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Mark Brereton’s Awesome Motorcycle Road Racing DVD
By Bruce Wilkins
 RoadRACE, the DVD |
Whether you’re a motorcycle road racer or not, there’s a new DVD out that is bound to have your hands tightly gripping the side of your easy chair and your body shifting from side to side, as if you, too, are aboard racing bikes on road courses of the Southeast. Forget the phoniness of cheesy Hollywood productions such as the ”Fast and the Furious.” Mark Brereton’s RoadRACE is the real deal.
With eighty minutes of virtual non-stopping racing, most of which is expertly shot from aboard Brereton’s own racing bike and the bike of wicked fast Greg Moore, this DVD will propel any viewer into a world where only thrill-seekers such as motorcycle road racers brave to tread. Even the transitory paddock pieces — with its informal shaking and moving camera style — blends in the personal side of the club-level racing fraternity perfectly with the breath-taking on-track action.
This awesome, independently-produced DVD is the brainchild of Brereton, a native of the United Kingdom who during the week is a button-down executive of a manufacturing firm in Georgia. But on many weekends throughout the year, he and his fellow WERA racers take their bikes to racing venues such as Virginia International Raceway, Road Atlanta, Barber Motorsports Park and other tracks throughout the Southeast.
The ironic notion is that while millions of couch potatoes are glued to watching the latest NASCAR racing on television, these true adventurers race in front of ”crowds” that can really only be described as friends and family members. Yet these weekend warriors are surely undertaking the most dangerous, pure, and skillful form of racing in existence. Welcome to the almost-unknown (to the masses), two-wheel, club-level world of road racing, and there are few better attempts at bringing the reality of this extreme sport to a viewer than Brereton’s RoadRACE.
Thankfully, the universal scheme of things worked in Brereton’s favor as he produced this DVD. He first wanted to have famous bands such as Trapt to provide music for its soundtrack, but quickly learned how expensive an endeavor that would be. So, he turned to friends on the WERA BBS — perhaps the most popular club-level motorcycle road racing Internet chatroom in the nation — for help. In just a matter of days he lined up music from ILL MIC and Healing Sixes, two cool bands in the Southeast that could also be described as club-level in their field. Magically, this resulted in a musical score that meshed so perfectly with the on-track action of Brereton and his fellow WERA road racers.
In that universal scheme of things I’m describing, ILL MIC and Healing Sixes have the same pure, independent intensity of artists who perform mainly for the love and thrill of performing, mirroring the main motivations of the club-level road racers themselves. Thus, we end up with a DVD that may not have the flashy stylistic elegance of a Hollywood production, the well-orchestrated dramatics of a NASCAR race, or the glitz and glamour of a huge rock concert, but instead, RoadRACE captivates its viewers with a raw and relentless drumbeat directly shot through each and every viewer’s very soul.
Even in a country where so many people actually think golf is ”exciting,” there will be absolutely no one who can watch RoadRACE and not be caught up in its pure, powerful, and pounding mental arena of true adventure.
Befittingly, the DVD starts off with Brereton and his girlfriend, Brenda, smiling and talking just prior to his leaving the paddock. This is, after all, a sport in which there’s a solid chance that when loved ones next see each other it could be in the emergency room or worse. In fact, the first time I actually saw Brereton myself was him kart-wheeling along at over a hundred miles an hour, his bike kicking up clouds of dirt and taking out brake markers in the infamous Turn One of VIR. He walked away, thankfully, but that opening scene surely was designed to show that at the end of the day, this sport is not only about the adventurous spirit, but also about love, family, and friendship.
As ILL MIC cranks up, so too, do the bikes, and we quickly see riders as they go through the gears and even passing a tumbling rider who high-sided along a kink. It’s all about a sport that is indeed gritty and dangerous, but also, breath-taking in its beauty and charm.
In fact, one of the most obvious achievements of this DVD is its ability to express the symphony of life that surrounds and permeates the awesome sport of motorcycle road racing. The sun comes in and out, behind and in front, constantly changing as does the rider’s direction to the stable forces of the sky. Constantly changing shadows and glares are as much a part of this spectatcle as the bikes and riders themselves.
The harmony of the fluid movements of the rider is then overlaid into the fluid nature of other riders as they approach one another. In one stream of the DVD shot through the backside esses at Road Atlanta, the viewer actually is swept up into ”their” world of how a line of closely-paced bikes are in fact, the dominant universal reality, while the rapidly-moving earth and sky that surrounds them becomes, eerily, secondary. Never have I truly experienced this sensation from another movie, television show, or music video.
It had to take an actual racer and attached on-bike cameras to visually record this universal connection between mankind’s relentless adventurous spirit and the peace and tranquility of our transcending natural surroundings. Brereton achieved the lofty artistic goal of virtually every producer, director, or cinematographer. He ”created” a world in and of itself.
 Greg Moore (left) along with Chris Siglin and Matt Furtek. |
For those who follow WERA and know the players, there’s also a treasure trove of paddock shots that release elements of the close-knit nature of this club-level, weekend community. Officials, wrenches, family, and friends are seamlessly inlaid throughout the production, which, when you think about it, perfectly mirrors the sport itself. Considering eighty minutes with virtually no dialogue, RoadRACE masterfully conveys an entire world that exists in racing venues throughout the country, but is so little known outside its own realm.
That visual world is as macro as a close-up of Brereton’s knee pad skimming along the asphalt to as expansive as a seemingly long, lazy glide through a turn that is really a few scant seconds of gravitational agony between tire rubber and pavement. The viewer will quickly see this world of perspectives that was perhaps not originally meant to be seen at all. Transportation not to go from Point A to Point B, but instead, transportation for the sole purpose of momentarily being physically and mentally swept up into a symphony that lacks cellos, violins, and piano. In this orchestra pit, the instruments are pistons, tire compounds, gears, fuel, and of course, the indomitable, unexplainable human passion for speed.
Watching from the vantage points of Brereton and Moore is as if sitting between a maestro and the orchestra, except the added dimension of danger radiates throughout the sound and sights of a true extreme sport.
This astonishing DVD provides many camera angles from the bike. Underneath, front, back, instrument console, and from the vantage points of the sidelines. But, perhaps, the most telling sequences that convey so much to the viewer is the closeup shots of Brereton himself from a camera angle looking up from the handlebars. The intense, focused, unblinking eyes of a road racer in action explains the very essence of the sport.
One quickly sees that this isn’t just a recreational sport, but instead, more of a cat-and-mouse game of sheer physical and emotional survival. No, this isn’t a game of Russian Roulette or idiotic boxing, this is a sport where intelligent and safety-conscious adventurers gather their wits and challenge the physical and mental boundaries of human existence in a manner that evokes a strange collision of the rational confronting the irrational.
Having ridden hot laps with some riders, I have seen that virtually every turn is an emotional struggle against the automatic perception that the bike can’t possibly make this turn. But most of the time it does and it does so not just because of chassis adjustments and tire compounds, but through human skill and bravery that is not only unafraid to challenge fellow racers, but the human condition itself. Non-road racing fans call it ”crazy.” They call it ”living.”
That’s the true, transcending, even overwhelming beauty of Brereton’s RoadRACE. It is far, far more than just an independent, off-the-cuff presentation of, ”Hey, everybody, this is home movies from what we do on the weekends.” This is — accidental or on purpose — a glorious and rebellious shout to the universe that we as human beings won’t allow ourselves to be trapped into any norm. This is far more than about speed and motorcycles. If there was one word and one word only to describe Mark Brereton’s RoadRACE it would, in my opinion, have to be: Spirit.
Not to sound condescending in any manner whatsoever, Mark Brereton accomplished something incredible with this DVD, something he may not have intended. He probably sat down in the off-season and decided that he would try to make a DVD of his hobby. In fact, perhaps, he unintentionally and accidently, created something far, far more. Mark Brereton created a masterpiece of the human spirit at its finest.
