Round·up
ROUND·UP
JOE PARKHURST
BOB HANSEN, of Team Hansen fame—a fame earned with Kawasaki recently, and Honda before that—has gone out of racing and come into the industry. After managing racing teams that earned him an outstanding national reputation, Bob has become the manager of operations at Continental Motorcycles in the western states. They distribute Laverda bikes, Kreidler mopeds and an electric scooter called a Solo.
Bob is an old friend to CW dating back to the old days at Daytona when he was a motorcycle dealer in Racine, Wisconsin, and used to show up with the most beautiful bunch of Matchless G50s in the world. Wonder if he’ll start a racing team of SFC Laverda production racers?
PERHAPS YOU’VE been wondering who has been winning the motorcycles in CYCLE WORLD’S big Win A Bike contest. Because of the lengthy time required to prepare each issue of the magazine, and because the drawings were held weeks after issues were taken off of the newsstands, it has been difficult to make the winners’ names known to you readers.
John Fisher of Cincinnati, Ohio, won the Suzuki TM125L that was given away in the August, 1974, issue. In September we gave a Kawasaki KS125 to Christmus Tadena in Braintree, Mass. With the October issue we offered a Honda Elsinore CR125 and Neil P. Chen of Gainesville, Fla., was the winner. Next month we will publish the names of more of the winners, and within a short time after that the full list. The contest closed with last month’s issue. . .January 1975.
EGULAR readers will WL notice something different about this issue of CW. . .the $1 price tag. Nothing has pained me more than being forced to raise our price. It is useless for me to go into a long dissertation about the cost of paper, printing, postage, etc., but, unfortunately, those are the reasons. It is difficult to complain of inflation, then turn around and contribute to it.
We were, genuinely, forced into it. I can only say that I sincerely hope it will be the last-ever price increase for CYCLE WORLD.
IN EUROPE they use basically the same engine for speedway, grass track, and what they call long-track racing. For years the JAP—not a racial slur, the initials stand for J.A. Prestwich—ruled the roost. The Czechs showed an interest and built the Eso/ Jawa, now the dominant power plant in speedway racing on both sides of the Atlantic. Now Weslake hopes to conquer the field with a new virtually-square 495cc singlecylinder four-valve, fourstroke engine that was raced recently less than 24 hours after the first production engine was assembled.
Don Godden rode it at the Lydden International grass track event. Winning one heat, he caught European Speedway Champion Peter Collins when his battery gave out. That was enough to make Collins want a Weslake for the 1975 speedway season. No gearbox is used in speedway, but Godden had fitted a Swedish Drott box and was using his own frame.
Grass track racing is best described as speedway on grass; interest is added by putting a kink on the back straight. Sounds a little like American TT racing. Long track is strictly a European sport using a banked and graded surface course that is about a mile and a half around. That is long for a dirt track! The Weslake engine revs to 7000, but with further development it is planned to buzz to 8500 rpm. With champions like Godden, Collins, Michanek and Ivan Mauger showing interest, it is obviously going to be the engine to watch this year. Costa Mesa too?
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RITING this column in early December places a hardship on my ability to talk about the present state of the economy, since our readers will be seeing it in the month of January. There is no question of the fact that we are in a recession and that economic considerations are the topic of conversation in every business office across the country. I never studied the subject in school—never even gave it much of a thought at the time—but I’m certainly thinking a lot about it now.
If our general slowdown continues, and if it is combined with continued rising fuel costs, price and wage fixes, a reluctance on people’s part to spend their money on new houses, cars, costly appliances, etc., it is almost easy to predict that one of the few things that will continue to sell will be motorcycles. Maybe it’s not anything to shout about. The fact that bikes just might become a major form of economical transportation is nice, but not at the expense of a “soft” economy, as the experts have labeled what is happening now. The leaders of the motorcycle industry are telling me that things look pretty good for motorcycle sales right now, after a very good first quarter, very bad second and third, and an uptrend in the fourth quarter of 1974.
This industry is going through what must be termed a growing-up period. After years of seeing sales grow hundreds of percent at times and, with few exceptions, seeing the motorcycle as the hottest selling thing on the market, we are now experiencing a leveling off. I have heard predictions of a five to eight percent sales growth for 1975. To some this sounds gloomy. A few days in the New York corporate jungle will dispel the gloom quickly. There are a lot of industries right now that would love to be able to forecast a growth of eight percent for 1975. The automobile industry is one of them. We have simply got to get used to the idea that the boom is over. Our sport isn’t dying; it’s just leveling off.
Back in the early ’60s when I started CYCLE WORLD, I had been heavily involved, from an editorial standpoint anyway, with karting. From 1959 or so until about 1964 it kept growing and growing. Then it just simply died. There are still a few people around racing karts, but it is a very small sport. Some time after karting and Karting World, the magazine I edited, passed away, I got involved with another sport destined to obscurity: dune buggies.
We got so enthused about buggies that we started a magazine. Dune Buggies and Hot VWs was the title. Buggies went the way of karts quickly. We sold the magazine, but it is still being published by ex-contributor Jim Wright. Of course there are still buggies around, but not in the numbers to which we expected them to increase. A lot of big businesses, and some small ones, too, lost a lot of money when the sports of karting and dune buggying died. Maybe “leveled off” is a more appropriate term.
So now motorcycling is doing the same thing. But one major fact separates karts and buggies from motorcycles; leveling off of bike sales amounts to probably just over two million sales a year. If there are 500 buggies sold in 1975 and one or two thousand karts, I will be surprised. Motorcycling ranks as one of the major participant sports in the country. It is still one of the healthiest and most vigorous industries. This is a difficult tale to tell the motorcycle dealer in your town who just closed his doors because he couldn’t sell what he had on the floor, much less the 1975 models he ordered from his distributor. It has been a fascinating and really incredible decade for motorcycling.
We may be seeing a slowdown, even a recession, and it’s going to hurt. If things get so bad that I don’t have enough money to make ends
meet, the one thing no downturned economy is going to touch is my time to go riding. My pure, basic, unchangeable and genuine love of motorcycles and the great things they do for my system, character, general physical being, therapeutic release of tensions, fully-realized sense of achievement and my fulfilled desire to do something satisfying, will not be changed by the fact that I may have to scrape and make a few sacrifices. Honestly, you can’t keep a good biker down.
YEAR or two ago I prophesied that Yamaha would be the first in the rotary engine motorcycle race. A little after we published my forecast, Dick Orth, head man at Suzuki, made me a wager. He was positive they would be the first. I lost. Suzuki is indeed the first production rotary engine motorcycle offered on the market. West Germany’s Hercules was the first to build a show prototype, which I had a chance to ride. But they have yet to make them available to you. Sorry, Suzuki.
IN THE November, 1974, CW, I mentioned a bunch of nuts jumping motorcycles hung underneath hang gliders. The mania hasn’t stopped. The same guys, Bob Wills and Doug Malewicki, have now raised the distance records by fantastic proportions. Wills jumped 205 feet in October, 1974. He then jumped 135 feet with Suzette Lowrey as a passenger!
Mind you, this exceeds Evel Whatzisname’s 129-foot record, achieved without a hang glider, of course. But, then again, he didn’t have Suzette on the back either. Aerovisions is the name of the group and they are still looking for someone to back their act for publicity of whatever product one might have in mind. They have submitted their achievements to the Guinness Book of Records in the meantime.
