Grand Prix to drive thousands to Florence
Staff writer
Florence’s biggest weekend of the year is only a few days away.
Flint Hills Bent Rims will be host Sunday for its annual Grand Prix, which sees thousands flock to Florence as gaggles of motorcyclists speed down Main St.
As of last week, 449 riders hailing from 24 different states were registered.
The Grand Prix began in 1972 to celebrate Florence’s centennial. A Wichita-based group, Sprockets Motorcycle Club, was host. The club is now defunct, though a Facebook group where members share memories of the good ol’ days exists.
Motorcycle races were popular in Marion County even before the Grand Prix.
The Flint Hills Enduro, which took place in Marion and Chase counties, preceded the Grand Prix by a few years. Jim Crofoot of Marion also recalled that Durham held several motocross races.
“Back then it was all manual scoring,” Crofoot said. “You’d run them through hay bales and stop them. Somebody wrote their number down. Somebody else would put a mark or a sticker on their helmet. Now everything’s done electronically, so it makes it a lot easier.”
Crofoot participated in the 1973 Grand Prix as a high school senior. (He couldn’t race in the first because he was at Boys State in Lawrence.) He now serves on the Bent Rims board, while his son gets behind the handlebars.
Bent Rims took over management of the Grand Prix in the mid-’70s, before the race abruptly stopped in 1978.
Crofoot and Bent Rims secretary Patty Putter speculated that the event was halted because of rising insurance costs or issues getting the rights to use the land.
Forty-four years passed before the Grand Prix was revived. A group of biking enthusiasts —among them Florence Mayor Bob Gayle, police officer Duane McCarty, and long-time participant Tobe Moore — spearheaded efforts to run a revamped race in 2022.
Crofoot recalled being surprised Bent Rims was able to save the race.
“I was on the sidelines, looking back, shaking my head, saying, ‘I don’t think they can do it,’” he said.
But the event was a success, and the Grand Prix has happened each year since.
Check-in will begins Friday, when participants begin arriving in Florence. Many will camp in trailers for the weekend.
Saturday is typically when bikers do laps around the course to practice.
Sunday is race day. Two races are staged: one for those using vintage bikes, and one for modern bikes.
“When they start coming downtown to line up, it’s like race horses in the gates,” Putter said. “They’re revving their motors and they’re so excited.”
The races are further divided into “classes,” which start the race in blocs, one after another. There are eight classes in the vintage race and 10 in the modern race.
In the vintage race, one’s class is dependent on the age of one’s bike. In the modern race, it depends on one’s age and skill level.
Motocross is a sport well-suited to the old. The average age of participants last year was 44, Crofoot said. The modern race has an age-70-and-up class with four participants, created this year because one of the diehards demanded it after he turned 70.
“It’ll be a bigger group next year,” Putter said.
It is also an exceedingly masculine event. Twenty-one women total are competing this year, making up less than 5% of participants.
There are two female classes — “women” in the modern race and “powder puffs” in the vintage race.
Women can compete in any class they like, Crofoot said, but men cannot compete in the female classes.
He described the event as “everything from people that shouldn’t be out there on motorcycles to people that are really, really fast.”
The vintage race will begin at 10 a.m. Sunday with a traditional start — a gun fired in the air by the American Legion.
Racers kick-start their bikes and hop aboard, then try to complete as many laps as possible over the course of an hour. The laps are three miles long.
The modern race will begin at 1 p.m. and has no time limit. Instead, competitors race around an 11-mile track until they have completed 100 miles. This usually takes around three hours.
The route can change as late as the day of the race because of weather, so lap distances are estimated.
“One year it got flooded out,” Crofoot said. “There’s that retention pond there the size of four or five football fields, and it had grass and six inches of water standing out there. They were going through the course, and it just turned into a rice paddy.”
Light rain is expected over the weekend. As a precaution, a few narrow bridges have been constructed near the retention pond.
The 100-mile race is difficult for spectators. Consensus seems to be to pack into Main St. for the start and then head out to the ball fields where an obstacle course awaits racers. But large swaths of the race go unseen to all but the racers themselves.
“Out in the country, you can’t really get to many of those places,” Crofoot said.
Putter, in her fourth year of helping organize the race, said she still hadn’t seen most of the course in person.
In any case, competition is sure to be fierce, and the weekend sure to be electric.
“It’s a unique race,” Crofoot said. “There’s only three or four like it in the States right now.”