Georgia, start your engines

Monster trucks, flying dirt bikes, road racing finesse and metal-to-metal short track action — Atlanta and environs can be paradise for lovers of motor sports.

Paradise, start your engines. This spring the racing season begins in earnest with events around North Georgia. Here are three ways to get your drive on.

Monster Energy Supercross

Your 250-pound motorcycle is 30 feet in the air and some fellow competitor happens to roll into your landing zone. Avoid him?

You can’t, says Supercross racer and part-time Georgia resident Davi Millsaps. “You just pray it’s not going to hurt as much as you think it is,” he said.

Millsaps will try to stay pain free — and maintain his points lead — on Feb. 23 when Monster Energy Supercross comes to the Georgia Dome, where it drew 71,000 spectators last year. “That’s an all-time record (for Supercross events),” said Supercross director Dave Prater.

The 24-year-old Millsaps has steered clear of the wreckage this year, which, in this sport, isn’t easy. Last year the top five riders either missed races or large portions of the season due to injuries.

Millsaps learned his skills as the son of racers, growing up in Orlando, Fla., and Cairo, Ga. His mom, Colleen Millsaps, operates a Cairo track that is one of the leading amateur training facilities and she guided her son’s career from amateur to pro. Near the Millsaps Training Facility is Davi’s own 130-acre spread in Climax, Ga., where he trains when he’s not at his California home, near San Diego.

These races feature 20 riders tearing across an indoor dirt track that is sculpted into banked turns, tabletops and ramps that send bikes on 70-foot jumps. Composed of 500 truckloads of Georgia clay mixed with sand, the track is dug up after the competition, trucked to a nearby underpass and stored for the next year’s event.

Atlanta Motor Speedway

Siblings will be siblings, even on the race track. The Jorgensen children of Stockbridge love each other, but they don’t mind trading paint when necessary.

“We got into it going into Turn 1 in Auburndale,” said Taylor Jorgensen, 16, about a Bandolero race in Florida last season when she got a little bit sideways with brother Jensen, 14. “We scared our parents to death.”

This year Taylor has moved up to the larger, faster Legend vehicle and won’t be racing against Jensen for a while. That would come as a relief to most brothers who don’t like to get beat by their sisters. (The rear of her car has the inscription “You just got passed by a girl.”)

But Jensen takes it in stride and is happy that he was a close second behind Taylor in many of their races. “Toward the end of the year he was my biggest competition,” said Taylor. “He was banging the paint off my bumper.”

“I beat her in some weeks,” Jensen recalls happily.

There are eight classes of competition in Winter Flurry races at Atlanta Motor Speedway, which continue through the cold weather to give hobbyists and aspiring professionals a chance to tune their skills. The Jorgensens will be among the teenagers racing in the Bandolero and Legend class cars on Feb. 16.

Though the grandstands at the Hampton facility will be closed to spectators, fans can purchase infield passes to watch the action.

Road Atlanta

This fall, up to 130,000 spectators will descend on Braselton for the 10-hour Petit Le Mans, a European-style endurance race at Road Atlanta modeled after the 24-hour Le Mans race in northern France.

A smaller scale event takes places next month (March 8-10), when the National Auto Sports Association sponsors the Pot-O-Gold Rush at Road Atlanta, a three-day gathering that allows would-be Mario Andrettis to bring their street cars onto the track and compete against their fellow weekend warriors.

NASA regional director Jim Pantas said drivers from ages 13 to 70 will be on the 2.5-mile track. He expects about 450 drivers and 2,500 spectators.

“We pretty much fill up every hotel within a five-to-10 mile radius,” he said. “You’ll see everything from a turbo diesel Volkswagen to a Porsche 997 GT3 race car.”

The event includes high performance driver training and preparation for those seeking a NASA competition license. Drivers must register ahead of time and most classes will fill up 30 days before the event.

April and May will bring other happenings to Road Atlanta. Tens of thousands will attend the Grand-Am race April 19-20, where high performance cars exceed 170 mph. “Tokyo Drift” fans will want to see Drift Atlanta May 10-11, which Road Atlanta president Geoff Lee describes as “synchronized swimming for race cars.”