25 Years Ago October, 1971
25 YEARS AGO OCTOBER, 1971
ROUNDUP
"When you’ve already designed and built two of the most exotic motorcycles in general production in the world today, what do you do as an encore?” That question began this month’s “No-Nonsense Road Test” of Honda’s all-new CB500. Smaller, quieter and easier to manage than the CB750, the sohc inline-Four won staffers’ hearts: “All told, the CB500 is perhaps the finest combination of superb engineering and deluxe features we’ve ever come across.”
• Joe Scalzo’s profile of Bart Markel, winner of 28 AMA nationals, portrayed a simple, “hamburger-and-french-fries man” who “avoids fancy restaurants and drenches nearly everything he eats in catsup.” Reportedly, “Black Bart” loved his privacy, preferred listening to speaking and had an atrocious memory. “Not only doesn’t he care about past races he has won or lost,” Scalzo wrote, “he doesn’t even remember them.”
• In a design contest titled “Project Future Bike,” CW Publisher Joe Parkhurst posed the eternal question, “What will the motorcycle of the future look like?” The answer, according to winner James R.
Ferron of Warsaw, New York, was
a Wankel-engined beauty with a “thermoformed ABS sheet plastic, metal-reinforced, sonicaily welded and foam-filled” chassis. Among the six honorable mentions was an innovative twin-cylinder “kneeler" penned by a young designer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. His name? James Parker, creator of the alternative RADD front suspension found on the Yamaha GTS1000.
-Matthew Miles
