Crock Rockets On Parade

CROCK ROCKETS ON PARADE

Progress, Huh? Guess Which Race Had the Fastest 500 at Ontario?

Allan Girdler

You can't believe what you read in the newspapers. Quoting from the Cycle News account of the AFM Six-Hour, "Pre-race entertainment was provided by a field of vintage machines— many of them true classics, others just old."

Hah. Shows what they know. What they were looking at was the second annual Ontario meeting of Vintage Racers Of Old Motorcycles, better known as VROOM, and it was more than a display, more than a race and even more than the mutual admiration society that forms whenever old bikes get together.

In terms of sheer speed, during the SixHour one of the riders in the 600 class mentioned that he was pleased because his machine qualified at 2:20.

Gosh, I said, Buddy Parriott and his Norton Manx ran the vintage race at 2:20. So the kid says Oh yeah, a Norton 750.

Which it isn’t. The Norton Manx is a 500cc Single, drum brakes, 1950s suspension and grey-haired Buddy Parriott, a national rider when my young friend still had training wheels, was going faster than the 550 Fours with twin cams, disc brakes and such.

Not only that, the winner of the vintage race, also grey of hair, was Don Vesco, riding a 1969 Yamaha TR2, a 350cc Twin. So, not only do the old crocks go quickly, they went quicker than brand-new Superbikes with more cylinders and bigger engines. When the club racers lose, they lose to other club racçrs. When we vintage racers get beat, we lose to Don Vesco, holder of the world motorcycle speed record.

Okay, be fair. The back of the pack is a long way back and although most of the old bikes are being ridden as fast as the owners dare, that’s not exactly fast. Instead, we had a record entry this year, some 60 bikes, and we had the, uh, race, preceeded by two parade laps for those who didn’t relish a drop or a rebuild, and during the rest of the day we had a show, a concours d’Elegance except that there were no rules, no judges and no prizes. Just the neatest collection of old motorcycles you ever saw.

There are people in this world who suspect Suzuki of borrowing the four-valve head from Honda. So at Ontario there was Steve Wright’s 1914 Indian board tracker, a 500 Single with, you guessed, four valves. And John Cameron brought his 1917 Harley board tracker, a Vee Twin with eight valves. And there was a 1935 radial head Rudge; one cylinder, four valves and two exhaust pipes.

What we had was an illustrated history of motorcycles. There were belt-drives with pedal start from the teens, and then the hand shifts, solid rear suspension and girder forks, on into plunger hubs, overhead valves and so forth.

There were leading links and trailing links. There was a Moto Guzzi Falcone with external bologna-slicer flywheel and mono-spring rear suspension, the spring concealed beneath the engine something you almost have to see not to believe, as the poet says, except that Guzzi made these machines for generations and they are still in use in Europe. There were English monoshocks from the 30s and one lucky chap, Sonny Angel, brought his 1956 NSU Sportsmax with full dustbin style fairing, the kind that enclosed the front wheel and made the 1950s Grand Prix machine so fast (and so susceptible to side winds that the FIM banned them).

Some of the bikes were better than perfect. Steve Wright’s Harley KR and Bill Bass’ AJS 7R are familiar to readers of the magazine. Frank Conley’s 1937 Excelsior Manxman appeared on Cycle World's cover years ago. They are works of art but some of the others, like Paul Madigan’s 1914 Imperial and Jim Walker’s Parilia Gran Sport, were as nice. Perhaps it’s just as well there was no formal contest, as it would have been impossible to say which was the best.

And some of the bikes weren’t perfect. No names here, for obvious reasons, but not everybody can afford a motorcycle just for show. There were scruffy old bikes, Bultaco Metrallas and Ducati Dianas that are in daily use, tacky Harley Ks and Nortons. Yeah, it would be hard to prove that all the entries were genuine vintage or classic material, for example my RSCstyle Honda 350, the Honda Benly rigged in road racer gear, the Honda 750 with alloy monocoque frame but heck, the reason we began doing this was that there are so many old bikes that deserve to be kept running, that are owned by people who care and need an excuse to work finding the parts, and there are motorcycle fans who appreciate seeing something older than last year’s sports model.

Not for purists only. Not only were there American, English, Japanese, German, Spanish and Italian motorcycles, spanning 65 years but the owners and riders mingled. The old rivalries were forgotten. The grandfatherly man with the pre-Great-War Harley helped the college kids and their balky Bultaco.

Same for the fans. There was an Italian bike ride-in and they knew where to find kindred spirits. They parked in the vintage paddock and so did the Norton club and the cafe Suzuki and drag race Kawasaki guys and the Original Fat Bob Harleys. Motorcycle racing is, for some people, more motorcycle than racing and the paddock was filled with people there for the motorcycles.

It was a glorious day. Three guys dropped their bikes, one because his brake lever fell off and two because they went a bit faster than they knew how to go, but nobody was hurt or even dented. We didn’t get any cash or contingency money but there was some surplus after the mailing was paid for, so every rider got a bottle of champagne.

“Pre-race entertainment’’? Nuts. For us vintage racers there was the main event and then, to keep the fans from clogging the highway on their way home, there was six hours of something to watch while the traffic thinned out. 0