Area riders dig Speedway

Motorcycle tracks ideal for locals

By ANDY WILCOX
Register Sports Writer

Golden Gate Motor Speedway has saved J.T. Mabry about 440 miles of travel each week since it opened July 26 in Vallejo.

The 20-year-old Napa resident has competed on Speedway motorcycles since he was 9 in Fast Fridays races in Auburn. For the last four years, he’s also wanted to compete on Saturday nights, but has had to travel to Costa Mesa in Southern California to do so.

When fellow Fast Fridays regular Charlie Venegas opened Golden Gate Motor Speedway at the Solano County Fairgrounds, it saved riders like Mabry and Vallejo’s Kell Kerrigan quite a bit of travel.

“This is great,” Mabry said while preparing his brakeless, gearless, methanol-power bike at this past weekend’s Golden Gate races, which start at 7:30 p.m. “Now I get to leave my house at 5:30.”

The track will hold the last two races of this seven-weekend inaugural season this Saturday and Sept. 6, but that won’t be it. Venegas has a contract with the fairgrounds for three more seasons.

Kerrigan, 38, said that even a trip to Auburn can be time-consuming compared the mere jog to the Golden Gate oval.

“This is like a dream, having a race track in your backyard,” said the Novato native, who moved to Vallejo to be closer to his job at Speedway sponsor Red Line Oil in Benicia. “On Fridays, I work half-days, until noon, so I can get up to Auburn and not have to sit in traffic all day worrying about getting there on time to be ready to set up for the races. Having a 10-minute commute to the race track is kinda nice.”

Kerrigan wasn’t able to compete Saturday because of a shoulder injury but was there anyway, to help out in the pits.

Venegas, a Vallejo native, knows the toils of traveling long-distance to Speedway races. He has been competing in Auburn on summer Friday nights for as long as he has lived in Southern California.

He got plenty of help building the new track and maintaining it since its opening.

“Every week we try and add another truck load (of dirt) to the track and compact it, water it and let it bake in the sun,” said Kerrigan, who helps Venegas, former Vallejo resident Shane Loessberg and a few others with the work. “Every Sunday morning after racing, we drag the track and smooth it out, get all the ruts and crevasses out.”

Loessberg said he raced Speedway at the Napa Valley Expo until the track closed down in 1991.

Kerrigan said he competed in “ice racing” across the country with Venegas last year, using bikes with spiked tires that into two-inch layers of ice.

Venegas has won several championships in ice racing, which is held at professional or semi-pro hockey rinks as far away as Florida and Louisiana.

Kerrigan said that Venegas has a big following in the Bay Area, so he’s been able to get much labor and materials donated from those who also want the track to succeed.

“There are a few riders here who don’t race in Auburn. Some guys like this relaxed atmosphere better than Auburn, which is more of a big show,” Kerrigan said. “One thing Charlie wants to do later on is have some practice days on Sundays, or Fridays or Saturdays once the season is over. This track is like a pool table, flat and smooth, and there’s not a lot of places you can find for practicing.”

The field in Vallejo on Saturday was mostly males in their 20s and 30s, but also included Elk Grove teenage girls Michelle and Desi Fehrman and 75-year-old Rich Magnano of Cottonwood. The Fehrman sisters’ father, Richard, also races, but Michelle said he didn’t start racing until they did.

Magnano — who is retired but still occasionally helps his former employer at an auto shop — said he and a fellow Speedway septuagenarian, 72-year-old Harlan Bast of Auburn, can’t get enough of the sport.

“My doctor said everything was OK at my last checkup,” Magnano said, “but he did say, ‘Are you still riding those damn bikes?’”

Mabry said he rode in “Pee Wees” exhibition races when he was 6 at Solano County Fairgrounds when it first hosted Speedway races until the mid-1990s.

Last year was his best season yet. He qualified for his first national event in Auburn, then competed with a junior team in England for two weeks. His father Tom, a former Speedway rider, said J.T. raced in eight “meetings” — as the British races are called — in front of up to 8,000 spectators. J.T. will compete in the Under-21 Nationals in Auburn this Friday.

Mabry said Speedway is more fun to watch than other kinds of racing because each four-lap race around the eighth-mile track lasts just over two minutes.

“Right when the gate goes up you gotta be on it and you gotta go or you’re not going to do well,” Mabry said. “You’re sitting around waiting because of cautions; we don’t have all that. It’s just bam-bam-bam and it’s done, and it’s real tight racing because the track is so small.”

Mabry is the only Speedway racer sponsored by Jimmy Vasser Chevrolet. The Napa dealership, which has sponsored him since 1999, buys him a new $2,000-plus leather riding suit each year, emblazoned with his nickname “Jet.”

“I got in a few wrecks earlier this year — I hit a wall pretty hard in Costa Mesa and got a concussion, and I’ve blown out my knee before — but generally I’m a pretty in-control rider. I’ll get hurt because somebody will fall in front of me. But we all make mistakes. None of us hate each other. We look out for each other even though we’re racing each other. There’s a lot of camaraderie.”

Kerrigan said Golden Gate Motor Speedway draws 400 to 500 spectators a night. Admission is $10 for adults, $5 for ages 6-12, and free for ages 5 and younger. Parking is $3.

“If we had five or 5,000 people here, all these racers would still be here,” Kerrigan said.

And somehow, the smell of methanol doesn’t drive them away.

“It’s what they run in Indy and sprint cars,” Mabry said. “You gotta have that smell, and smell it down the street.”

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009