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Gymkhana

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When Portland-based wunderkind Andy DiBrino isn’t busy putting it on the box in the MotoAmerica Championship, winning the RSD Super Hooligans flat track series, coaching riders, or just kicking my ass up and down a race track in the Pacific Northwest, the 26-year-old can be found looking for speed in all of the wrong places.

This has led to Andy getting slideways in his backyard flat track and TT course, jumping road race bikes off big kickers, and most recently taking up four-wheeled drifting on local kart tracks.

So, it was only a matter of time before those two-wheeled and four-wheeled pursuits found their intersection, and would become Andy’s latest project.

Enter the HooliGhana – an exercise in motorcycle and car tomfoolery at one our region’s great treasures: The Ridge Motorsports Park.

To find out more about this creation, we sat down with the Zebra-loving man to get the scoop from Andy on his latest project, which to our knowledge is the first Gymkhana-styled video where the stunt driver and rider are the same person. Here’s what he had to say.

Motorcycle gymkhana is perhaps the ultimate test of any road racer’s bike control. Navigating machines through courses of curves and cones, it boggles even this veteran rider’s mind at the level of precision that goes into every maneuver, and every video of these special events is a free tutorial on the benefits of smooth throttle, brake, and clutch actuation.

It’s not like we need a real good reason to post up today’s installment, but someone finally figured out that a counterbalanced rotary video rig would be an awesome point-of-view perspective for this form of two-wheeled racing.

After the jump, we ride with the winner of this year’s Dunlop Autoby Cup, Round 3 — though, this might be one of those few videos where you’ll want to mute the sound, and play your own soundtrack. You’ll see what we mean…

Asphalt & Rubber readers are an eclectic group of men and woman, and I am not going sully the romance we have going on here by lying to you guys with some sort of convoluted web of reasoning as to how a nearly team minuted Ken Block / DC Shoes / Ford Focus video is related to motorcycles — because well frankly, it’s not. Yeah sure, there is a 12 second Travis Pastrana cameo tucked-away in there somewhere, and that might be enough material to spin-doctor the snot out of this puppy, but here’s the deal:

First, the video is awesome in that 12-year-old boy discovering bottle rockets sort of way. Second, the video is set in my home town, and we all know how militant I can be about the Golden State, whose border I draw somewhere just south of Ojai. And third, the video is an example of great marketing, and it is such an easy example of what can crossover into motorcycles, it pains me that we here in the two-wheeled world haven’t answered back with something even better. Enjoy after the jump.