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VOLUME 56 ISSUE 37 SEPTEMBER 17, 2019 P127 built his son's bikes during that championship-winning 1955 season. Andres was born in Eureka, California, March 19, 1912. As a youngster he got an old junked motorcycle running and began a hobby that would turn into a pas- sion and career. Growing up in Stockton, Andres and his broth- ers started racing motorcycles around the dirt tracks of Northern California. Speedway racing was his favorite, and he rode JAP speedway bikes to numerous regional Class A short track victo- ries during the 1930s. By the middle '30s, Class C racing was gaining in popular- ity, and Andres began racing a Harley-Davidson 45-cubic-inch model. The biggest victory of his racing career came when he won the 1937 Pacific Coast TT Cham- pionship in Hollister, California. That race was the first-ever AMA national TT held on the West Coast. The Andres name became very well known in racing circles. Not only was Leonard winning races but his brothers Gene and Roy were coming up through the ranks on their way to becoming top West Coast racers as well. Andres retired from serious racing in 1938 after he opened a Harley-Davidson dealership in Modesto, California. The busi- ness grew, and he was able to buy two more dealerships in the coming years, one in Sacramento and another, later, in San Diego. Andres recruited his brothers to help him run the growing family business. By the 1950s, Andres' son Brad began showing a lot of promise as a racer. The elder Andres helped his son by mak- ing sure he always had very well-prepared equipment. By 1955, Brad was ready to turn pro. With his father doing the tuning, 19-year-old Brad completed the most impressive rookie season in the history of AMA Grand Na- tional Series. He won five of the 13 races (including the Daytona 200) en route to the national championship. Andres' reputation as a top engine builder was solidified in 1956 when his son's bike blazed down the beach at Daytona in qualifying at 126.31 mph. That was over two-miles-per-hour faster than the next-fastest ma- chine piloted by Joe Leonard on his Tom Sifton-built Harley. Third fastest was Rich Dorresteyn's Triumph, which clocked in at 121.62 mph. Andres' work on Harley's KR helped Harley-Davidson return to the top of the heap after the Brit- ish invasion of the late 1940s and early 1950, when Triumph, BSA and Norton presented Milwaukee with a new challenge. This came at the same time that its former rival Indian was beginning to fade out. Andres' engine-building ser- vices were in high demand. In later years, Ralph White and Cal Rayborn would win AMA nation- als with engines tuned by Andres. After Brad retired from racing, the elder Andres continued to build engines for other riders, and he also served on the AMA competition committee during the early 1960s. By the early 1970s, Andres retired from building racing engines. He ran his San Diego motorcycle dealership until sell- ing that business in 1976. That marked the end of nearly 40 years of Andres running motor- cycle dealerships. For the last 20 years of his life, Andres worked with his son Brad in the family's property management business. Andres died on Christmas Day in 1996. Leonard Andres was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 1999. His work on devel- oping the KR into a wildly suc- cessful racing machine etched his name among the all-time greats in the history of builders in American motorcycle racing. CN THE HARLEY KR Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives