Check out the article on dragbike.com (to see included photos) @ http://www.dragbike.com/dbnews/anmviewer.asp?a=5198&z=3. Huge thanks to my friend Paul Cavanaugh for writing the article about me and my company! :)
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Flight of the Bumble Bee
Tuesday, September 08, 2009 By Paul Cavanaugh
Flight of the Bumble Bee
By Paul Cavanaugh
I do not know how many of you have heard “Flight of the Bumble Bee” by Rimsky-Korsakov, to be quite frank, it completely drives me crazy.
Fortunately, this article has nothing to do with it.
What it does have to do with is a woman by the name of Annette Rob who I met through www.sponsorhouse.com back in 2005 when I first started racing and was trying to find sponsors. Annette had also newly started racing and was on the website doing the very same thing. Sponsorhouse is sort of a social networking site where racers of all types try to find sponsorship. You can have friends much like Facebook and all of us drag racers have a tendency to find each other like magnets.
The Bee learns to fly.
Annette learned to ride on a dirtbike as a child under the tutelage of her father. As she got older Annette learned to ride on the street with a friend’s early model GSXR1100 and finally bought her own 2005 Kawasaki ZX636R where she had her first taste of drag racing at Sacramento Raceway in California.
She managed to do well ET racing getting the bike to run 10.75s. Then she had a slight mishap, which resulted in her waking up under the timing tower answering a bunch of trivia questions like, “What is your name?” “What is the date?” “Who is the President?” “Where do you live?” Admittedly, Annette told me she did not answer the questions very well so the paramedics awarded her a trip to the hospital for losing their quiz show.
It took a few months after the “looptie off the line loop” incident to get back in the swing of things. As time passed she got back to the 10.7 range again only to have to sell the bike for financial reasons.
A friend had been bugging her to ride his wheelie bar drag bike and Annette asked him if he realized she had wrecked her own once on the track. He did not seem to mind and told her to give it a shot. At first Annette was a bit apprehensive about letting the clutch go, wheelie bars or not and her first runs were in the blistering 14 second range (The blisters were on her feet from pushing the bike down the ¼.). Three months later she became comfortable and started knocking out 8.80’s.
She entered in S/C at the NHRA West Coast Motorcycle Challenge and was running all over the board from 11’s to 9’s while somehow managing to make it to the finals. The bike she had to race looked like a Pro Stock bike and she feared the worst. Annette said the run felt good but nothing spectacular stood out about it. At the track she was racing you do not know whether you won or lost until you get your ticket, a white one for a win, a yellow for a loss. When the lady at the ticket booth gave her the white one and congratulated her, Annette thought the lady had made a mistake. It turns out Annette had run an 8.904 for the win.
The owner of this bike had run into financial issues of his own and sold the bike. This left Annette without a ride again. Next, it turns out the company she was working for had financial issues of its own and downsized Annette out the door in October of 08.
4 months and 220 applications later Annette had not one interview for a job and started seriously questioning her ability to be hired. She had been to job fairs where 7 employers would show up to hire and there would be anywhere from 300 to 1,500 people there trying to get these jobs.
Annette did some soul searching and thought about the things she was talented at; marketing, and the things she liked to do; motorcycle racing. Putting them together she came up with www.bumblebeemotorsports.com.
While Annette’s dream is to pick up a Pro Stock ride, for now she is content enjoying herself at the track using her creativity to market her fellow racers.
Now that is something to buzz about.
See ya on the track!
