Quinn Olson is on the fast track to winning times in the Canadian Motorcycle Drag Racing Association.
The St. Albert racer was a speeding bullet on his nitro harley at the recent Spring Nationals in Medicine Hat to kick-off the CMDRA Points Series season.
The No. 1 qualifier on the Old’s Kool Racing sponsored machine defeated reigning champion Al Miles of Edmonton in the final elimination round of the Hawaya Racing Products Pro Dragster class with a time of 7.63 seconds on the quarter-mile track.
“I only licensed on nitro bike two falls ago so last year was my first year competing in the pro dragster class so coming out of the gate this year and taking the first event, the whole thing, was kind of exhilarating,” Olson said of finishing ahead of the long-time pro dragster.
There were 10 racers in total but “a couple of guys blew up,” said Olson, who progressed through four elimination rounds on the last day of the competition.
“We qualified number one on Saturday, which was amazing enough, and then Sunday we just continued to tune the bike the same as we had. You’ve got to adjust to elevation and stuff like that when you’re running nitro. It’s all precision. You mix the fuel and it has to be a certain percentage and then it’s all dependent on the weather so we just tuned it the same, allowed a little bit for the elevation changes with the weather and then just kept running it the same,” said Olson of the carbureted nitro-methane burning dragster.
“There are so many variations and alternative ways to tune the thing. Once you get it tuned then it’s a focused thing.”
Olson’s personal-best time of 7.41 seconds was clocked in North Carolina, where he purchased the bike.
“I trained with the guy that builds these things,” Olson said of the nitro bike school at Rockingham Dragway. “It’s kind of a tough sport to learn because you’re up on a back wheel, on the wheelie bars, for half the track. The front wheel is off the ground and you’ve got to learn how to ride it so you’ve got less than eight seconds to hone a skill that you only get to do four or five times some weekends.
“It’s different than anything anybody can do I guess. There is not many people that actually run these things.”
Olson, 54, has been racing for five years and this is his second year with a license on nitro harleys.
“A friend of mine raced bikes for years and I helped him out in the pits, part of the crew for him, because there is a lot of work that goes into the bike. I was on the super gas and I raced that a couple of years and then I decided that I was kind of going to shut it down and then one thing led to the next,” Olson said. “He said you should try this nitro bike so I got on it a couple of times and man that was it. You hit that throttle and it’s an adrenaline rush like you’ve never seen.”
The next CMDRA competition is the Summer Nationals, July 23-24 in Rimbey, followed by the Edmonton Oil City Nationals on Aug. 7.
Olson has high hopes of building on his success at the Spring Nationals.
“I’m just trying to hone the skills, see if I can get in the top few qualifiers and see what happens. I would like to win but you’re not going to win every time, I realize that, but I would like to continue what I did in Medicine Hat,” said Olson, who hails from the village of Viscount, Sask.
“There wasn’t much to do there except chop bicycles apart and put them back together.”
