Round Up

ROUND UP

JOE PARKHURST

TIRED, and getting a bit sore from crashing his two-stroke road racer when the engine or gearbox seized, Joe Zeigler came up with a rig that should solve the problem. It is a rear hub that slips, with an adjustable drag or load so the bike doesn’t go into a freewheeling posture upon seizing, which could easily be as dangerous as the lock-up itself would be. Joe has had three or four seizures since fitting the thing to his machine; word is that it works perfectly. The unit is still in the development stage and is being patented. It could save a lot of pain and suffering and should probably be mandatory on some bikes. Penguin Racing, 166 Cullinane Dr., Marlborough, MA 01752, is the company.

PlEATURING a combination of bikes and cars, the recent show in Tokyo drew record crowds. The affair played host to 1,200,000, making it by far the largest in the world. No entirely new models were shown. Absent were such rumored beauties as a large-bore, four-stroke series of Suzukis and the Honda automatic that is already in the U.S. Yamaha’s

handsome new RD line stole the show, although we had seen them in late summer of ’75. Honda did show an interesting new CT125 trail bike that looks just like the CT70. It has a fully-enclosed chain and Elsinore-type forks. A well-protected exhaust system, solo seat, road-legal equipment and brush basher reveal its true nature as a real motorcyclist’s bike.

IF YOU thought that motorcycling had enemies among various environmental groups and safety do-gooders, you ain’t seen nothing like Albert Benjamin Kelley, senior vice-president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. He recently delivered a proposal for a nation-wide ban on motorcycles to the annual meeting of the American Association of Automotive Medicine in San Diego.

Ed Youngblood, general manager of the American Motorcycle Association, writing in a recent issue of the AMA Report, detailed Kelley’s grand scheme to “hold human losses to an acceptable minimum” by slowly regulating motorcycles out of existence. He also said that individual freedom need not be considered, since it is traditional to interfere with the individual in the name of safety.

Unbelievably, he compares the banning of motorcycles to automobile licensing. He points out that licensing drivers also interferes with individual freedom. “Motorcycle driver education programs have not been shown to reduce motorcycle related death and crippling,” Kelley says. The truth is that rider programs haven’t helped much yet because they haven’t been tried to any significant degree.

Dr. Susan Baker is the AAAM president and she shares Kelley’s feelings. The data Kelley used in the presentation was meager stuff supplied by the Department of Transportation. He works under Insurance Institute president William Haddon, who is a former director of the government agency known as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. If that isn’t enough, Dr. Baker serves on a committee that supplies the NHTSA with advice on how to handle motorcycles. Sounds like a stacked deck, doesn’t it?

James Gregory of the NHSTA has publicly expressed anti-motorcycle feelings, as well. He was another who made a presentation at the same AAAM annual meeting.

If you want to write someone in the Congress or anywhere else in Washington, be my guest. It is almost impossible to believe that our own government is involved in a plot to deprive more than 10 million people of the opportunity to take part in the finest sport in the world, but it sure looks like that’s what it’s trying to do.