At Large
AT LARGE
Judkins’ art
HAVING FORGOTTEN TO CLICK ON THE
Norton’s push-push kill button, I kicked the starter lever fruitlessly, and finally flooded it. I knew, of course, that the Boyer ignition my teammate Dick Tietjen and I had installed on the Commando engine in January of '72 was still so good that whenever the Production Racer didn’t fire on the first or second kick, something was seriously awry. But sometimes you just do dumb things. So I kicked too much fuel into the chambers. Finally, panting, I realized what I'd done.
As always, my options were: keep kicking, throttle wide-open, and hope for the best; pull the plugs, close the throttle and kick it through enough to help the fuel to evaporate; or bump-start the thing. Since the Proddy Racer has a diabolical kickstarter I’ve always hated, bump-starting was an easy choice.
Rolling the Norton into the alley behind my house, I snicked it into gear, backed it up, clutch out, against compression, ran three paces, jumped on the seat sidesaddle and dropped the clutch. The engine coughed once, then started sweetly, as it always had. Still rolling, I stood on the left footpeg, swung my right leg over the seat and slowed the bike briefly at the intersection of the alley and the street.
A couple of the teenagers who live in the rented house on the corner stared at me. Normally, these guys are heavily into Cool, pretending nothing is interesting enough to knock the all-knowing sneers from their pimpled faces. But they’d obviously never seen a guy start and mount a motorcycle that way before. They gaped. As I accelerated onto the street, it occurred to me that bumpstarting was something not many people knew about these days.
It wasn’t long ago that things were very much otherwise. When I was in college, the only reliable means, thanks to the miracle of Spanish electrics, of starting my 175 OSSA was to hurl it down the steep hill outside my dorm. My pal with the 250cc Ducati Diana Mk. Ill was in the same boat; the Italians had given him a kickstarter, but its throw was so short it was useless. He learned how to park so that, whenever possible, he was facing downhill.
Given the state of our machinery until, say, last week, the art of bumpstarting was something every rider— not just racers—included in their motorcyclists’ bag of tricks. As much as scuffed kneepads are admired today, a smooth, graceful and seemingly effortless bump-start was understood to be the mark of the master rider.
Not many guys managed it, on the track or off. I learned why in March, 1967, when I began roadracing with the AFM. It was one thing, I discovered, to take a city block getting my OSSA going, and something else entirely to make my Yamaha 350 light off as soon as possible after the flag dropped.
In the best spirit of club racing, a fellow AFM rider helped me out. Bill Judkins was respected not only for his speed and style on his Suzuki X-6, or for his splendid blue leathers, but because he was a black man doing very well indeed in a sport that had been no more color-blind than any other American institution. I shared my racing colleagues’ admiration of Bill’s guts and style, but what endeared him to me was that, after watching me practice “GP” starts, he smiled and gently showed me the secrets of bump-starting. To this day, I can’t think about it without thinking about Judkins and his patient explanation of the techniques. Not only because of who he was, but because for the five years that I rode GP bikes, those techniques were absolutely vital.
Nostalgies would have us think otherwise, but most of the machines we raced until recently were temperamental, cantakerous beasts to start. The multi-ported, air-cooled twostrokes, tuned to a hair's width of self-destruction, had to be coaxed into life with a surgeon’s delicate touch on the throttle. And the heavy, high-compression big-bore fourstrokes needed a trapeze artist’s sense of timing to plant butt on seat at precisely the right time to leverage the rear wheel correctly through compression. None of this was easy. It was simply necessary.
No longer. Last year the FIM finally abandoned its historic mandate that all Grands Prix be begun with dead engines and a push start; so, racers all over the world now emulate AMA riders, who for decades have waited for the starter's flag with live engines and clutch in, ready to race. That this is so is vindication for those who’ve claimed all along that “clutch starts” are more sensible, safer ways to begin races. And they’re probably right; my mental photo file is full of unpleasant snapshots of bump-starting fiascos and of starting grids that seemed always to be uphill.
Still, I can’t help believing that as long as there are motorcycles, there will be motorcyclists who will be forced, occasionally, to push them into life. Batteries will continue to die, black boxes will continue to freak out, and new generations of riders will undoubtedly have to learn, one by one, from each other the tricks that Bill Judkins handed off to me at Cotati.
I thought about that after my ride on the Norton. Wiping off the inevitable oily residue of our gallop along the two-lane blacktop, it seemed fitting, somehow, that my ride and my thoughts about bump-starting had taken me back to Bill. The process seemed, somehow, to sum up a large measure of what motorcycling is all about.
See, Bill was killed a few years ago in a road accident. So he’s gone. But like the art of the bump-start he taught me, and which I’ve passed along, never forgotten.
Steven L. Thompson
