By: Dave Abrahams
Cape Town – The South African Motorcycle Racing Academy is more than just a one-make racing series.
Granted, all the competitors ride Honda NSF100 pocket racers and, after a season of hard-fought races at almost every kart circuit in the country, a champion is declared - but all the riders are between eight and 13, and the reason the series exists at all is to teach them their craft.
It’s no secret that the two countries which dominate motorcycle MotoGP – Spain and Italy – have long-running training programmes that have delivered a number of world champions, some of whom seem absurdly young until you realise that at 15 (the youngest age at which it is permissible to ride in Grands Prix) they have up to seven years of intense training and ultra-competitive racing behind them.
The Netherlands also has a successful Honda NSF100 training programme, and Samra director Neil Harran was able to recruit some of its top instructors to mentor a three-day motorcycle ‘Boot Camp’ at the Killarney ‘K’ circuit, led by former Grand Prix rider Joey Litjens and current World Superstock young gun Wayne Tessels, backed by British Superbike star Bjorn Estment from Gauteng, SA SuperGP riders Malcolm Rudman and Brent Harran, and local hotshot Trevor Westman.
FULL OF MISCHIEF
The riders came from all over South Africa and abroad, some complete novices, others with a season on the NSF100 already under their belts, nearly all of them under the age of 10 – and as full of mischief as any other eight and nine-year-olds.
But Harran and Litjens proved to be strict disciplinarians, keeping the opening briefing short, tight and focused, and soon the first group of ‘newbies’, some of whom had never ridden an NSF100 – or even on a tarred circuit – before, were wobbling round, learning the bikes and the track under the watchful eyes of the instructors.
The second group in the early ‘free practice’ session included at least two talented local youngsters, who made the most of home-track advantage to show the ‘up-country boys’ a clean pair of heels - but that didn’t help much after the break, when the instructors marked the ideal turn-in and apex points on each corner with chalk and insisted that the riders hit the chalk marks every lap, to the centimetre.
The first Samra Boot Camp was scheduled for three days of intense training, culminating with a two-hour endurance race on Friday 12 December as part of the ASAP/RST 8 Hour Endurance meeting; Harran intends to hold two more in 2015, possibly at the Scribante circuit in Port Elizabeth and iDube in KwaZulu-Natal.
Who knows, one of them might deliver South Africa’s next world champion.