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VOLUME 57 ISSUE 27 JULY 7, 2020 P97 care who was on the Bul', and they screamed all the louder when he took the lead about three-quarters of a lap into the race. Pomeroy was never headed after that, giving Bul- taco a GP win—as a privateer. "I was a definite privateer," Pomeroy said. "I had a sponsorship through University Honda/Bultaco of Seattle. They bought the bike. It was a stock '73 Pursang Mk. 6 that I had taken out of the crate three days before and put together myself. The day of the race, I got two free tires from Pirelli. I wasn't used to getting free stuff, and it took me 45 min- utes to change them that morning. I didn't have a mechanic to help me." After winning that first moto, how- ever, Pomeroy suddenly found him- self with eight, as a swarm of factory Bultaco mechanics jumped in and tore apart the Pursang to freshen it up for the second moto. You'd think that Pomeroy would be pleased to see it, but instead he was pissed. "When I pulled in, I was sur- rounded by press and people, and I didn't know what happened to my bike," Pomeroy remembers. "It was running so perfectly that I didn't want anything touched. Then finally, the crowd started going to other people, and I looked and saw my bike had all these mechanics on it, and they had torn it apart. I couldn't believe it, and I ran over and said, 'What are you doing?!' But it was too late. They had already torn the clutch apart and put new plates in it. Then in the second moto, the clutch slipped so badly off the line that I got a really bad start." Pomeroy once again worked the outside to perfection. Using his momentum to baby the clutch, he passed his way up to third place by the 30-minute mark. But then came disaster, as he crashed in a fourth- gear corner. Fortunately, Pomeroy was able to regroup and get going again. "I got back up and caught back up to Hans Maisch to get fourth place, which gave me the overall win.'' Or did it? When the awards were handed out on the podium, Maisch was given the GP trophy, and Pomeroy was relegated to second place. It turned out to be a mistake of monumental proportions. "What happened was that in years before you had to finish both motos to get GP points, but they changed the system for 1973 to points by moto, and that's where the officials got confused and gave my trophy away. I went up to the podium and they put me in second place. "I wasn't too happy about that." By the time the officials realized the mistake and corrected it, Maisch had made off with the trophy, and, when told of the change, the Ger- man refused to relinquish it. "I asked him for it three or four times, and then I just gave up on it," Pomeroy says. "So I went without it, but it didn't matter, because I won half a dozen more GPs after that, and a lot more motos. And after that race, I started picking up $1200 in start money, and then I started liking the system. It took that GP win to get it going." He would continue riding Bul- tacos through the 1976 season before coming home to race AMA nationals for Honda in '77 and '78. He then returned to Europe for Bul- taco in '78 and rode until the fac- tory closed its doors before switch- ing to an ill-fated ride on the Italian Beta brand in 1980. Upon returning to America in 1981, Pomeroy was more or less forced into retirement by a bizarre AMA rule that labeled him as a non-qualified rider for AMA nationals even though he had held an FIM license. But that wasn't the end of Pome- roy's racing days. Based in Wash- ington he remained active in the AHRMA vintage motocross scene while taking care of his real estate concerns. In fact, it was just last year, at an AHRMA National MX event in Chehalis, Washington, that Pomeroy got the surprise of his life, as he was awarded his first-place 1973 Spanish GP trophy. "I couldn't believe it when that happened," Pomeroy says. "My brother [Ron Pomeroy] and a couple other people put it together. I never dreamed I'd get that back. It choked me up pretty good." Trophy or no trophy, Jim Pome- roy was the first American ever to win an FIM motocross grand prix. They never gave out a trophy for that accomplishment, but it's also something that they'll never be able to take away. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from issue #15, April 21, 2004. CN has hundreds of past Archives edi- tions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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