough. The reason we were at that stand to begin with was because we were to meet BassPete there, who had become separated (as we all learned Pete has an uncanny talent for getting lost at the circuit, I use the word “lost” loosely, as it was just a matter of surveying the near bars, at which you had a 99% chance of finding him in line for a refill). So we’re behind the Becketts stands and we had just walked around ¾ of the circuit, which translates into about 10 miles (as we learned the day prior searching for the needle in the haystack, or as Brits like to call it, an ATM machine.) I had instructed Arrabi I wanted to be sure we had seen every angle and vantage point of the track known to man, which from one hopelessly addicted fan to another, this was greatly appreciated; but also made for a growling appetite. “I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries please.” I’ve said this sentence thousands of times in my lifetime, never with any memorable consequence. The oversized .... with a stupid looking white hat hands me the “chips” and cheeseburger. I pop a hand full of fries into my mouth, and I’m thinking, oh hell yeah, time to grub. I follow it up by the biggest bite I could summon on the cheeseburger. As the mystery meat starts to make my taste buds synapse, the message to my brain must have gone the opposite side of my brain of the fries message. Uhm, I protest to the boys sitting at the picnic table, “this isn’t very good”. I have an idea, so I pile on catch-up, both types of mustard, some brown .... in a bottle, and salt. Take another bite, again, damn, this doesn’t even taste like beef. I reluctantly polish off as much as I can stand from the burger, as I tried to overcome the hunger pains, we then made our way to the grandstands, as qualifying was about to start. We go up to Becketts bleachers, and what had been California looking day went artic cold. Wtf is up with the weather? We had sat under the cover in the stands, but I start to get the shakes. I’m thinking, geez, its cold, but my body shivering is a bit much. I convince the boys to move into the part of the stands where there was partial sunshine. But I’m still shivering, the taste in my mouth is foul, say, imagine you just ate road kill. My stomach starts to go whack. I start counting down the minutes to the end of qual. We go down the stairs and I tell the boys, “yo, wait here please, I need to make a toilet deposit.” .... me, the ten thousand people that came down from the stands are now in two big lines for the restroom. Think back to a time where you were in line (or as Brits like to say, “queue”) for the restroom, and you had to go real bad, its like your mind decides, ok, if you can hold it until you get to the front of the line, your brain then fires off the message to your colon, NOW is the time… RELEASE! Which means you have 3 more seconds to get the toilet stall. Well, I did everything possible to hold it, when I finally get inside the door, all I see is a big urinal trough! I start to visibly panic, holy ...., were are the shitters, the thought becomes a verbal outburst, I yell out, “Hey, were the .... are the shitters, the toilets??? …a dude looks at me and reply, “That’s the other line mate.” WTF! I push the dude behind me outta my way, I run to the other line; by that time my brain has already fired off its prescribed message: RELEASE! The other “queue” is still deep. I try my best to interrupt the involuntary sequence to my colon that my brain has been fooled into prematurely sending. .......! What seemed like an eternity, I finally get into the stall. I sat down, knowing damn well, the damage had been done. The bowel movement started with a bang. If you’ve ever wondered how .... gets on the backside of a toilet at a public restroom, I now know. Everything I ate the previous 15 hours went straight though like the MotoGP bikes at Hanger Straight, including that ....... hamburger. Oh man, and did it emanate the foulest stench which would have made skunks protest. I hadn’t had the guts to admit it, as I didn’t want to deal with the embarrassment at the time. (But oddly enough, the virtual world is a peculiar medium, as we debated this dynamic later on at Arabbi’s house, and which I will talk about later). Notwithstanding, I’ll reveal here, the boxers I had taken to the track in the morning…well they never returned. All my efforts to interrupt the message to ‘release’ were mostly successful, but not entirely. Somewhere in a Silverstone trash can is very soiled .... stained underwear. I tired my best, but sometimes, you just can’t avoid some crap. Be careful what you eat in a foreign country. (Btw, Gator had a similar lesson, on our way to the track race day, while sitting in traffic. I’ll have him tell it).

Click to expand...

Jumkie said:

I'm dealing with something of a personal crisis, a potential catastrophe more like it. Has the thought every gone past your mind when boarding a plane that it might crash? Well, it seems my computer didn't make the journey back as well as I did, as it now fails to fire up. The blue screen with the little ".... you and wait" clock has been wagging its tongue at me for hours. I've summoned every tech at my work for a solution. I feel like a person waiting for the judge to return to announce the verdict. If you've ever lost over a 100 gigs of your life to a little white machine you'd understand the thought, 'I would have rather my plane crashed instead of the computer.'



I'm using the computer at work, but its not the same.



Lesson #5: Bring hearing protection. No, not to the track, but to your friend’s house if you plan on attempting to catch some sleep on the living room floor in close proximity to a bunch of other guys on the eve of race day. I’ve always admired the rumble and piercing sound of a GP bike, but I’ve never felt the need to don hearing protection, no matter how close I stood to a bike. The decibels of which are of no comparison to the frightening rumble that came from BassPete as he snored the night away. Pete, who had been camping at the track, came to sleep at Arrabi’s house the night before the race, much to my delight. As I said, he is a joy to be around, I soon was to discover, this only meant when he was awake. We had a cracking ethnic Indian dinner that night, or as the Brits like to say, the national cuisine. All of us happy and fed (thanks to the generosity of the better contingent of the Yanks, thanks again Gator), we went back to Arrabi’s to re-watch the day’s track activity on the teli, as we had done the night before. We decided going to sleep fairly early would be a good idea, since we needed to be up at the crack of dawn race day. Chopper and the misses took my bed, the one that I had selfishly accepted from Arrabi the night before (yes, I put Arabbi out of his own master bed, in my defense, I had slept at total of 3 hours in the two days prior, I needed the sleep). I figured; I’d pay it forward. So I decide to sleep with the rest of the boys in the living room and let Chopper & Bonnie knock one out (as I later walked in on their marital bliss, but that’s another unmentionable lesson I will not do a write up for obvious reasons). As they say, ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ and this was no exception.



BassPete ‘snored’ the whole night. And I use that word “snore” loosely to mean, an alien sound that would make any self-respecting Sasquatch, Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman relinquish the title of The Most Terrifying Sound Never Before Heard. When I say “snore” what I’m trying to describe is a kind of nasal sound in which if you recorded a cow’s communiqué, then played it back in slow time, mixed in with the sound a flat tire on a wheel might make as the driver tries to creep slowly toward a safe area, then try to imagine the guttural sound three swine might make with there short snouts, filled with mucous and muffled intermittently by a wet thin cellophane membrane around them, something like a loose piece of plastic, flapping around each of their mucous dripping filled nostrils as they struggled to breath. Then imagine the oddest low frequency sound, like those Tibet monks singing in trance, but imagine some bizarre previously undiscovered animal doing it instead of the monks, because the monks, well their human, and no human can make this sound I’m trying to describe (that is except Pete). Say, something reminiscent of one of those National Geographic specials, you know, the one where they track some never previously discovered specie broadcasting its mating call anomalous of some Hollywood alien movie’s representation of the eerie and disturbing sound that makes you believe in extraterrestrial life. Well if you can imagine the sound all those descriptions above put together would make, well, that’s NOT the snoring sounds that BassPete made, no, it was much more unsettling. Lesson #5, bring hearing protection to the boys MotoGP slumber party.

Click to expand...

Willski said:

As the man with the pleasure ( and I use that term very loosely ) of bedding down closest to Basspete, I can vouch for all the above. Not only was Pete snoring from his upper orifices, but also his lower ones. At certain points during the evening, when the crescendo was at its peak, I swear I could see the ceiling being sucked down towards us when Pete inhaled.....What made it all bearable for was that when pete farted, he actually laughed in his sleep

I wonder whether the ultrasonic vibrations caused by the aforementioned snoring caused the structural damaged which eventually led to Arrabs conservatory collasping

Click to expand...

Jumkie said:

Lesson #6: Bring the proper gear to the track. In the case of attending an outdoor event in United Kingdom, that apparently means bringing Arctic gear, the kind you might want to pack when planning a summit to Everest. Yes, I got the memo on the rain, but I didn’t get the memo it would get so cold that polar bears would have protested, “Jesus, its ....... cold!” Don’t get me wrong, this did not deter me from wanting to stay at the track all day, as the GP bikes motored past our grandstands was marvelous. Turns out, on race day, you cannot leave your seat, because there’s always some rabid Bopper family, decked out from head to toe with every possible yellow outfit, trying to put their filthy ... on your seat. This means you have to leave in shifts to protect your seat. Me, not having any Brit money left, meant I had no reason to go down from the bleachers. So I decided to weather the weather. My shivering got so visible that Arrabi kindly offered his hoody sweater, which I gladly took. And Wilski, seeing my pale white face, a feat not so easy for me, as I am a very dark Latino, invited me for breakfast, his treat. Fantastic, I thought, a reprieve from the cold. The thing is, when we went down, the ground was so wet that my shoes got soaked, which later meant my feet were so cold that I almost waddled like a penguin.



The boys held on to our seats. But that was short lived, as I went back up to face what must have been a sub-zero wind chill factor. This prompted Gator, being from a decidedly tropical region, to don his wet weather suit, which could only be described as some Ninja suit. Sure, it rains in southern Florida, however, if it gets below 75 degrees in December, it’s Armageddon. Donning his Ninja suit, he had on full body cloaking attire. It did make him disappear underneath the thing, but I’m not sure the cloaking buffered the chilly conditions, as I saw him several times close his eyes as if to sleep. Maybe he was imagining himself being in a t-shirt with flip flops back on the Florida keys, or perhaps he was going into some type of self preserving coma. He wasn’t falling asleep; it was more like a body defense mechanism of preserving all the body heat he could muster. The lack of body fat on Gator surely didn’t help, as I think a 125 riders would wince at Gator’s body fat index, a factor in which I held a distinct advantage. Though I will admit, the piercing icy conditions seemed to ignore the fact that I have a robust layer of fat insulation. But everybody hung in there. Even Chopperman looked to be struggling with the wintry conditions, and that in a way provided a level of consolation for me, thinking to myself, well, I'm not being to much of a ..... in the cold if even Chops is moaning. It was like a pat on my back, as I was braving the freezing conditions that even a Brit was visibly effected. For if I had an advantage over Gator in the body fat index insulation factor, well Chopperman’s index might conjure up the word; “walrus”. So seeing him shiver like a little .... in the cold just made me want to forge ahead. Of course, this all dissipated once the race started. The grid forming gave me a soothing feeling inside, especially when I realized my seat was front center on Nicky’s grid position. He even waved at me. Which provided all the warmth I needed. The reverberation of the entire grid at redline, as they collectively waited for the red lights to go out, was something of a shot to the body. I don’t think anybody felt the least bit cold after that. Well, at least not until the race ended. Then the consensus was, lets get the hell out of Dodge. Just a quick note, Nicky lost a podium position from a mistake in those treacherous conditions, but it may have been a good thing, as I probably would have jumped off the bleachers in a state of momentary insanity. But we did have a fellow American on the podium. And I was tickled that the Brits took to Colin with such fond applause. It was a fantastic day!



12096:IMG_0459.JPG]

Click to expand...

Jumkie said:

Everything I ate the previous 15 hours went straight though like the MotoGP bikes at Hanger Straight, including that ....... hamburger.

Click to expand...

chopperman said:

Click to expand...