An American Racer

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An American racer

David Edwards

YOU PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF BUDDY Parriott. He’s been dead now for almost five years, brought down by a heart attack in his 60th year, but at one time he was among the very best of American roadracers.

Born in 1927, Parriott hoisted himself onto his first motorcycle at age 6, inspired by his father, Sam, who competed in hillclimbs and on dry lake beds. At 20, Buddy won his first trophy, at the old Box Springs TT course near Riverside, California. Over the next two decades, he ran mainly in California roadraces, as he tried to juggle his trucking-company career and raising a family of nine children with his love of speed on two wheels.

Published material on Parriott is scarce. There were no major magazine interviews, no long list of accomplishments in the AMA record book. His brightest moment in the spotlight came in 1965 when he finished second to the great Mike Hailwood at the Daytona USGP, riding his 500cc Manx Norton. He followed that performance with a win at the Sebring races the next weekend against some of the same international riders, though Hailwood and his $40,000 MV Agusta were not in attendance.

Those showings earned Parriott prime position on a full-page Norton magazine ad. He’s depicted bending his Manx to the right, eyes piercing through the lenses of his goggles, scanning the track ahead. His Florida finishes also bagged him spots on the three-man Cycle World squad that was to contest the Isle of Man TT in 1966 and on Yamaha’s 250cc Daytona team. A seamen’s strike put pay to the IoM effort, and a practice crash that cracked a shoulder bone (his only serious racing injury) took away Parriott’s last shot at national glory. His TD-1B was given to replacement rider Bobby Winter, who went on to win the 100-mile Lightweight race.

Parriott went home, did a few more local races on the Manx, then hung up his leathers for good. He was almost 40, after all, and the diabetes that had plagued him since childhood was taking its toll.

Don Emde, winner of the 1972 Daytona 200, was a hard-charging kid trying to make a name for himself about the same time Parriott was winding down his race career. “Buddy was really good. By that time, he was only racing at Riverside and Willow Springs, but he had the lines, he was smooth,” says Emde, now publisher of Motorcycle Collector, a new magazine devoted to vintage and classic bikes.

Gordon Jennings, roadracer and journalist, wrote about Parriott in a story titled “Willow Springs Remembered” for the July, 1973, Cycle: “Buddy Parriott had talent, and a quiet ferocity that surely would have taken him far had he not been too old and too devoted a family man.”

Today, Jennings is the co-founder of Wheelbase, an interactive electronic magazine dealing with cars and motorcycles. “Buddy was quick, and as steady as a freight train,” he says. “He was also the only genuinely nice guy I knew who went fast. He never really wanted to beat anybody, like most racers do. He just liked to get out on a track and go real fast, and in doing so he ended up in front.”

Another of Parriott’s rivals was Don Vesco, of land-speed-record fame, who now builds off-road race trucks and competes in vintage roadraces. Vesco remembers Parriott as “one of the nicest guys around. He treated roadracing as a hobby-heck, most everybody did back then. He was eight, maybe 10 years older than me, and he was an idol. He was virtually the guy to beat at Riverside. He had very good eyesight, so he was real, real good in fast corners. He’d go in deep and hard, and run way, way out, riding high all the way through the corner. Buddy was hard to beat.”

Ed Kretz Jr., better known for his dirt-track heroics, also roadraced in the ’60s, and recalls that Parriott “used to go very good on that Manx Norton of his. He always kept it immaculate, too, just like his trucks. He was quite an enthusiast, a nice, likable guy who was always calm and cool. He just enjoyed motorcycling.”

Parriott’s best friend was Art Esquerre, whose family owned a bakery. It was Esquerre who sponsored Parriott’s Norton.

“It was a real fire engine,” he says of the racebike he still owns. “We stripped it down-everything was drilled for lightness, even the frame. I think we had it down to about 270 pounds. We were the first ones to run a disc brake in a GP. Buddy could go into corners so much farther than anybody else. We also had an invertedcone exhaust instead of the open megaphones everybody else used. Hailwood’s father, Stan, came over in the pits, looked at it and said, ‘It won’t run with that.’ Well, his kid ran away from us, but we ran away from everybody else.”

Parriott’s machine was fast, but he knew how to get the most out of it, too. “He had this thing for speed,” Esquerre says. “He lived to go fast. He loved Turn Nine at Willow Springs, loved to lay that Manx over and keep it cranked. The two of them were one, melded together.”

But joy on the racetrack was tempered by tragedies in life. There was a truck accident that took the life of Parriott’s grandson and almost cost him a leg. And the diabetes’ assault on his body was devastating, eventually stealing away most of his once-keen eyesight, and stressing his kidneys and heart.

“Buddy had some pretty hard times in his later years,” Esquerre says, “but he enjoyed himself. He considered himself one of the luckiest people in the world, and was very thankful for all the good things in his life. And he was the best of friends.”

You couldn’t write a much better epitaph than that.