Sailun Tire Canada Presents The Monday Gate Drop

Good day, and welcome to another edition of the Monday Gate Drop. Sailun Tire is your one-stop shop for car and truck tires as they offer all types of tread patterns and styles of tires. If you require a new set of tires for your car, SUV, and or truck, please visit www.sailuntire.ca

I hope everyone a had great first weekend of April. My weekend was good as I spent it in a hockey arena watching my son play his final tournament of the year. After six months of hockey, the season is finally over and now it’s time to change the focus to moto. Even with the January shutdown, our hockey season was very enjoyable and my son enjoyed playing in a new town and with a new team. Speaking of hockey. I mentioned last week that Brett and Melody are heavily involved with a Senior AA team called the Seaforth Centenaires. Well, on Saturday evening in front of their home crowd the Centenaires cliched the 2022 WOAA Senior AA Championship as they defeated the nearby Clinton Radars four games to one. Something tells me that the town of Seaforth is still celebrating as we speak as this title has been a long time coming. Anyway, congratulations to the Centenaires, Brett and Melody Lee, and of course the entire community of Seaforth. It was great having Senior AA hockey back this season.

This past weekend was also a little different as for the first time since early January we didn’t have Supercross to watch on Saturday night. I know I missed it but for the riders, teams, and series personnel I’m quite sure it was nice to have a weekend off. I think it’s been an entertaining SX Series thus far and even though there isn’t much of a championship battle in the 450SX class, the racing has still been excellent at each round. I think it’s been great watching Eli Tomac have the type of season he’s currently having. Obviously, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen him have success in Supercross, but this is most certainly the first time he’s looked like he’s actually enjoying being on the race track. Over the years Tomac has appeared to be very robotic when he’s at the track and that has sometimes carried over to his riding. Yes, he’s won and won a lot, but it’s been difficult to be a real Tomac fan as his personality has been somewhat dry and you don’t feel like he even cares if you cheer for him. He just shows up on the weekend, does his job, and then goes home and puts in another week of work. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that as I’d rather see that and have a rider win as much as Tomac has as opposed to a rider with a ton of personality who finishes 10th every weekend. But there is something different about Tomac this year and I feel it’s been a lot easier to cheer for him. He just looks to be having more fun off of the track and that has translated into perhaps the best Tomac we’ve ever seen on the track. I hope he keeps winning in 2022 and I hope this new persona is here to stay.

In keeping with SX, there has been some talk lately about how to make the sport safer for everyone involved. Have the 450’s gotten too fast and do we need to slow them down? Could the tracks be made safer? Or are things just fine and is SX a sport where we have to accept that riders are going to get injured? Well, on the latter I’d say no way should we ever accept that crashing and injuries are just a by-product of the sport. Yes, SX and MX are dangerous and riders do crash, but I feel like as a rider you can do a lot of things to minimize the risks. With regards to the 450s being too fast? If the average rider threw their leg over a factory 450 I think what would surprise them the most is how easy they are to ride. I don’t think it’s a case of them being too fast at all and right now it would be difficult to tame them down without affecting how the top riders ride them. So that leaves us with the tracks and the area where I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement as far as making the sport safer.

If we use history as our guide let’s look at what the SX tracks used to be like back in the mid-2000s. They were more technical, they seem to vary more in their design, and most importantly they were slower. As the saying goes “speed kills’ so if you want to make SX safer then slow the tracks down. You could do this by making more technical sections, use more over/under bridges, and maybe sit down with some of the top riders and see what they think would work best. I don’t know, maybe they do and we just never hear about it. Another item that could be looked at is the placement of Tuff blocks on the side of the track. When these foam blocks were introduced years ago they were considered to be a breakthrough with regard to both track safety and track presentation. In many ways they still are but we’re seen several crashes over the years when a rider gets a little sideways through a rhythm section and instead of just exiting the track they hit a Tuff block and suffer a hard crash. I’m not sure what the solution is concerning Tuff blocks and how they can be placed around the track so they continue to aid in safety but also allow riders to get a section wrong and not hit one and have them cause a crash. If you take a sport like sport like Formula 1 they’re constantly looking at ways to improve safety and hopefully behind the scenes SX is doing the exact same thing. To sum up my opinion. Leave the bikes alone for now and let’s look at the tracks and also look at ways to have a few more off weekends for our top SX riders.

Onto some Canadian moto news and did everyone watch the new GDR Fox Honda film The War For Four? Don’t worry, if you haven’t watched it then I won’t spoil it for you. But I can say that it’s excellent work by Interlaced Productions and it really captures the team’s 2021 summer competing in the Triple Crown Series. In this 38 minute masterpiece, you not only see the team’s results during the MXTour Series but you also get an in-depth look at what each rider went through to get those results. Chasing a championship at any level isn’t an easy task and last year the GDR Team went through it all. I love videos like this and I hope we see more of them in the future in Canada. If you missed it, here it is:

Well, that is it for me this week. I don’t have Covid but I’m severely under the weather today so I’m going to have to cut this short. I can’t believe we’re into April already as March felt like it went by fast. More tracks are opening up this week and racing will begin in certain regions in a few weeks. Time is moving fast and soon it will be time to travel to races every weekend. However, for now, it’s time for practice and preparation. Good luck and thank you for reading. Have a great week!