Welcome to the 2016 RACES of Gentlemen.
I'm so glad the weather held out for us.
First I want to say thank you to everybody who's out here.
Incredible vehicles you brought.
Here's what's going to happen.
We're going to run five races.
We're going to run five races.
I've been racing since I was 11.
Started off with quads.
Moved up onto drag racing 69 Camaros on the half mile dirt,
or excuse me, on the quarter mile.
And then when I was 24, started racing 1923 Harley on half mile dirt track.
So yeah, I've been racing since I was really little.
So we're in Wildland New Jersey today at the race of the gentlemen.
Racing on the beach in the beautiful sun, bringing the heat so it's real nice.
Yeah, it's going to be a great time.
I'm out for the gold.
I'm going to try to win.
Last year is the first moment across the finish line ever.
I was hopped up to that line, racing against Matt Wapsler, Matt won.
But I felt really good about being that first woman across that finish line.
Now I'm trying to be the first woman winner.
So I'm hugely competitive.
And I love racing and the sport of racing, so I'm out to win it.
My dad, he was building hot rod motors and street rod motors.
You know, just really cool wicked machine motors, you know,
that just, like those little street machine cars you see with the blowers.
I mean, that was like my dad.
My dad was building a lot of motors like that when I was growing up and building hot rods.
And so when I was three, I went with my dad to Scrivener, Nebraska to go to an IHRA drag race.
And Shirley Muldowney was there.
So my dad had sat me down and showed me the movie, Heart Shape Like a Wheel.
And I just thought it was a movie.
Like, I didn't really think this woman, Shirley Muldowney, was a real person
because at the age of three movies are fake, you know?
Well, then fast forward a week or so and we go to the drag strip and I get to meet Shirley Muldowney.
And I think I'm meeting a movie star, not an actual professional drag racer.
I didn't think that women drag race, you know, my mom didn't drag race,
my aunts or any of my dad's friends, girlfriends and wives.
I just didn't see women, you know, I didn't see them at the drag strip.
Well, then my dad walks me up to Shirley Muldowney at this IHRA race and says,
I'd like to introduce you to someone.
And immediately, like I said, I thought I'm meeting a movie star because I saw this movie about this woman.
And I asked her, why aren't you in Hollywood making films?
And she said to me, well, I'm not an actress, you must have saw my movie.
That was a movie about me.
I'm a professional drag racer.
And at the end of just visiting with her for a little bit,
she told me that I could be a professional drag racer if I wanted to be someday.
So from three years old until like literally now, my goal, I've always just wanted to be a racer, you know,
and I've always wanted to be a professional racer.
So when I'm having fun with old bikes, I try to apply a professional manner to that
and try to have as much fun as I possibly can.
I've always believed in working with someone who's talented and who knows the tracks,
who knows how the bikes run and who's been doing it for a long time.
And my racing coach, Jim Wall, he had been racing in the board track class for some time
and he was the 10 time consecutive board track class champion.
And so immediately I went to him and just started talking to him and I said, hey, where do you train?
And he was like, well, don't really train. He said, well, no, we're going to train together.
I need you to teach me how to race these old bikes because I want to do it
and I want to do it right, safe, and I want to be good at it, you know.
And so, yeah, he took me under his wing and we went to a 3-8 mile track in Holy Oak, Colorado,
which is just a little small town in Colorado, another one of those old Centennial tracks
that had been around for 100 years.
And, man, we just had so much fun. At first we were so slow going,
but now, like, seeing where we first started off in 2013
and then, you know, going to, like, last year and where we were at the half mile in Sturgis
and us just going back down that back straightaway at 70 miles, 75 miles an hour.
I mean, it's incredible to see that progress and I wouldn't have been able to get there
with some more heads, so taking me under his wing.
When you have a mentor and you have really good friends who are racers and they understand racing,
they give you confidence, they give you the knowledge of what to do,
they help you with your machine, and then at the end of the day, you know,
that's what you need, you know, you need the confidence, you need the ability to ride your machine
and then you also need the ability to actually go on for more, you know,
and that's the thing with racing, too, is you've got to get off that line first.
You've got to shift, you can't miss a gear, you know, so you've got to be on top of your game,
but those guys that are so supportive and my mentors and my friends, you know,
I have them sitting on my shoulders with me at every race,
and I'm always constantly thinking about what they say and what they do.
Don't let it load up. When you're at the start line...
My dad, we built a motorized bicycle in literally my mom's living room
and I took it out to Sturgis one year and it had people stopping me on the streets
asking for business cards and brochures and being so young,
I didn't realize why people didn't actually go and build them in their own living rooms, you know,
so I thought, well, maybe I can make a little business out of this.
And a couple other friends in the industry in the motorcycle industry said,
you know what, we need some more women builders.
And I said, you know, but I like cars. Motorcycles don't excite me.
You know, I don't like sport bikes or sportsters or modern bikes, baggers.
I'm not into all that stuff.
And then they started asking me questions about, well, who's bike do you like?
I said, I like the Wall of Death bikes.
I like 1940s knuckleheads and panheads.
And so they said, all you like old bikes.
So then I started doing more research.
And like coming from the racing background, I decided to do more research
on the history of motorcycle racing.
And that's when I follow up with board trackers.
So then I was bound to be determined to build a board tracker
and then enter my husband from the left into my life.
He told me that they were still racing these bikes in Davenport, Iowa and Wausian, Ohio at the antique meets.
And no idea.
Later on in that same summer that we met,
he asked me to marry him with a 23 motor for my board tracker,
which we had already started collecting parts and making plans to build.
So that's how I got into racing old bikes, riding old bikes and having a good time on them too.
So we were coming back from Born Free Six out in California.
We stopped at my racing coach and best friend's house named Jim Wong.
And he said, hey, I got a 38 Indian project that we could build up for road racing.
If she'd like to do that.
And so we thought about it and kind of kicked it around for a few days.
And before we left, we said, you know what, we would like to do that.
Let's build a 45 road racing.
That'd be awesome.
We raced in surges and my racing coach brings some of the Indian parts to surges.
We start working on it and I start thinking, well, who can I get as sponsors?
Who can I get as support with this race bike?
My immediate response was, well, I believe I should probably go to the Indian dealer
in surges out of a right to work together because the Indian dealer in 1938,
Pappy Hoyle, is the one who started the Sturgis Rally in 1938.
So I named my bike the Spirit of Sturgis in regards to it being like a tribute race bike, you know,
with having, paying honor to the founders of the Sturgis Rally and races.
I go to the owner of the Indian dealership.
I cold call him up and say, hey, I think we should meet.
One of my friends told me that we should get together and that this would be, you know,
a good opportunity for both of us to exploit, you know, old motorcycle racing in Indian motorcycles.
And we had a meeting and right on the cover of my presentation, I have the Spirit of Sturgis.
It's just with a, you know, gold paint pen.
I wrote Spirit of Sturgis and it says featuring, you know, antique motorcycle racer,
Brinne Olson, 20th century racing.
Well, he hadn't even opened up the presentation before he looks at the Spirit of Sturgis
and he looks at the cover and he goes, well, where did you get this?
I said, oh man, if he's impressed by my handwriting, wait until you see my presentation.
He goes, no, no, no, where did you get the Spirit of Sturgis?
I'm just working on trademarking that right now.
We're about six weeks into the trademark process.
I go, oh shoot, I just shot myself in the foot and I got to find a new name for my bike.
Well, he was so impressed though that he said, I'm going to absolutely vacuum and help you.
Let's talk to the general manager and the managers at the store and get them on the same level.
And let's do this.
Let's support 20th century racing at Brinne Olson and the Indian.
And we did that debut the bike last year at the Lictor's exhibit during the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally
at the Buffalo Chip and we brought it out for a day of racing at the Flat Track.
At the end of the rally, my sponsor and partner, he came up to me and he said,
how do you think about hosting a vintage festival?
And I thought, this is great because Sturgis is such a motorcycle mecca,
especially for racing and they've got the grounds, they've got everything because of the rally.
So that's how we came up with the Spirit of Sturgis Vintage Festival.
And for me, I became pretty emotional after the last year's rally because, you know,
it was published in a magazine that they were closing down the track.
That that was our last year on the track.
And immediately I just became so emotional because this is where I won my first motorcycle race.
This is where the Sturgis rally started, you know, in 1938.
We got together, we had a couple meetings and I said, you know, I'm definitely all in,
but let's try to honor and save this half mile race track from going, you know, and being demolished
because there's so much rich motorcycle racing history.
And if you think about it, that's really our only, our state's only massive scale motorcycle racing history.
Like that's on such a big level because it set the president for so many years
for hosting the Sturgis motorcycle rally.
So I felt obligated to make something happen, you know.
So yeah, so we created the Spirit of Sturgis.
It's going to take place August 26th and 27th.
We have half mile vintage flashback racing and 660 foot dirt drags on the half mile as well.
And we're having a great party.
We're going to have a little race bike show and everything.
So it'll be a really fun vintage swap meet and antique flea market.
So yeah, all in regards to honoring the history of that track.
Thank you.
