On Sunday, Sept 4th, a few of us
stopped by the Wasaga track to see if we could do a little clean-up
and turn a few laps. "Our" little track is located just
off River Road W in Wasaga Beach, and you can see a rough map of the
are and where it is located here. If
you zoom in, you can see a rust coloured area in the middle of the map.
The track is the sand coloured area just to the right of it. Marcel
and I originally planned to go to the track, do a little maintenance,
and do a few laps to help us get accustomed to our pythons, specifically,
to help prepare for the next Windel race day, which is being held here.
The Windel track is the little black spot, in the middle of the
map, just to the right of the two white spots. A few other riders
showed up to give us a hand on a great day, which was warm enough to
do some work on the track, but not overly hot.
A few pictures are below.
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Here are Larry (at the back)
and Marcel (in blue) starting to clear away some of the dirt and
debris on the track just after getting there at about 2PM. I
wanted to keep working but they said "Hey! Why don't
you stop working, go take some pictures, and we'll work twice
as hard while you're off??" I really didn't want to, but
they looked like they'd be REALLY mad if I didn't, so I snapped
some photos :) A little while later, John and Wayne showed
up, so we had a few more hands to help out. Next time we'll
bring more shovels and brooms.
The pile of crushed limestone
comes from the Ministry of Natural Resources at Wasaga Beach and
they use the old, abandoned track as a storage site for things
like the crushed stone, cold patch, parking bumpers, dock weights,
etc. In the end, we'd like to see if we can shovel the pile
back so it doesn't take up so much of the track. The track
is about 30' wide and 1/4 mile long, and there is plenty of room
to get by the pile, but we'd still like to move it eventually.
A 30' by 1320' is a LOT of sweeping :) and needless to say,
we didn't get it done, on this the first day, with only two brooms.
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| To the right, is a shot going
into corner one. The corners have a slight bank on them that
makes them really comfortable to ride through at speed on a trike
or bike. You can see the tufts of grass and weeds that are
growing up through the small cracks in the asphalt as you get deeper
into the corner. The first part of the corner looked much
the same, but after the pebbles, sand and weeds were swept away,
you can see the track is in pretty good shape, is pretty smooth,
and cleans up rather well. We tried to pay particular attention
to all the broken glass for obvious reasons. While much of
the glass seemed old and the edges weathered, I didn't want to take
a chance on any punctures. We started at the "Start/Finish"
line and started to work our way around the track. With a
few more visits, we should be able to make the whole track look
like this. cough . . . volunteers . .
. cough :) |
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| This is the back stretch coming
out of corner 2. You can see more of the grass/weeds in the
the cracks, but there don't seem to be any major holes in the asphalt
itself. There's a little more dirt and debris on the back
straight than there is on the front, but nothing a little "sweat
equity" won't rectify. The majority of the weeds tend
to be on the outside of the track, while the bottom tends to have
the most dirt and debris. For the length of time that this
track has been unused, it really doesn't have that much junk on
it, or serious problems. Down towards corner 3 on the outside
of the track, you can see some stacked parking bumpers. They
are just on the edge of the track, and neatly stacked, so they aren't
in the way at all. |
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This is coming into corner 3.
Not so much of a weed problem, but a fair bit more gravel
and sand. Down near the bottom of the turn it's clear enough
to ride through without any difficulty though and Marcel was doing
just that on his python at over 40kph. Marcel says "Smooth,
clean tracks are only for the people who are afraid of skin ripping,
bone snapping wipe-outs". Marcel is a wee bit of an
animal . . . which is exactly why we keep him around for track
testing like this.
About half way through the corner,
up in the middle of the track, there looks like there might be
a hole about 12" in diameter. Nothing that a little
cold patch can't fix, and by providence, there just happens to
be a small pile of it on the front straight :)
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In this picture, about an hour
and a half has gone by, and the troops are feeling the need to
do less sweeping and more riding. At this point, we have
about 1/5th of the track done (more or less . . . likely less)
and we decided it was time to do some riding, seeing as how we
all brought our bents.
Larry is at the back left in
the, black shirt, doing some stretches. He's ALL about proper
stretching before doing any spirited riding! Wayne
is to the right in the grey shirt with the safety flag. Wayne
is ALL about safety whether on an obscure abandoned track in the
middle of nowhere, or out on two wheels riding down the middle
of Main Street. Wayne has also been found attempting to
ride over that pile of limestone, on occasion . . . John
is in the red with his back to the camera, and it was nice to
have him out with us as he has been extremely busy all summer
building his new home. I yelled for him to turn around for
the picture, but he was mumbling something about "photographs
stealing your soul". . . Marcel is closest to the camera,
on his python, facing the wrong way. Marcel isn't a big
fan of the normal convention of running counter clockwise on tracks.
My python is off to the right, waiting to be crashed 6 or
7 times . . . err, I mean waiting to do 6 or 7 laps. Yeah,
that's what I meant . . .
At the bottom of the picture,
in the middle, is a small patched area of the track. Wayne
used some of the cold patch from the small black pile on the right
of the picture. Wayne used to be a professional-cold-patch-using
guy, it would seem, but he gave up all that excitement for the
more sensible job of bike-store-owner guy. Cold patch, by
the way, is a special formulation of asphalt that is designed
to be used for small jobs and cures slowly at low ambient temperatures
while being compacted by nothing more than the weight of a vehicle
driving over it. Wayne patched up two or three small areas,
and it worked out great.
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| Here's a picture of Larry on
my python. We were trying to talk him into learning how to
ride it, but the best place to learn how to ride them, really, is
big open flat spaces like parking lots. The look on his face
told us he was already mentally making alterations to the python
design and is planning to build one or 17 of his own too. He
builds prodigious quantities of bents, very fast, and they are all
very pro looking, and great riding pieces of work. John and
Larry have been a huge source of inspiration and motivation for
my own bent projects. A lot of his, and John's, bents can
be seen on the Gallery
page. |
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| Here's a picture of Marcel whipping
by on his python at a little over 40 kph. Even with the state
of the track, some nice speeds can be reached, even on something
as unusual as a python. It's also a testament to Marcel's
balance and reflexes, which are both abnormally (I think) well developed
:) I went to click the picture when he first entered the frame,
but by the time my finger and the camera were done doing their thing,
he was just about out of the frame. The python makes this
cool wind "hissing" sound as it goes by when you start
to get them wound up to speed. |
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This is the next picture I tried
where I told Marcel to slow it down a bit so he'd actually be
IN the picture. While he complained bitterly, I explained
that he needed to slow down or he wouldn't have a good picture
to sign and give out at autograph sessions. :) So, he slowed
it down into the low 30s for this pass. The look on his
face indicates he likely thinks I can use a camera about as well
as I can use my python. I think he's right :) Larry
was also turning laps in the 30kph+ range on his trike.
At the top left of the picture
you can see the dock weights lined up in the grass at the edge
of the track. Those little babies were something I REALLY
didn't want to have a meeting with when I was on the gas coming
out of corner 4.
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| This is a picture of Marcel relaxing
on his python after his action photo runs. While looking off
to the right at the "official" lap timer, he has a "what-do-you-mean-40kph,-your-stopwatch-is-busted"
look on his face. |
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At the end of the day,
I think we got a fair amount accomplished, and after a few laps on the
track, I found it to be in better shape than I anticipated. The
track was originally built quite a while back for midget car racing,
and supposedly was also used for snowmobile racing in the winter. Apparently
a young racer had an accident, was killed, and the track was closed
down shortly thereafter. Local residents have used it in the subsequent
years for riding their bikes, mini-bikes, snowmachines and walking their
dogs, not to mention it's use as storage or it's role as apparently
the best place to smash glass bottles in all of Wasaga Beach. We'll
see if we can get it cleaned up a little more for some low key bent
events. :)
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