Sport bikers come to Gardnerville

EDITOR:

Just wanted to let you know that June 29 was the inaugural bike night at The New Rancho Grande restaurant on Highway 395 in Gardnerville, for the Sierra Sportbike Association (www.sierrasportbike.com).

The association has been the premier sport bike club in Northern Nevada for over 15 years. With the growing number of motorcycle riders in Carson Valley, I decided to expand our club into the Carson Valley area. Our goal is to try and provide a social setting for motorcycle riders, and to promote safe riding. Our association believes in all the gear all the time and promotes motorcycle safety and education. As you might know, sport bikes are like sports cars, and can lead to hooligan behavior in its riders.

One of the leading causes of death for motorcycle riders in our area is failure to maintain a lane due to overriding these bikes in the "twisties" (local mountain roads). We try and address these problems by sponsoring track days at Reno-Fernley Raceway where these riders can safely ride their bikes on a road course. We provide professional racers as instructors and teach proper riding skills for people riding sport bikes. We also work with other professional track day organizers who frequent our area, Like Zoom Zoom Trackdays, Kegwins and Pacific Track Time. We find that by providing a 'close course' environment for riders, they can ride their bikes to their full potential, which has a tendency to slow them down when they ride public roads since they have another safe place to do this.

When not at the track, we do group rides where we riders can ride in groups on some of our local Sierra roads, which are some of the best in the nation. By riding in groups, with other experienced riders, we try and provide a safe and sane way to ride, and yet maintain safety and provide learning opportunities.

Our association has been meeting in Reno on Tuesday nights, and will now hold a Monday night event in Gardnerville. The New Rancho Grande has offered us parking and special food prices for our event. At these events, we try and help promote our local businesses by holding raffles for items donated by local motorcycle shops (we will have raffles after we hold a few of these events), socialize, and organize rides for the local riders.

Even though our emphasis is on sport bikes, we welcome all motorcycle riders, from beginners, experienced, and even 'wannabes'. We have many members that ride touring motorcycles, dirt and cruising motorcycles.

Dale Paul

Gardnerville

Board of Trustees, Sierra Sportbike Association