CVMA Race Weekend

About this event

Chuckwalla Valley Raceway is run in both directions, and this November round goes clockwise, which makes a 2.68-mile circuit most of the grid knows by heart feel unfamiliar again. The Chuckwalla Valley Motorcycle Association is owned and run by racers rather than by a promoter, and crowned its first champions for the 2011 season. Ed Bargy laid the track out in the Colorado Desert off Interstate 10, and the location is the whole point of the winter series: while the rest of the country is salting its roads, this stretch of desert stays dry and mild from October through April. Friday evening is registration, technical inspection and two qualifying sessions per group; Saturday and Sunday are races, from Formula Superbike down through Formula 40 and 50 to the Hooligans and Femmewalla classes. A season licence is a hundred and seventy-five dollars and a race entry seventy. This is a competitors' weekend rather than a spectacle — in the paddock, riders keep a radio tuned to 90.5 FM, which is how schedule changes reach them.