It Takes a Real Special Person

It takes a real special person to want to take a machine engineered to drive on pavement and Frankenstein it to run out on hard water, but then again if you’ve ever lived through a Wisconsin winter, you’d probably understand the desire to want to get your butt out of the house however you can. Start by taking a perfectly good motocross tire, insert some screwy goofball with a crazy notion to want to go fast, and you’ll find yourself a fella on his knees drilling hundreds of screws into the lugs of a perfectly fine tire. Now, I’m not saying that any of this stuff is safe, nope far from it, nor am I trying to downplay the craziness of the whole notion of running a two-wheeled machine on ice, but trust me, until you have ridden a motorcycle out on clear glass ice for the first time, it’s pretty hard to comprehend why someone would find any of this remotely fun. Well, let me try to explain. When you insert screws into deep lug tires, you in effect create a motorcycle on ice skates. The bike becomes, for a lack of a better term, “velcroed” to the ice and you can virtually bank it almost 90º and stay hooked up. Have you ever ridden your motorcycle around a high banked asphalt turn on a hot summer day and revel in the traction that it held? Yeah, kinda like that. The bike becomes a two-wheeled speed skate slicing across the ice only under the direction of your throttle hand. It’s quite exhilarating. I mean, who doesn’t in the middle of winter count down the days until you can pull that beautiful bike back out onto the road? Enter ice racing! When football season comes to a close, and there isn’t much left to do but shovel the driveway, Sundays become race day. Don your thermal bibs, turtleneck fleeces, hand warmers, and insulated boots, it’s time to race!

If you are curious about attending some of these events, there are a couple of different sanctioning bodies that sponsor events over the winter months in Wisconsin, and they cover a large portion of the state. C.W.I.R.A. and S.W.I.R.A. are both running separate series throughout the state and can be found on Facebook and their respective websites. If you’d like to see where I will be running the ABATE Hooligan Bike this winter, you can check www.sidewaysshakes.com for more information and an always updated schedule of events. I look forward to seeing you guys out there!

?Sincerely,

Your Hooligan Racer #9x

Eric Schuelke

AKA ‘Sideways Shakes’

“Go Fast. Turn Left”