June, 1965

June 1965

ROUNDUP

CW 25 YEARS AGO

TECHNICAL EDITOR GORDON Jennings was upset, and understandably so. He went to Daytona in the spring of 1965 with a Yamaha TD1B 250 in hopes not only of a top-10 finish, but of a great story on how he did it. He got the story, but not the finish.

His bike had problems. These included a fairing that decreased the bike's ground clearance, and an expansion chamber that blew apart, drastically reducing the bike's power output. Blasted by the deafening sound of the broken exhaust, Jennings wrote, "But for a determination to at least finish, I would have pulled in." He didn't pull in, and went on to finish 34th out of 106 riders.

Jennings and the rest of the early staff at Cycle World helped shape the

magazine's identity by becoming in volved in the events they wrote about. In the early days, CW set land speed records at Bonneville and raced at Daytona. Later, CW set world speed records and raced in the Baja 1000, the Le Mans 24 hour and the Inter national Six Days Enduro. We've excelled in the various speedrecord attempts, and we have had success in our other kinds of racing, but the - point of C~'Vs efforts is to show you what it s like to be part of what ever event we're involv ed in. And though Cycle World has evolved since Jennings was rac ing two-strokes and then writing about it, putting the reader in the picture has remained more im portant to us than winning a race or setting a record. -Camron E. Bussard