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CONTACT: Mrs. O'Leary's cow (800) HOT-MOOO

RUDIMENTARY, PA (VPI) You have to hand it to those plucky Team Longbeard people: they refuse to quit when they run smack dab into hardship.

For starters, they were hit with what most racing veterans would call a "catastrophic setback" in Daytona this year. It was here at the '02 season's premier event that the Amish team's astounding all-natural, steam-powered wheat-composite Superbike was entirely consumed before the race by a rare Venezuelan Prancing Goat. This animal was allegedly the property of superstar Scott Russell, who has a number of rare species running around on his Georgia farm.

"That animal ate the whole bike, rear stand and all, just like that," said an amasuperbike.com Daytona Correspondent that looked a lot like Susan Haas. I think it was Susan because, while telling me this story she was simultaneous transcribing a press conference and balancing Nicky Hayden's tires.

"The team followed that weird-looking goat around the paddock all day with a wheelbarrow, hoping their Superbike might appear," she continued, while mapping the fuel injection on Anthony Gobert's Yamaha. "But no Superbike scat has shown up yet."

"The goat is God's creature, and will surrender our property in God's good time," opined the Team's PR Master Brother Kenneth Celibate on Sunday.

(Full disclosure: Celibate was, quite literally, put out to pasture after Daytona as there was plowing to do. We shall hear from his replacement shortly).

Anyway, in this particular case "God's good time" meant several days later, well after the race. The location turned out to be, allegedly, Scott Russell's Hummer back in Georgia where the goat had been placed in charge of the satellite navigation system (or, eating the trash out of the vehicle. My notes are unclear on this point).

Bottom line: the remains of the Superbike were unridable.

Poor Team Longbeard. If it were me, I would have been pissed and probably thrown a fit when that goat did his bitter business. I might even give up building a Superbike if I was them, since every time they try something new bad things happen.

But these people are unusually hardy stock who are known to work long, hard hours without the help of electricity. This means they have no blenders, Playstations or tire warmers. Indeed, we saw the lengths these people are willing to go to in order to avoid electricity when the "tire warmers" in the Daytona pits were actually several young women with unusually large forearms who generated heat in the all-natural-rubber tires by rubbing them continuously (while the bike was parked, of course).

You would think fate would reward such hard workers, but no.

No sooner had the team returned to their Pennsylvania factory, where they were producing an all-black, street-legal version of the Superbike designed to be pulled by a draft horse instead of run on steam like the race bike, that yet another disaster struck (although they deny it).

"Man, that place went up like Michael Jackson's hair in a Pepsi commercial," drooled Robert "Rad" Simpleton, a local witness who specializes in witnessing things and then commenting on them.

"I ain't never seen nothing like that big ol' fireball. Man, there weren't nothing left of them Amish's big black barn on the hill. The word on the trail was some adolescent cows broke into the building and started tattooing each other using a forbidden propane torch they stole from a non-Amish farm. They started somethin' in the barn on fire as they weren't too good with that torch on account of, well, they're cows."

That makes sense.

"And, man, did that place go up," he continued. "The cows got away, but the barn was burned to the ground and then the ground burned. It looked like the crater my brother's minibike left in our mom's vegetable garden, when we strapped a cruise missile we stole from a Chamber of Commerce fundraiser on it and shot it off the roof."

It's amazing how violent some people of the land are, don't you think?

But we got a very different story from Team Longbeard's new PR person, a woman who, amazingly enough, is not Amish. She has worked with these hardy people before, though, when they mounted the Encounter Today's Buggy campaign to introduce non-Amish peoples to more traditional forms of transportation. Her name is Diva Von Disseminator, and she paints a very different picture of the tragic inferno:

"The fire at the Team Longbeard Motorbike Manufacturing Facility was a minor event, and should in no way interfere with production or parts distribution," she said in a fax she gave us from the fax machine she wears around her neck like a big necklace. "The damage was really quite inconsequential."

"But hey," we pointed out, "there was nothing left but a burning crater."

"This is a source of heat for the workers," she replied.

"But then a tornado hit," we pointed out.

"The fresh spring breeze helped clean out the slight debris from the minor combustion event," she faxed.

"What about the flood that hit after the tornado, and filled the crater with all the crap from the toxic landfill?" we finally queried.

"Team Longbeard sees no problem with getting the English their motorbikes in time for the spring riding season," she said. She tried to add to this, but she had some kind of problem with her fax machine. There was a paper jam, and this missive maker so precariously hanging from her neck caught fire. As fires often do, it spread to her flowing, Stevie-Nicks-style garment.

"Nothing to see here! I'm just going to check on the inventory!" she screamed as she ran out into a pasture and jumped in a pond, creating a violent splash that frightened several cows.

One of these fleeing bovine spectators had a tattoo of a milk carton on her ass, too. It looked like it was half-finished.

Hey, you don't think. . . nahhh .