Legends

Legends

UP FRONT

David Edwards

ANYBODY BORN WITH THE FIRST NAME of Bartlett better be tough growing up, especially in the gritty, hardscrabble town of Flint, Michigan. This man was. Amateur boxer. Stint in the U.S. Marine Corps. Line worker at the GM plant. Three-time AMA Grand National Champ. In the record books, he's listed as Bart Markel. Fellow riders and their fans sometimes knew him as "Black Bart."

Bartlett David Markel, one of the toughest sumbitches to strap on a steel shoe, a dirt-track legend, died this past February. He was 71.

“I didn’t like following anybody,” Markel told the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum on the occasion of his 1998 induction. “If I needed to give someone a little shove to gel in front of them, that’s what I’d do.

I don’t like to admit it, but I guess I was a little rough. Back then I figured if 1 settled for second one week,

I'd settle for third the next and so on. So I always rode as hard as I could.”

A “little rough” may be an understatement. The AMA suspended Markel at least once for aggressive riding. Then there was the time he entered an indoor short-track down South, there to pick up some easy money between nationals. But the cherrypicking did not go according to script as a local hotshoe beat the factory Harley rider off the line and amazingly stayed in front despite Markel’s repeated muggings. Going into the final turn, of course, Black Bart well and truly torpedoed the young upstart, sent him sprawling, and went on to take the checkers.

The crowd, incensed that their local hero had been so wronged, let go with a roiling cascade of boos. “Why did you knock him down?!” an interviewer demanded.

“Never saw him,” Markel responded without missing a beat, making his way to the pay window.

Still, Markel always had more fans than detractors. He was presented the Most Popular Rider of the Year Award (now called AMA Athlete of the Year)

following the 1966 season. The man who started racing on a $50 BSA would go on to w in 28 career nationals, seventh on the all-time list. He never won at Daytona, but an incident in the beach race one year typifies Markel’s mettle. An early getoff had filled his goggles with sand, so he tossed them aside and got back into the race, essentially running blind.

“I was ducking my head down on the straights and because of the (flying) sand I would only look up every once in a wLile,” Markel recalled. “Coming down the beach at almost 140 miles per hour, I looked up over my numberplate and there was a rider on a BMW going about 40 miles an hour slower! I hit him and ricocheted off into a spectator’s car. I was in the hospital a few days for that one. Years later, a guy came up to me and told me I had totaled his Studebaker on the beach.”

Legends of the mechanical kind will once again be by a beach `this coming May 5. as the second-annual Legend of the Motorcycle Con cours d'Elegance lines up Saturday morning on the wellmanicured grounds of the Ritz Carlton seaside resort in Half Moon Bay, California. Expect another knockout event with 150-200 of the world's best exotic and col lectible pre-1976 motorcycles

up for judging, or check out the Bonhams & Butterfields auction of rare motorcycles and memorabilia that evening. Featured marques this year are Excelsior, Henderson and Vincent. Also, to honor the 100th anniversary of the Isle of Man TT, a selection of bikes that “raced and placed” on The Island will be displayed.

I am more than a little proud to say that two of my Triumphs have been accepted for the invitation-only show, a 1949 Tiger T100 desert enduro bike (above) with aftermarket Martin swingarm, and the T140 Bonneville owned by my late brother Kevin that’s being built up (come on, chromers) as a best-of-everything café bike in his honor.

For more information and to purchase discount tickets ($50 online, $65 day of event), visit the concours’ excellent, feature-packed website at www.legendofthe motorcycle, com.

There’s no more legendary a racing venue than the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and it looks like bikes will be back at the Brickyard in 2008.

I Iold on a second, when did two-wheelers ever race at Indy? Well, that would be in 1909, when the first-ever event held at the speedway was a motorcycle sprint, won by Cannonball Baker on an Indian. It was a bit of a disaster, as the 2!/2-mile track’s original crushed-rock surface was unkind to tires. A year later, 3.2 million bricks were laid down.

Now, just in time for the track’s centenary (well, minus ■SPEEDWAY^" one) comes the news that things are looking good for a second U.S. MotoGP race in '08, to be run at IMS. Changes to the track wall be required, namely eliminating the perilous high-speed final turn bordered by crashwall, but, says an insider, “Speedway officials are doing everything in their power to secure a MotoGP event for 2008.”

Bikes at the Brickyard? You bet! □