Quad biker's racing genes kick into gear

Jess Wedlake is completely her father's daughter. It may have taken the Havelock North villager 20 years to come to terms with it but the only child of Graham Wedlake now straddles her "absolute stock standard factory" quad bike with ease.
She will, of course, be the first to hasten to say that the way she came off on the starting line of the Bluff Hill Climb on her Yamaha YFZ450 at the annual Burt Munro Challenge late last month wasn't by any yardstick copybook, but the big blokes loved her zest regardless, dubbing her the "Quad Queen" in her rookie year.
"I probably had a lot more zest then I should have," she reveals after her excessive revving of the throttle resulted in a lift-off on the uphill climb with the machine doing a wheelie on its rear.
That aside, the fact remains the blood pumping through the veins of Wedlake is genetically in tune with that of her English father who has competed in every five-day Burt Munro motorcycling event since the inaugural one in 2006.
"If my dad dies on a bike he'll be a very happy man," she says with a laugh of the 46-year-old manager of Hastings roofing company Edwards and Hardy (HB) Ltd, which also sponsors him.
"It's not that anyone wants to see him die soon but that's the way he wants to go," the Whitcoulls Napier branch retail employee says of an accident-prone Graham, who confessed in 2008 from his Invercargill Hospital bed that "when I burp I taste petrol".
Wedlake says people often try to talk him into giving up racing but "that's not my dad".
The challenge, which this year ran from November 24-28, was generated through interest in the life of Kiwi motorbike racer Burt Munro, of Invercargill, who had a succession of New Zealand road and beach records from the 1950s to the 1970s.
In 1962 Munro covered the standing quarter mile at Invercargill in 12.31 seconds. A movie about his life, The World's Fastest Indian, in which Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins played Munro, was released about the same time as the race was held in 2006.
The results of the younger Wedlake's ATV Quads section of the longtrack, hillclimb and Oreti beach events are inconclusive, as organisers were still crunching the numbers. She was off the pace in her first two runs up Bluff Hill but clocked her best time of 69.62s on the final go to make it on to the front page of the Invercargill newspaper.
It is fair to say this year's East Coast and national women's champion has had a taste of the smorgasbord of races and will return to the predominantly blokes' competition.
Wedlake started racing only in May. She received her first bike on her 11th birthday from her father but preferred to hoon around the family's farm in Havelock North.
"I was always a little scared of them so dad and I had talk about it and agreed I was probably a little too young then."
Over the years she and her mother, Christine Kirkman, of Hastings, who is separated from Graham Wedlake, travelled to watch him compete in speedways so Jess Wedlake built her confidence.
Says Graham: "Her starts are outstanding and she blows away even the top guys."
Her mother was sceptical this year when Wedlake started racing but she was chuffed when her daughter won the two titles in Gisborne in August.
It helps that Wedlake's boyfriend, Matt Harris, of Napier, is into road and trail biking.
Her commitment has also created interest at her workplace, with manager Kerin Barker pinning up articles of her at the Hastings and Napier branches' noticeboards.
Graham Wedlake was happy to have competed this year without any accidents, winning the Oreti Beach Open class NZ title race, but finishing runner up in the 0-500cc class.
"On Saturday night at the speedway [Teretonga] I touched the tapes so I had to start 30 metres back for second place so I finished third overall."
He was fifth in the grand prix class of the longtrack and fourth in the longtrack speedway. He finished fifth in the hillclimb.
In Sunday's race at Wyndham, Graham Wedlake qualified ninth on the grid. Two fifth places and a sixth left him with a top-five overall placing. "I haven't raced on tarseal since last year. I've been doing more beach racing."