Before I go any further I have to sort out a naming problem, because I got it wrong in my own head for weeks. “MiniSBK” is not a separate national series. It is the name for the youth classes — Moto1, Moto2, the combined Mini3&4, and 50cc — that run inside the RACEMoto Regional Championship’s own numbered rounds at Shannonville. It is a different ladder entirely from the FIM MotoMini Canada National Championship, which is the internationally sanctioned series with its own separate round numbering. Same track, sometimes the same weekend, two different scoreboards. I am writing that down here so I stop getting it wrong out loud at the fence.
Round one of that regional season ran May 8-10 on the infield Nelson go-kart layout, and two of my three boys had a race.
Cohen won both Moto2 races. Not close ones he backed into — the reports both describe him riding up through the field to get there, which is the harder way to win a race and the more useful one to have done at thirteen.
Crosby, seven years old and racing a Honda CRF50 in the combined Mini3&4 class, finished second in race one and third in race two, both times behind the same rider, Thorleif Grummett. He is the youngest of the three of us doing this, and watching him find his own version of a start-line nervous stomach — the same one his brothers have, just scaled down to a smaller bike and a shorter fuse — is its own kind of education.
Two different races, two different bikes, two different outcomes, and one very long drive home listening to both accounts at once, talking over each other, neither one willing to let the other finish first.
