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Virtuoso of Velocity
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Nicky Hayden
Jeff Buchanan
07/01/2006
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Photograph by Arthur Coldwells
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Every folding chair in the Istanbul Park racing circuit’s
pressroom is taken. The coffee urns have long since been emptied and only crumbs
remain of the lavishly catered spread. The overflow of international reporters
stand along the walls, a din of one-sided conversations in a multitude of
languages pouring into cell phones as they file reports of the day’s events.
They fan themselves with programs, looking at watches, calculating the time
difference between Turkey and their various offices around the
world.
 Suddenly an eruption of flash bulbs and the shuffle of journalists
rising to their feet announces the entrance of the person they’ve been waiting
for. A young man is ushered to a microphone at the front of the room. For the
next 20 minutes, blinded by the bright TV lights, he graciously answers the
myriad, sometimes awkward questions fired at him in broken English from a host
of interpreters. This has become a regular post-race routine now for Nicky
Hayden, the reward—and perhaps bane—of consistently finishing on the podium in
the most vaunted motorcycle racing series in the world. Looking out at the sea
of international press representatives intently scrawling down everything he
says for quoting in magazines, newspapers and on television sets around the
world, somewhere in the back of his mind he must be thinking that this is a long
way from stripping tobacco on his uncle’s farm in Owensboro, Kentucky. (Click image to enlarge)
At 25,
an age where many American males are still searching for their way in life
through the fog of post-college fraternity partying, Hayden is shouldering the
responsibility of several major corporations’ multimillion- dollar investments
played out on an international stage. Hayden plies his trade as a motorcycle
racer at the pinnacle of the sport—the elite, premier class called MotoGP, a
world of two-wheeled competition so fiercely exclusive there are less than two
dozen riders from an international field who can lay claim to
membership.
Top: Hayden ponders 2006 at Jerez, Spain. Bottoom: On the Jerez grid. Photographs by Arthur Coldwells. (Click images to enlarge)
MotoGP is motorcycling’s equivalent of Formula 1. In countries
all over the world, the series enjoys the same kind of pomp and spectacle as its
four-wheel counterpart, combined with the level of fanaticism and devotion fans
have for their beloved soccer. Each race is like the Super Bowl, except it’s
played out 17 times per year.
The MotoGP season runs from March to October,
like a high-tech, globetrotting circus with teams setting up their proverbial
tents and magic show at the finest race circuits in 15 countries around the
world. Hayden will travel to Spain, Qatar, Holland, France, China, Australia,
Malaysia, Britain, Germany and America, among others, to compete, and he will
double those air miles with the training, testing and personal appearances he
makes the rest of the year. The flight schedule alone is enough to humble the
stoutest of individuals.
Honda plucked the young Kentuckian from the AMA
Superbike series after he won the championship in 2002, making the decision to
sink millions of dollars into a multi-year deal to harvest Hayden’s immense
talent, grooming him for the world scene and a MotoGP title. Before a staggering
global audience of nearly one billion people, Hayden performs his magic aboard a
240-horsepower, 320-pound factory Honda RC211V, taming the beast with a smooth,
poetic finesse that betrays the breathtaking speeds he is traveling. Hayden’s
one-off, hand-built Honda is a million-dollar masterpiece of carbon fiber and
titanium perfected in the wind tunnel and the secrecy of clean rooms. It will
touch nearly 215 miles per hour on the straights—at that point machine and rider
are traversing 300 feet of pavement in a single second.
Contrary to what some
people may think about the wisdom of those who willingly climb aboard such
missiles, the men who pilot these exotic machines are not hoodlums hell-bent on
fulfilling a death wish. These are world-class athletes at the peak of physical
fitness who possess incredible mental strength, a calculating calm at speed and
an innate understanding of what makes a motorcycle work. They live at the edge
of tire adhesion where every aspect of what they do is a precisely controlled
science.
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