A bit of background first. I have had various motorbike since passing my test in the UK back in 1977, soon after my seventeenth birthday. I have always had a racing bug, which typically involved watching others race. When I was 21, my Dad, paid for my brother and I to do a track day with tuition at Brands Hatch, we raced around the Brands short circuit for 25 laps on stripped down Honda Super dream 400’s, I would fully recommend this to anyone thinking of taking the plunge.
In late 1986 I moved with my wife to France, and whilst continuing to ride bikes on the road, and watching racing at the trackside, and on TV, I never really did anything about my old childhood dream to race!
Now after another 20 years (yes!!), I have decided to do something about it, and hence the project that this site is mainly about.
Looking through the various websites in France about motorcycle racing you quickly understand that although the French have a great racing heritage, they are far from being extrovert about their accomplishments, and even worse there just don’t seem to be many related web pages to read through to get related information. After weeks of searching I decided to send of a quick email to Café Racer, a popular magazine, and miracles – they published my request, and gave me a couple of web sites and associations to investigate.
At my age (46 years old), I am not interested in becoming a MotoGP racer or killing myself on a hugely powerful road machine, and therefore I chose to look for the more “classic” oriented racing scene, which lucky for me, is alive and well, in the form of “proclassic racing” (proclassic.free.fr). in September 2006, I took my wife to one of the last races of the year on a small circuit “Le Vigeant” in the West of France. The weekend’s racing combines many different categories, from the SuperMono series, to the Roadster cup (mainly Hornets and Fazers), aswell as more classic racing with two series – the Proclassic series, and the Vitesse en Motos Anciennes series.
The Proclassic series has many categories, but largely these are bikes older than 1983, that can either be race bikes, or road bikes used on the track. There were a few entries with the type of bike I was contemplating, (Yamaha RD 350 YPVS) which seemed to fair reasonably well. The atmosphere in the pits was friendly, with complete freedom to wander around and chat to the participants, and their teams (mostly their wives, kids etc..). The weekend’s racing cost 10 Euros to watch, and to be honest was great value for money. I came back from the weekend excited at the prospect of being part of the scene, in the year to come.
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