If it makes you feel any better, there were 2,000 other people sat at home during the first week of June looking at identical weather websites while going through the same seven stages of grief.
Fortunately, vintage dirt bikers and their occasionally miserable machines are already accustomed to shock, guilt, anger, bargaining and depression. This makes the last two – acceptance and hope – practically a parade lap. Unadilla’s 2024 MX Rewind was at war with the gods, playing hit-and-run with the sun then hurry-up-and-wait in the rain. “You pay your money and hope for the best,” one attendee said before Saturday’s practice on a professionally-prepped course that would still stay slick and squirrelly in some spots for hours.
Rest assured, the Robinson clan that has run New Berlin, New York’s storied course for 55 years shared the same stressors (and then some) of those who wait 362 days for this gathering. Between shaky satellite forecasts and rapid track adjustments to safely get this year’s edition off the line and into the history books, Rewind ’24 is mercifully done and not the least bit dusted.
Rainy Days and Mondays
Now in its 14th year, the three-day Rewind needs little introduction. It’s the land of leaded gas and loud noises and it’s only right that such an historic track is still here to host the same bikes of the sport’s heyday. If you’re anywhere between Ottawa and Orlando and own an old ring-a-ding that still goes “zing,” this could be the summer vacation destination. No official headcount has yet been released, but 2023’s 1,580 racers was the fourth year of record-breaking attendance. While the camping grounds were still filled to the gills with mobile homes and campers from across the Eastern Seaboard, you could tell the numbers were down just ever so slightly.
“The problem weather-wise is you go by the forecast. People look at it ahead of time and they say, ‘I’m not gonna go.’ Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it could be raining a half-mile down the road, but not here,” Unadilla head honcho Greg Robinson said after Saturday morning rider’s meeting when asked about the next 12 hours of his life. Indeed, an hour-long drive up Route 8 on the way in alternated between bone-dry and sopping wet. You could sense the sincerity when Robinson said this unpredictability was “frustrating,” adding that the staff puts in so much work to pull the whole thing off under less-than-ideal circumstances. “You try to put your best foot forward.”
‘Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it could be raining a half-mile down the road, but not here.’
And you know what? Saturday rewarded the fruits of such labor. The track took to social media late Thursday to show off their elephant in the room: a tamped-down course that should be ready to rip when the time came. It was firm on Friday evening, looked like loamy chocolate cake come Saturday morning and was about the best you could hope for by the second set of motos that same afternoon. If a section needed muck scraped off or jump faces shaved down, it was done post-haste.
Small-bore racers ran wide-open through oatmeal to the point of seizure while big bores dug out slot car single-track inside the turn toward Gravity Cavity. Robinson’s deadpan delivery about not trying to jump Skyshot was serious, but given the audience and suspension travel, no argument there. Even if attendance figures do prove to be lower, there were 22 races on Saturday alone stretching from 11 a.m. to well past 7 p.m. with minimal delays in-between. Credit to organizers for not slashing lap counts in half for the second heat, and for then going back out after racing was complete to groom and seal the track back up.
Sunday… was a different story. Pre-dawn downpours of disappointment meant the damage had already been done hours before practice even began. Those who stuck around to race (18 total this year compared to 22 in 2023, with a whole lot more “DNS” than “DNF” in the results) remained in my thoughts and prayers during the slog home. That it eventually unfolded under pleasant blue skies was just insult to injury. Some “had a blast even if I DFN’d.” It was both “a grind” and a “heck of a time.” One “learned how to become a mud torpedo” while more emerged with “a thousand pounds of muck stuck to my legs from the knee down.”
Any hardware earned this weekend was hard-fought with a fair bit of good luck in the mix. All it took was one rider down in front, one uncontrollable cross-rut or a slip through the slicks and there went three positions. Back home then back to work, flipping through a warped and waterlogged notebook of rain-stained chicken scratch quotes trying to avoid explaining a weekend spent at speed, Karen Carpenter’s angelic voice shone through like some sort of consolation prize: Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.
‘You Pick your Battles’
It wouldn’t be an outdoors summer race without a Dumpster full of E-Z Ups blasted to bits by Mother Nature. An inch of rain made Friday morning’s XC event a bit slippery, AHRMA Northeast organizer Bob Close said, but dedicated teams were out “in the woods until the sun went down making changes and fixes to the course.” He noted that facility ownership truly enjoys putting on Rewind and will listen to feedback and make adjustments as needed. A serious thunder and lightning storm during Friday’s scrambles would divert Close’s full attention to strictly racing his 1975 YZ125B on the national track the following day. Once one comes to terms with the bolt-throwing upper-hand Mount Olympus has over weather, the conclusion is inevitable: “You pick your battles,” he said.
‘It’s the same track for everyone out there. Competition is competition.’
Craig Jones and Brian Patterson, both from Pittsburgh, Pa. with an arsenal of post-vintage MX-ers in tow, said they’ve been coming to Rewind since 2020 and the drive usually takes about eight hours. It was closer to 30 this year – and they still pulled off the impossible. A bad electrical ground mid-trip killed the starter motor on their RV, which landed their vehicle in a shop and forced a hotel stay en route. Also in-tow was a bike a friend was selling to former pro racer Bruce Stratton, whom they were going to meet at Rewind. Stratton just happened to live three miles from where the breakdown occurred. A few phone calls to the garage service manager and a few drinks at the bar to kill some time “and here we are,” Jones laughed late Friday night.
“I’ve raced motocross and hare scrambles on and off for 30 years. Our bikes are modern enough that they can handle it,” Patterson said when asked about hypothetical worse-case course conditions come dawn. His companion’s sentiments echoed: “It’s the same track for everyone out there. Competition is competition. I’m never going to shy away from rain.”
Decades of Decadence
Man makes plans while the universe laughs. You can spend days with one watchful eye cast upwards, tracking the ominous paths of nimbus clouds as if we were all suddenly meteorologists and mechanics. Ron Draper from Poland, New York, understood the risks and rolled the dice. “The first moto was like racing a bike on a sheet of glass. It was slick,” he said of Friday’s grass track scrambles. Conditions slowly improved and his trick 1977 XT500, with its period-correct PE400 swing arm and YZ250 forks, offered Draper “some time on the seat” and a great time doing it. “I’m in my fifties. I’m trying to get as many more years out of this as I can.”
Power-washing away the evidence, leaving 20 pounds of dead weight splattered around the pits, doesn’t erase history. There have been some hellish mud races at Unadilla and historic ones, too. Go watch the American wrecking crew of Hannah, Johnson and Ward get sideways in the slop during the 1987 Motocross Des Nations – much to the delight of ‘Dilla’s infamously destructive denizens of yore – then remember why you trek here in the first place. It is, as the old white barn says, “the capital of American motocross.”
There will always be poorly-timed “no-refunds” weather to squander the best-laid weekend plans. Holidays, though… well those only come once a year and as each passes, another war story loaded into the chamber. When your foe is nothing short of Zeus and the Heavens letting loose, shake your fist at the sky, curse the fates and taunt the gods. Between those vows of vengeance, you just might hear the voice of an angel sing the rest of this story: Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.
Greg Adomaitis 