American Racers

American Racers

Of Milwaukee Vibrators, Triumph 40-inchers, Voo-Doo Goldies and the men who rode them

JOE SCALZO

SIXTEEN DEAFENING XR-750s occupying all 16 starting places of the dirt-track national at the Terre Haute Action Track were doing the essential Harley-Davidson macho number, clearing their throats going boom-flah!, boom-flah! Raising his voice to be heard over all the Milwaukee propaganda, a sidelined Kenny Roberts said, resignedly, "I think they got a winner there."

Little did he know.

It was a firing-squad August afternoon in western Indiana during the 1975 summer, and an era was ending. The same wolf pack of Wisconsin Vibrators that invalidated the other marques at Terre Haute continued executing and rampaging for the rest of the summer... the rest of the season...the rest of the decade and well into the 1980s.

So, this noisy Sunday was really a celebration of Harley-Davidsoniana. The alloy XR-750, replacement for the vexatious old iron XR, was perfection at last. And what was equally intimidating about the big suckers was that they possessed reliability equal to their firepower. Hearing 16 of them revved up at once was like listening to howitzers booming. H-D never thought much of "furriners," and those 16 dominating Vibrators at Terre Haute seemed to scold, to sneer, to settle old scores:

Here, BSA, Triumph and Norton, the howitzer salvos seemed to say, you redcoat carpetbaggers for the Queen of England, take that! It's what you get for messing with us! And here, Yamaha, you miserable rice-burner, this is for talking trash about Harley-Davidson!

H-D never thought much of riders not of the Vibrator faith, either, and especially not those dirtbags who'd won races and national titles that nobody but Milwaukee deserved. So the XR-750s broke it off in them, too:,

Here, Eddie Mulder, you flake with your smog-addled Los Angeles brains, this is for what you did to Bart Markel at Peoria in 1965 ! Here, Jody Nicholas, stick that fiddle of yours where the sun don't shine, this is for George Roeder and Dick Hammer at Laconia and Meadowdale in 1963 ! Here, Gary Nixon, you Okie urchin, this is for Freddie Nix at Ascot Part in 1968! Here, Kenny Roberts, you disrespectful pup, this is for Rex Beauchamp at Colorado Springs in 1973! And here, Dick Mann, you iron-butt troublemaker, this is for you because you started it!

"It" was a dizzy and epic period, roughly from 1963 through 1975, when grand national tournament racing for once wasn't under the H-D fist. The 1960s were the decade of rebellion. The straight world was flipping out, everybody shouting, "Defy authority!" Motorcycle racing was shouting, "Defy Harley-Davidson!"

Almost all the worst troublemakers came from California, mostly from L.A., but Dick Mann, whose ferrous posterior did indeed start it all, was out of Frisco. Mann never met a Class C motorcycle he didn't like, and in his long and quirky career he won dirt-track and roadrace nationals for five different brands-once he even raced a Vibrator. Having demonstrated that he was arguably the riding equal of Milwaukee's Mr. Cool (Carroll Resweber) and Mr. Hot (Bart Markel), Mann in 1963 was forced to prove he was their equal in the pain culture.

Vibrator heroes tended to be pain snobs obsessed with the arrogant idea that everybody else was namby-pamby compared to them. Markel set the standard. Too machochic to wear gloves, when he got thrown at a roadrace the pavement ground one of his palms to hamburger, and people who came to his rescue were too sickened by the gore to do much. So, "Brat Mackrel" visited a hot dog concession stand where he totally grossed out everybody by packing his wounds with the contents of a salt shaker. Without flinching, he walked back to see where his Vibrator had crash-landed.

A hard act to follow, but Mann pulled it off. Late in 1963, leading the point standings, he went cherrypicking on a small half-mile in the Midwest and managed to fall off and get run over by what felt like everybody there. Nevertheless, he was at L.A.'s Ascot Park for the steeplechase national three weeks afterward, where he made 50 perfect take-offs and landings from the big TT jump with a raw rump full of stitches.

Nobody but a member of the H-D tribe ever had been seasonal champion before; firing the revolution, Mann won Ascot, the title, the priceless Number One plate and even the brief respect of Harley-Davidson-whose team smoked him off the following season anyway.

ann during one campaign or another raced almost everything, yet seldom, maybe never, a Triumph 40-incher. Probably because he was too sane.

All Triumph 650 guys had excellent nicknames:

Squirrel, Van Looney, Dickie Bird, Hammer Dick, Beetle Bob-there was a whole asylum of them. There isn't time to decode them all, but Squirrel was Eddie Mulder and Van Looney was Skip Van Leeuwen. They came out of the Saturday night world of exhibitionist steeplechase racing at Ascot Park, the track with the biggest anti-Harley-Davidson complex of all.

Mulder-Squirrel-was godson of Iron Man Ed Kretz, and a case of stunted development. He never grew up. Winner of the Big Bear Run at 16, when that desert and mountain marathon had the most mystique of any race, he refused to come down from its high. Everything else was anti-climax, including the five TT nationals he won between 1965 and 1970.

Disliking the uptight atmosphere of high-stakes nationals, Squirrel was devoted to mad Saturday evenings at Ascot. Hell was popping loose as he and the other wild-hairs with their exotic nicknames and 40inchers came to the line, throttles revving neurotically, the hysterical grandstands roaring their wheelie cry. Meanwhile, the nervous starter was sweating blood because he knew Squirrel was going to screw him by jumping the start and riding the back wheel through three gears to Tum 1.

Mulder never noticed, but his act didn't play as well in Harley-Davidson parishes. The crowd at the 1965 Peoria TT National serenaded him with boos for being an L.A. wise-ass and flipping off Markel in mid-air as he passed Black Bart en route to winning the race.

Meanwhile, Van Looney/ Van Leeuwen trained on a trampoline, jumped rope, pumped iron, and as a consequence was in perfect health. So much so that he resented the AMA for not licensing him unless he paid a yearly visit to the doctor for a physical. An exam cost 20 bones; besides, all a croaker did was listen to your ticker and make you cough. So Van Looney got hold of some medical documents of his own and began writing up his own

physicals. This went on for years, and in time Dr. Van Looney was giving physicals to all the other nicknames, too, including Squirrel and Burritto Gene Romero, Triumph's national champ of 1970. But the killjoy AMA smelled a rat when the medic's name Van Leeuwen had copied out of a telephone book turned out to be a gynecologist-how the heck was a motorcycle racer expected to know what a word like that meant? Suspensions and fines followed.

Being from Anadarko, Oklahoma, and points east, Gary Nixon, Triumph's double grand national champ of 1967-68, wasn't one of the L.A. jokers, although occasionally could function like one-he once tried to ride a 40-incher off the roof of a house into a swimming pool. In 1967, HarleyDavidson underestimated him, and Nixon grabbed the title, riding the last national with a broken thumb. In 1968, H-Q again marked Nixon as dead meat, and in the year's finale at Ascot fell on him with a six-man hit squad captained by Freddie Nix, the team's new Joe Leonard/Carroll Resweber/Bart Markel. Nixon by then was a nervous wreck down to a diet of cigarettes and baby food, but he pounded on Nix and put Harley-Davidson on its keister for a second time.

riumphs may have ruled Ascot Park's Saturday night TTs, but

Friday night half-miles were unassailable BSA Gold Star territory. The Gold Star contingent was racing's most off-thewall. Its members were abstract talkers and creative thinkers with comp'ex per sonas. Detractors dissed them as ardent death-wish ers. While the Triumph TT crazies got their jollies living on the back wheel, paradise to the Gold Star fanatics came when they zapped

Ascot's sticky oval wide-open and without brakes, whites of their eyes blazing like headlights. They weren't on a suicide trip, but Gold Star folks were different. Billy Al

Bengston-to pick one at random-was sometimes called "Rembrandt." He spent as much time painting as,racing, and eventually became the artist whom influential critics of the 1990s describe as L.A.'s quintessential-an important art word. In fact, an original Billy Al watercolor can fetch what the wine-andberet crowd calls "a quarter," as in $250K.

Whatever, Billy AÍ now says he wonders if blowing off motorcycle racing was the correct career call.

John's Bicycle Shop in Pasadena was where certain Birmingham Small Anns partisans spent hard time assembling Schwinns to financially make it through the week. They were into jazz at its most full-tilt, and when you walked into John's the stereo was cranked to full volume, maybe with Miles, Coltrane or Philly Joe blazing away. Neil Keen, who at the Ascot National of 1961 broke Vibrator icon Resweber, was a sharp-witted street philosopher who one afternoon at John's got into a word duel with a visiting Jody Nicholas. Nicholas on pavement was a Harley-Davidson nightmare; he'd brought down George Roeder at Laconia and Dick Hammer at Meadowdale. In addition, Nicholas was a perfect little southern gentleman who besides being a classically trained violinist-a reasonable gig for a Gold Star off-the-waller-also had a bachelor's degree in German. Anyway, Jody was laying some Goethe, Schiller and Hegel on Keen, and Neil was returning fire with the wisdom of Jack Kerouac and Sonny Barger of the Hell's Angels, while the difficult AÍ Gunter (another Goldie guy, who later killed himself) was saying they were both full of crap.

ver in L.A. near Santa Monica Blvd. and Western Ave., in C.R.

Axtell's tiny garage-laboratory, was the Gold Star of Gold Stars. Ex-hot-rodder and former dry lakes luminary, Axtell was reputed to pass 16 hours a day preening No. 7's voo-doo cylinder head on his "flow meter," a black-magic device. No. 7's head breathed like no other; rider Sammy Tanner, a.k.a. "The Flying Flea," could buzz the onelunger to revs upwards of 8200. Along with a certain rogue G50 Matchless belonging to Dick Mann, No. 7 became the greatest scourge of the revolution, beating up on factory Vibrators at six different nationals, including in 1964 destroying HarleyDavidson's 16-in-a-row win streak at the Springfield Mile.

"Farewell to the BSA Gold Stars!" wept Roxy Rockwood into his mike at the close of the 1960s when a new engine formula sealed their doom. Perhaps the only dry eyes at Ascot Park were Axtell's. Sentimentality apparently isn't in a tuner's personality, and, like a medicine man bringing his goodies to primitive people, Axtell in the 1970s simply started sharing his flowbench sorcery with other affiliations, including Triumph and-Ax, how could you?-Harley-Davidson.

"All Triumph guys had excellent nicknames: Squirrel, Van Looney, Dickie Bird, Hammer Dick, Beetle Bob-there was a whole asylum of

That it would embrace the teachings of C.R. Axtell, the dreaded L.A. witch doctor who had spent the previous decade tormenting and defeating it, shows how desperate Milwaukee was to crush the revolution, now entering its 10th season. Actually, the uprising was almost played out. Triumph was finished, its factory team extinct, as were BSA's and Norton's. Yamaha's arsenal, for all intents and purposes, was reduced to one man.

Unfortunately for Milwaukee, that one man was Kenny Roberts.

oberts entered the grand national scene as a 22year-old rookie in 1972 and immediately served notice. The preternatural Cal Rayborn was just home from showing the Brits how it was done on their own short circuits-with a hand grenade of an iron XR, no less!-and was the road warrior to beat. At Ontario Motor Speedway, Roberts was instructed to learn something by following Rayborn around. He did so, afterward erupting in mock anger: "Rayborn fell off! Fell right in front of me! Took me down with him! My hero." Roberts in 1973 put in an especially hair-raising effort against Rex Beauchamp and the fastest XR-750 on the cushion mile at Colorado Springs, ending the cam-

paign as Grand National Champion with the greatest number of AMA points in history, 2014, which he exceeded in 1974 with 2286.

He shouldn't have been able to. A Yamaha 750 Twin was no match for an XR-750, and well Roberts and Yamaha knew it. To improve the odds, they pirated away from Rex Beauchamp one of H-D's most celebrated mechanics, Babe DeMay, but there was no chemistry between DeMay and Roberts. To raise the horsepower,

Yamaha brought out of retirement the engine guru Tim Witham to Jeckyl-andHyde cylinder heads. This scheme bombed, too.

So, what was the secret of Robert's successes?

Well, he was Kenny Roberts, for one thing. Yet

he had something else going in his favor, something historical. Gold Star sage Keen's solemn motto, "You can't trust anybody who has one cylinder following the other," was a motorcycle racing pro forma.

Everybody knew the Vibrator troops were the "bad guys," including themselves. Since the toothpicktrack era of the 1920s, Harley-Davidson "strategy" was to mount-up every available factory hired gun and privateer and sic 'em on themselves-last man on his wheels wins.

Darwinian racing was the reason H-D won so many championships, but it could backfire, too. Roberts, for instance, captured his 1973 and 1974 titles with HarleyDavidson's top gun missing. Mark Brelsford, 1972 sea-

uGary Scott confronted the Harley team at the Ascot TT with a decrepit old Triumph, threatening to ‘blow their asses sideways' with it. Then did v

sonal titlist for H-D, was in the Jody Nicholas mode in that he looked like a goodiegoodie but raced like an assassin. In approved H-D fashion, Brelsford had his career upended by injury when one of his own fourthstring teammates crash-andbumed him, literally, at the 1973 Daytona 200.

Came 1974, and HarleyDavidson selected a fresh pistolero to assault Roberts and Yamaha: Gary Scott. Formerly of the Triumph persuasion, Scott wasn't a popular pick among H-D's existing riders—particularly Beauchamp, who in 1973 made Scott's acquaintance wheel-to-wheel at the San Jose Mile, and afterward discovered himself veering for the fence. When Beauchamp demanded to

know why, of all people, HD had picked a cue ball like Scott, management supposedly replied apropos with something Lyndon Johnson might have said about J. Edgar Hoover: They preferred having Scott inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

A

t that coup-degrace Terre Haute National of 1975, the year he won back the AMA title for Harley, Scott's was one of those 16 XR-750s keeping Kenny Roberts harmless on the sidelines. But in '76, he was back outside the tent, fleeing the team in anger following a beef over salary and other grievances.

So, Scott waded into 1976 snarling like a werewolf. He warred with H-D employees

on the tracks, punched out some of them off the tracks and used the rulebook to confiscate Beauchamp's best engine (he also helped himself to one of Roberts' roadrace Yamahas). Most wounding of all, after often defeating factory XR-750s with XR-750s of his own, Scott confronted the team at the Ascot Park TT with a decrepit, eight-year-old Triumph 40-incher, threatening to "blow their asses sideways" with it. Then did.

Scott was even less into hero worship and respect for his elders than was Roberts, if that is possible, but what goes around, comes around. Beginning in 1974, the AMA in its wisdom had opened the door to the licensing of 16year-old Novices, child-puppet professionals who could outgun all the old geezers, including the 25-year-old Scott. Fastest of all these brat prodigies was Jay Springsteen, a whole 18 years old in 1976 when he memorably beat up on Scott and everybody else to become the youngest national champion since Brad Andres in 1955. Not that it was a done deal. To capture his seventh national of the year and ice the title, Springer had to compete with a broken finger and double vision, courtesy of teammate Beauchamp, who had succeeded in torpedoing the two of them in practice. It was the perfect Harley-Davidson postscript.

Honda made life hell for the XR-750 fleets in 1984, 1985 and 1986, but 22 years after that bellwether afternoon at Terre Haute, (he XR750s are still winning and, when not defanged with boombox mufflers, still going boom-ßahl, boom-flah!

Righteous. □

Joe Scalzo has written books, features and columns about twoand four-wheel motorsports for decades.