Welcome to think bike, the podcast about all things motorcycle and the voice of motorcycle safety and awareness in Alberta. Your host is Leanne Langlois.

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of think Bike. I am very excited today to have a old friend that I haven't seen in quite a long time. Jodi Parowicz from Parowicz Cycle Fab is joining us today to talk about a whole bunch of different things that we haven't touched on when it comes to racing. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show today.

I'm excited to have you here. Like I said, it's it's been a while since we've seen each other, but we do follow each other on socials and you're always up to some crazy things and we'll get into it in a second. But first for our listeners, who is Jodi Parowicz and what got you into riding?

Okay, so obviously, I am Jody Perowicz. I grew up on two wheels. It's what my family does. We eat, sleep, and breathe motorcycles. My dad has made himself a name as well as a business that has supported us my whole life.

It's a passion. He was able to pass that passion on to me. So for him and I, we don't go to work every day. We get to go and play with motorcycles and paint motorcycles, and he builds motorcycles. I race motorcycles.

So, everything in our life literally revolves around motorcycles. And my dad was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 02/2001. And then I was inducted in 2020, and we're the first father daughter duo in the Motorcycle Hall of Fame, which is pretty cool. So it just kind of shows like how much we really engulf ourselves in motorcycles.

Oh, it absolutely is. And for those who don't know who Jodi Stadt is, Dave Perowitz, he's a very famous painter. Our paint guys around here know who he is as well. Amazing work comes out of both of you because yeah, you've picked that up too. And correct me if I'm wrong, I think your dad might have mentioned to it just in passing in a conversation once at the Salt, like, your, I'll call it, motorcycle royalty, like, goes through, like, the Arlen Ness type of folks as well.

Like, those are a part of your circle. So you guys really are up there in that world.

Yeah. I mean, my dad was such good friends with Alan. And I mean, Alan was a mentor towards my dad. And, you know, back in the seventies and even eighties, like, they were the big guys back then because there wasn't anybody else doing it. So it was like, you know, they were in the magazines.

They were going to all the events. People were trying to build bikes off of the bikes that they built because they were very innovative and back then they didn't have catalogs to buy stuff out of and put on, you had to make it and you had to figure out how to make it work.

It's a very different world now. You can buy all this aftermarket stuff. I mean, there's a lot of people that buy Arlen Ness stuff on their bikes now, so it's all made for them. But, yeah, trendsetters for sure. And, like, the real deal, like, the OGs of of that bike build era.

What are you what are you currently riding, and where would be your favorite place to ride?

I am currently riding well, this past weekend, I rode my dad's best friend, Maul, unfortunately passed away a few years ago and he left me his bikes. And so one of them is a 2012 Road Glide, and I just happened to be riding that this weekend. I have a new Road Glide as well, and then I actually went to a bike night a couple like week ago, and I rode one of my FXR's. So I am constantly riding different bikes. I it's first world problems, but it is my business.

They're my retirement someday, but I get on so many different bikes. I love to ride my 50 Panhead, and they all kind of have cool stories, you know, like, Moe's bike, that was my dad's originally, and then he sold it to Dave, who is his best friend, and then Dave left it to me. So it's kind of come full circle. A couple not last year, the year before, I did 12,000 miles on that bike. Literally rode just all over the country, rode into Mexico.

Kind of in honor of of Mull. But also, one of the things was Mull and I always talked about hitting a 100,000 miles. And unfortunately, he left it it left it to me with 89,000. So now I'm at like 106,000, I think.

Nice. Yeah. You got that for him. That's the black and yellow one. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Black is flames.

Yeah. So I will put a challenge out to you Jodi because pre COVID before Mol got quite sick with cancer, we had talked a lot about him coming up here and riding through the Rocky Mountains. And so I will throw that invite to you to hop on his bike and come up here and let's go do that for him because that would be amazing to close that one out for him as well.

Yeah. So part of it was going to Glacier.

Yeah.

And so I I actually, ironically, not planned, nothing. I hit a 100,000 miles in Glacier.

Nice. Nice. I need you on this side of the border for that one. It'll take you through the the Big Rockies. But, yeah, it's I remember him and I talking about that.

Then when COVID happened, he couldn't come up. Then the cancer came. Very sad because he's such a good man and very instrumental in your life as well because when I first met you and let's kind of touch on that, it was at the Salt Flats and he's your crew chief.

Was like part of our team. Ronnie was my crew chief. Right. And then Dan Thayer was my tuna. Yeah.

And then Mo, my dad, and a couple of the other guys that kinda came with us. They were like our everything guys. And especially Mo, I mean, he played such a crucial role. I mean, he drove the truck and trailer out there. He made sure my bike was set after every race, you know, cleaning, you know, making sure the salt's off of it.

I mean, you know how much the salt cakes onto your bike. But there wasn't he used to, like, joke with my dad all the time because there wasn't one run that I made that he wasn't at the starting line. And there was one run that I made that my dad wasn't at the starting line. So Mal was always like, oh, I was there every run, every run.

What were your achievements there? Because you set some pretty cool records and on a Harley.

Yeah. So I still hold 16 land speed records.

Jesus.

I was the first female on an American D Twin to go over 200. Before we

went there Wait, that's 200 miles for the 200 miles

Crazy. So, before we went out there, I did a little research, and I saw that no female had gone over 200. So, that kind of became my goal, because you can set records, and people can take them from you. Nobody can ever take the first. You'll always be the first.

So I wanted to be the first. We made it our goal, and fortunately, we had a good team. We we we were good out there. We were really good.

Yeah. You guys you guys made the mark for sure. I agree with you on that. You like you can there'll always be a first and that was last year for me, there was like nobody had done what I had done on the Rocket three like that high of a CC with with a side hack on it and went out and set two and, you know, that's that's the first. And I set the bar.

So, you know, nobody else can take that from me. You're right. It will always be the first. But you were yeah. You were a force out there and and your bike was amazing.

But then there's all this stuff in Daytona and you're riding all this old stuff in Daytona. Tell me a little bit about that.

Okay. So that was a little bit why we kind of stopped going doing land speed racing because I was starting to get into like antique bikes and circle track racing and stuff like that. And, I mean, it just it takes up so much time. You don't make any money at this. So and it's like, you still gotta work.

You still gotta make it happen. So, obviously, we kind of retired our land speed race team and got into Sons of Speed, which is circle track vintage racing. So it's under a thousand cc's in banked paved circle tracks and you have no brakes and no gears. So just to let that set in. So you push, they push you to start, you get the bike going, pop the compression release, starts up, get up on the track, and then there's a pace bike, and everybody has to stay behind the pace bike.

And as soon as the pace bike drops down and crosses the line, you go. And, you know, you think, like so I raced a couple of different motorcycles, but let's just we'll use the 1919 Holly for an example. That bike, it was fast. Like, you know, you think, alright, 1919. It's over a 100 years old.

It's rickety. There's no suspension. You're holding on for deal life. Like, how fast could she be going? I mean, we were going seventy, seventy five miles an hour Jeez.

On these tracks. You got remember, no brakes. So, you might be able to go wide open in that straightaway, but you come to that corner, that's where it determines, you know, the people that got balls don't. So, you know, you gotta hang those corners because also, these bikes are fast, but it takes them a whole lap to get up to speed. So if you let off, you're not catching back up.

There's not enough time to catch back up. So it's like you really got to stay consistent on these bikes. But everybody used to always laugh because they'd say she just went from 330 horsepower to about 20, you know, at the moment. So it's one extreme to the other, though, because like I said, there's there's no brakes. So the only way you slow down is we would have, a kill switch on the handlebars.

So you hit the hit the kill switch. It literally shuts the engine down, but you have to hold it. And the second you let it go, it starts back up again.

That concentration is insane. Is it like when you're at the SALT and it's not gender specific? Like you're out there against the guys, right? And how did you do?

So I was actually just telling somebody about this today. The first and I'm not sure exactly how accurate my numbers are for land speed racing because I kind of forget, but the first year that we went out to Bonneville, I believe there was like three twenty races, and there was only 19 females. Yeah. So we didn't even make up 10%. Yep.

You know, it's like such a male dominated thing. And then in Sons of Speed, I was saying, I probably did let's say I did 20 races. I'm going to say 15 out of the 20, I was the only female. Like, they just and there's other girls that race in it, you know, but they don't race every time, or they race one time and didn't come back, or whatever the reason is. Yeah.

So, nine times out of 10, I was racing the guys.

And where were you placing?

I was a hot contender. I was right there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I won all my heats and I'd go for the final and I'd be winning and one lap in, I'd blow my back up. Oh. I'd break a chain.

You know, break a valve, like, you know, because they're old. They can only take so much abuse. So, it's like, if we had to have three heats, that would kill my bike. It would kill it. You know, I'd just be literally talking to it in my helmet of, come on, keep going.

Two more laps. One more lap. Come on. I did take home the checkered flag in one of the races, so I can't say I won and I barely won. Barely won, but I was just a little more consistent.

I wasn't faster, but I was a little more consistent, and I literally got ahead by a tire width on Turn four and was able to beat beat the guy that was winning.

I'm gonna guess that because of your history at the Salt Flats and everything that you accomplished there and then your family being who your family is, these guys aren't looking at you coming out onto that track going, oh, look at that girl. See what she does. They're looking at you like you belong there.

Yeah. They do. They do. I I definitely I think that because of land speed racing or whatever, I had a lot of respect right away. And these are all different motorcycle bubbles.

You know, like, the land speed people don't race antique motorcycles. Antique motorcycles don't race land speed. It's a motorcycle world, but it's different. It's different bubbles, it's different people. You have different, you know, ways of life.

You know, whether these guys are just go to these two, three races a year and that's it. They don't actually even ride their motorcycles. Like, it's just all these bubbles are just so different. And that's what's kind of cool about me and even my dad is we're so diverse. Like, I'm in so many different bubbles because I feel like I can engulf myself in all two wheels and it's all knowledge to me.

It's, you know, the better knowledge the more knowledge I can have, the better rider, the the better I can be at my job.

Yeah. No. Exactly. Exactly. Because your whole life is about bikes and building, painting, like just understanding everything about them.

But Yeah.

Okay. So the next bubble then is this like Cannonball, which I mean most people know the movies and like it's a car thing and whatever, but like you're doing it on again vintage. So how does that work?

Okay, so the motorcycle cannonball was a cross country endurance race. So the first one that I did in 2018, we went from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, and I rode a 1926 Holly JD. So part of it is that you have to be able to fix your motorcycle during the day. So you get in the beginning of the day, you get a map of the route that you have to take, and all it is, is, like, go 5.5 miles and take a left at the Red Bond. It's not that specific.

There's no GPS. Sometimes we would go in circles, where I'm like, 'I swear we're already on this road.' You know, but they did it on purpose to like, throw you off. But, you know, in these bikes, they don't have odometers, so you would have to have a bicycle little pedometer on your bike to tell how many miles you've gone. But so you have to get from A to B every day on your own. So you have to carry what you think you might need, and if you break down and you can't fix it yourself with what you have, you have to get picked up by the sweeper truck.

And then you lose your points for the day. So it was like, if you got picked up by the sweeper truck, you had to do, like, the walk of shame. You did not want to get picked up by the sweeper truck. So that first year, fortunately, I made it all the way across country. We made it, like, 3,800 miles without skip and beat.

My bike was so solid. It was such a good bike. Like, it was just I soaked it up. But then I did it again in 'twenty one, and we rode from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan to Myrtle Beach to Corpus Christi to South Padre Island.

That one just plagued me. It made up for the first one. I literally had issues every single day. I just was just plagued with, you know, nothing that I could have prevented. On that one, I wrote a 1921 JD.

It was my friend Tom's, and it ended up I was in first place on the thirteenth actually, twelfth day. I only had, like, three days left. And we were in Texas, and we stopped for gas, and it was me and my friend Alex, and which I was just talking to Alex and saying, like, I couldn't have done it. Like, so the other people on the race can help you. Okay.

But you have to remember too is they're in the competition, too. So, you know, not everybody's going to help you. Yeah. But there was a couple of times where if I didn't have Alex with me, I wouldn't have known, you know, what to do to fix something. But we pulled into the gas station and I said, Alex, something is wrong.

This thing is just vibrating like crazy. Like, there's something wrong. And we looked over my bike and we realized that all the back motor mounts had completely broken off. So my motor was just hanging on by the front motor mounts. And I only had about 50 miles left to go.

So we took bailing wire and wrapped it a whole entire roll around the cylinders to the frame to everything, anything that we could to try to just hold the Moda in place. Got back on the road, and in the meantime, we had to take my primary, the Ka'va, off. So because it just was the chain was just slapping the primary because the Moda was so off. So I'm going down the road just watching it, like and it's getting wonkier and wonkier. And we're moving along, we're like, Keep going, and Alan's right beside me, and all of a sudden, the thing just breaks off.

The chain breaks off. The primary comes flying back. It's stuck in my rear wheel. I skidded off into the ditch. Like, oh, what the heck?

So I had to get picked up by the by the sweeper truck. Sorry.

Oh, wow. And then you have the walk of shame.

I do the walk of shame. So I was so bummed because, you know, now I'm out. Like, I can't make that up. But my dad was like, well, listen. We'll tear it down tonight.

We'll get it fixed. We'll be back on the road tomorrow. No problem. We got this. So they tear it all down, fix the mounts, fix the, you know, the frame, everything.

They get it back together, and they go to, like, tighten the motor down, and they're like, something's wrong. Come to find out, I had broken the whole neck of the frame, and the front end was broken as well.

So if you're gonna blow something up, you just, like, do it all.

Yeah. Like, anything that could have broke, I broke. Like

So needless to say, you probably didn't finish that one?

No. So fortunately, the Cannonball is so cool. The people that are on it and it's like land speed racing. Everybody helps everybody out. I actually ended up riding the rest of the way.

One guy, his wife showed up, and he had already lost points for whatever earlier. So he was like, 'Hey, my wife just came here. You want to ride my bike?' I was like, 'Yeah, okay.' So I jumped on his bike one day, and then the next day, somebody had brought an extra bike, so I ended up getting on his bike. And so I ended up riding the rest of the way, just not.

Not for points. Yeah. What a community.

That sounds like an Such an experience.

Yeah. That sounds like an amazing adventure. So you've done like almost every type of racing. Have you ever thought of like this will be a hard one for you because I don't think there's any Harley sport bikes. But have you ever thought of getting like into road racing just to try it out?

Or?

Yeah. There's a couple of local guys, my dad's buddies and stuff that do do it with baggage. Like in the Yeah. Oh, yeah. They started doing that.

Yeah. Yeah. Local road course. Yeah. Because they do like weekends, you know, you just go out there and ride.

Yeah. I keep saying, I'm like, man, will you guys call me so I can go with you guys? Yeah, so I would love to do that. I would love to get out there on my road guide and go around those corners.

I totally forgot they started doing that in legit competition too.

Yeah. It's pretty big.

It's insane. I've seen that. I'm like, what are they doing? But it's like baggers, and off they go, what about drag racing? Have you ever done drag?

Like straight out drag?

Yeah. I took right before Bonneville, I took a drag racing school, George Bryce's school. So it was like five days. You go down there and they basically teach you how to drag race. It was cool.

I don't know. I feel like it's not much of a thrill. It's like gone. Would have dragged out a little bit, but I don't know. It wasn't really Not your thing.

Yeah.

I I've had people because I know a lot of people who drag race up here and and I've spent some time at the track with them and like with photography and stuff. And they're like, oh, gotta do this. I'm like, that's not really my thing. You know, it's just, it doesn't I like to go watch, but it doesn't interest me to do. I think you and I are similar in the sense of, I wanna do things that not everybody else is doing.

Right. Yeah. And I I want, like, a little more of a challenge. Yeah. Like, a longer challenge, I guess.

But I think people don't understand. Like, well, the cannonball, that sounds like the craziest challenge ever because you do need to know how to fix things. And then, like, the Sons of Speed, like, wicked cool on oh, now I'm from Boston. But it's just like it's a cool adventure on like a circle track. And then like land speed racing, people don't understand how hard that actually is.

And it's hard to explain it. And they're like, oh, you're just going fast in a straight line. And I'm like, it's a little more than that. Like, help me explain that part. Because there's a lot of safety that goes into that.

Yeah. There's so much more to it. And I I get that too where they're like, oh, it's just a straight line. They give us plenty of room. But the thing is, there's so many different factors into going fast at Bonneville.

You can have all the horsepower in the world, but if you can't get it to the ground, then you've got nothing. And the surface is so unlike anywhere else in the world that you can't practice. There's no practicing. You don't know what that how that tie is gonna spin on the salt or the condition of the salt. Is it gonna be slick?

Is it gonna be thick? Is it gonna be sticky? And I mean, you know, it changes every day. Like, the salt is forever changing, and it's also it's a team effort. I couldn't have done it without my crew chief.

He couldn't have done it without the motorcycle. The motorcycle couldn't have done it without all the products that we used to to build it. It's Everything has got to align. It's got to work together. Wind, even, you know, it's so vast out there and big that the wind plays such a big role, and the course is so big that just because there's no wind at the start line doesn't mean there's not going to be wind at Mile Maka 5.

Yeah. So, there's just so many different factors into it that it's not just getting on a bike and going. If that was the case, everybody would do it, and they're not, you know? Yeah, they're not. Yeah, I get that too, where they're like, yeah, big deal, she went straight fast.

You try it.

Yeah, come on down, give it a shot, you know? You touched on something that, you know, there's not a lot of women involved in any of this racing. There is a lot more women out there riding on the street, which is really great to see. I'm sure it's the same down in The States as well. How do we get more women involved in racing?

To get more women involved in racing, that is a tough question, because I would like to see that. I would like to see more women involved, but I almost think, like, at this point, it's tough because you have to have a team. No matter what kind of racing you're doing, you've got to have support, and you've got to have knowledge, and you've to have time. And, you know, I don't know whether women don't want to take the time or they don't have the time or the support. I mean, it's so important to have the right people around you.

And I don't know about, like, I don't know how I would get women into racing themselves, but getting them as spectators, getting them interested in it, getting them as fans of it, like, even that's cool. You know? And I try to always advocate for women to just get on two wheels. Just get on a motorcycle. You know, go take the safety course, which I already knew how to ride.

I mean, it basically was born on two wheels, but my dad made me go take the safety course. Nice. When I

got my kids. Good job, Dave.

Yeah. That that was a cool thing because, you know, he taught me and my brother taught me how to ride motorcycles, but they taught me, like, how they know. They don't they didn't teach me, like, the correct way, the, you know, the proper way. So it was cool to take that course because I did learn a little more than what I already knew. So I always try to advocate that.

And, you know, you go and take the course, if you don't like it, it's not for you. At least she did it. Yeah, but you never know. You might like it and tell your husband, 'Hey, I'm getting my own bike.' You know? So I'm always an advocate of going and taking the course.

And also, think that somebody else teaching you versus somebody you know is always a little better, and you use their bikes. They're just little, you know, two fifties or five hundreds that you can handle, and it gives you some confidence to to get on a motorcycle and try it yourself.

Yeah. And I mean, do it for you. That's like, that's such I'm so happy that your dad threw you in a course no matter what because yeah, you like came out of the womb onto a bike and I think a lot of people think, well, I grew up with it. But you do learn. Is there any other last question.

Any other kind of safety lessons you've learned along the way, like outside of normal training?

As far as like safety, I would say always ride at your own pace. Don't push. Like, if if you're riding with a bunch of guys, girls, whatever, that are totally experienced, they're on different bikes, they can hang those corners, Don't feel like you have to keep up with them. You'll find your way. You'll figure it out.

Like, don't push it. And that's where I find that a lot of accidents happen because they're trying to keep up with their friends and they're not at the same skill level. And that's okay. That's okay. Some people are better at some things than others.

So it's like, don't go outside your comfort zone, you know, because you're chasing somebody else. You know, stay within your limits and you know, you can always get better, but you're not going get better in a hospital bed. Know, that's

Yeah, or six feet under, whichever. I say the same thing, like ride your ride. It's good to push yourself a little bit, but within the means that you can. And if you're riding with a bunch of people who are like, you need to keep up, well ride with different people because they're gonna get you hurt pretty fast.

Yeah. And it's exactly what I said. Like, everybody has technology nowadays. Like, you lose them, you'll find them. Pull your phone out, look at a map, call them up.

Like, yeah, the excuse of, you know, oh, I'm trying to keep up with my friends. Well, that's not an excuse anymore. Know, just stay within what you feel comfortable doing, not what they feel comfortable doing.

I think that is a perfect note to end on. That's a really great lesson for everybody, especially the women out there. Jodi, thank you so much for taking the time for me. I really appreciate it. It's good to see you again.

Ditto. And thank you for having me on your show. I appreciate it as well.

Now we just gotta get you and, Mole's bike up here to go through the Canadian Rockies.

Yes. It's about you for another road trip.

We'll chat. Alright, everybody. Hang tight for the mixed bag. On today's mailbag, Meredith sent us an email asking us for a discussion on airbags. While we'll be doing a full episode a little later in the season, the quick note would be that air tech is not just for MotoGP anymore.

It's actually getting to be more affordable for us common folk. Look into the Alpinestars tech five, tech seven, or tech 10. They all offer a different amount of coverage with the tech five at the quote unquote lowest and tech 10 at the highest. But be aware of some feedback from our top local road racers. While they all agree that the most coverage is the best with the tech 10 as it covers your hips as well, there have been some issues with it not deploying or deploying when it shouldn't.

Therefore, most of them are running the new tech seven. You're looking at about a thousand dollars for these airbags, but it could very much mean the difference between a very long recovery to a shortened one, paralysis versus being able to walk or more. So much so it's something that I'm getting into this year and something that everyone should really consider. And that's our show for today. To make sure that you don't miss out on any of our upcoming podcasts or listen to previous ones, make sure you click on subscribe or follow wherever you get yours.

If there's a topic you'd like us to cover or a guest you think would be great on the show, or even a question for the mailbag, let us know. You can connect with us on all the socials. Email us at info@ab-amss.org or reach out through the website at a b dash amss dot org. Thanks for listening to Think Bike. From us, always remember to ride smart, ride safe, and think bike.

See you out on the road.