Hemmings Motor News Blog Blog

Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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They Do Come Back, Otherwise There Wouldn't Be Motorcycle Races: The Allure of Flat Track Racing

Posted February 09, 2022 5:00 AM by dstrohl
Pathfinder Tags: motorcycles

Doubtless you've seen pictures of flat track racing. Motorcycles drifting around a dirt arena at such severe angles to the ground you'd swear the camera was tilted. Inside foot out and skipping along the surface like a flesh-and-bone training wheel. Front wheel cocked at an impossible angle, maybe even hovering a few inches off the ground. Few motorsports offer more dramatic imagery than a squadron of flat track racers rounding the first corner. But it's a sport that can also be beautiful, even graceful, as we see from Evan Senn's short documentary "Fast and Left," released last summer, which follows the flat track circuit around the Midwest. In it we hear from veterans of the sport, superstars, beginners, families, and pretty much everybody in between, explaining not just the mechanics, the zen, and the thrill of flat track racing but also the tight-knit community that keeps the sport alive and thriving.

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Re: They Do Come Back, Otherwise There Wouldn't Be Motorcycle Races: The Allure of Flat Track Racing

02/13/2022 10:26 PM

Some of the best motorcycle road racers started out flat-tracking.

Here is Fast Freddie (Spencer):

then later in MotoGP.

Flat track racing gets the riders used to the idea of sliding around motorcycle tires. And then more comfortable with the idea of sliding slicks on the tarmac.

Other notable flat-trackers who went on to great success on the road courses were Kenny Roberts, Eddie Lawson and Wayne Rainey.

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Previous in Blog: Multi-Million-Dollar Recreation of the Long-Lost 1935 Bugatti Aerolithe Amounts to “Experimental Archaeology”   Next in Blog: Open Diff: What’s on Your List of “GM Gets it Right, Then Kills It” Cars?

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