Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/125890
er By John Huetter Well, this IS the motorcycle that really started it all, isn't it? Karl-Heinz rolled Adolf's rattylooking 400 with the well-worn alloy tank and the chipped paint frame out of the blue Maico van back in ] uly o f 197 3 and immediately threw a tarp over the rear of it, waving off photographers and questions. But when Adolf and, of course, Willi raced in that Belgian International, everybody lining the track could see these prototype Bilsteins (or were they Kanis?) mounted halfway up the swingarm and they could see that the rear end never, well, hardly ever, hopped around but just kind of flowed over the ruts: never at an unseemly angle. It was only by nearly throwing his bike into the woods and his body down the track that Roger DeC. beat Adolf at the fin ish line while the German was completely un !lap p ab le. It was on ly a few weeks after that before everybody racing motocross in GPs or Internationals had moved the shock mo unting positions forward on frame or swingarm, or both, and o nly a few months after that until everybody (well, nearly everybody) at Ruttenbump Racetrack had tried to do the same thing. Then everybody from factory GP rider to First-Day-Beginner-Mini·Under. 16 could watch, and feel, their shock damping go away. The main difference was that the GP rider could write off the set of wasted dampers to R&D and A very few race b ike s make yo u fas t er as a matte r of course .' This is one such , and f or a moment , you ar e (almost! Adolf Weil .. . 24 gra b so me new ones o ut of the van for the next mo t a . But so mething had really hap pened via Maico (even ifit didn't always work in less skilled hands) / whether it came fro m native Teutonic genius o r a low-budget response to the Yamaha monoshock, on which Andersson, Van Velthoven, Jonsson, and Tarao Suzuki were running rampant allover Eu ropean ci rcuits last year. For this and other strange collections of reaso ns, Long(er) Travel Rear Suspension was The Thing of the season in motocross competition for the simple reason that, when do ne righ t, it allowed the fast to go faster. The concept wasn 't really new but Maico had reapplied it in anew way. It was only about ·16 months later that you could, if you had the req uisite funding, satisfy your very own needs with a copy of a machine that was a GP secret weapon only the season past. On top of that, we got an orange one. It was an orange Maico that had been used, that being one reality in the often absurd microcosm of motojournalisrn, but not, thankfully, used up. Now get ready to believe this, since I have not found a price wo rth deceiving you for : we never did use it up. Yes, maybe your friend has DNF'd three out of three • 5 races o n h is last year's model Maic o, bu t it is a fact of our existence together that' I've never had a Maico break. I me an really break, with snapping bolts and lunched gearboxes and th e things legend has it that they do regularly. They have run well under me but this one particularly , this 1975 model 400 motocross close-ratio Maico, has the rare quality of making yo u feel magic on a motocross course. (Of course, if for perfectly good reasons involving reality contacts you don't want to feel magic, don't ride a 400 Maico GP.) The feel is that you can do no wro ng as lo ng as the motor keeps motoring and the suspensio n keeps suspending, no t even necessarily pe rfec tly, but wit hin a 20% tolerance of wh at they we re designed to do. The 400 Maico enables a Novice with nothing to prove in the Machismo Department to take the downhill at the site of the U.S. 500 GP tapped in fourth gear, which is the highest number in the Maicos gearbox. In the close ratio model tested, that number isn't high enough . Nor is messing with the sprocket sizes a completely satisfactory answer. Some courses will require a fifth gear that doesn't exist but lacking it. those same courses will be partially susceptible to One of the best-engineered f ro nt ends in motocross felt just a tad harsher this year ...