Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

Vance (Kaw) topped Mike Keyte (Suz) in the Pro Stock ranks. Mike Pizzatola (Kaw) won in Pro Compo Buddy McBride (Kaw) was the winner in Pro Gas. ISOE bits and pieces: The overall standings from the 69th IS DE show Jeff Fredette, the top individual scorer for the U.S.. in 14th position among the 293 finishers. Geoff Ballard was 23rd . . . The 1985 ISOE will be held in Alp, Spain on September 22-28 in a region known as La Cerdanya in the Pyrenees ... Team doctor Richard Meyer celebrated his 1Oth ISOE. Looking back, Meyer says today's riders are in much better physical condition than when he began going to the event in an official capacity. "I could've treated this year's riders with a small first aid kit," said Meyer. "It was the support people who needed all the help." ... Geoff Ballard, who replaced the injured Ed Lojak on the Trophy team could have ridden a Husqvarna instead of the CanAm 250 on which he qualified. "If Geoff had had some problems with his bike or for some other reason didn't want to ride what he was originally entered on, then we did have a spare Husky 260 he could (Continued to page 54) By John Ulrich When I wrote about sloshing through two-foot-deep water crossings during an eight-hour endurance road race at Texas World Speedway (Risk, Cycle News October 17), some readers had trouble visualizing just how deep the twin rivers on the course aaually were. Two feet. That's over your knees if you're standing, float-bowl-level on your bike; that's front wheel and fender, front discs and calipers, rear disc and caliper, chain and sprockets and swingarm and igniton system and exhaust all under water, as in below the surface, submerged, lost beneath the muddy waves. This water was deep enough that for a moment a rider could wonder if a bizarre course change had brought .him to the Rio Grande, deep enough to start a pilot looking for illegals swimming in the current or maybe Immigration and Naturalization patrol boats. It's a wonder nothing alive and slimy surfaced from the murk and developed an appetite for leather>yrapped humans. But there was more to that sodden day in Texas than flash floods and road-racing water crossings. There was Texas World Speedway itself, once the fastest stock car track in the world, now, weN in a state of decline. There's corregated banking, steeply inclined and so rough that the word "bumpy" is wholly inadequate. It's a big deal to get a fast bike's throllie pegged in top gear, and a bigger deal to keep it there all the way around. All the time you're on the banking the motorcycle is jumping around, trying to change direction; one bump, rut, crack, frost heave after another tries to deflect the bike's wheels, which bounce off the pavement and land again, hopping from one high spot to the next; the rider of a stifflysuspended Formula One bike is pounded until his guts ache. Russ Paulk went out in practice and came in asking around for a kidney belt. He discovered that hanging off the inside - far enough off the bike that only his thigh was on the seat, his right knee locked against the high side of the gas tank - kept his kidneys from hurting. I tried it and it worked; my left knee straight out into the wind helped keep the bike on course too - that neutralized the bike's tendency to aim for the wall over the bumps. Gelling around the bank on the gas in fifth gear meant running eight feet from the steel wall atop the track, with constant levering on the handlebars to keep the thing on course. I caught myself wondering if the bike's wheels would break from the ISO-mph beating, found myself glancing at the sagging steel wall and wondering if I'd hit it or clear it if the wheels fell apart on the next section of ragged pavement. When I slid back up onto the seat, pu lled in my knee and . tucked in underneath the bubble I could feel the bike pick up acceleration, lunge forward, fly onto the straight. Tumbleweeds grew out of the track. along the edges of the straightaway, and one particularly well-formed green weed made an excellent brake marker for turn one. Shooting down onto the road course took the bike over one dip that knocked my bUll up off the seat every lap - it was over the bump or nothing; for most of the race riders had to hit one narrow dry strip between puddles entering turn one, go outside another puddle, inside a fourth, and hook it into turn two. Beyond the facility itself, events in the state of Texas are run by ·an engaging group of enthusiasts known as the CRRC, for Central Road Racing Club, under WERA sanction. I . can't figure why the club, run by College Station motorcycle dealer Joe Fisher, isn't known as Lone Star Racers or Texas Road Racing Club or something more distinctive, something that bener tells all that this is racing in Texas, by Texans, for Texans, and that's all there is to it. "This is Texas, and we do things our way here," the race director told me last year when I asked why LeMans-style run-to-your-bike, deadengine starts are used in Texas World endurance races even though a commillee of concerned riders convinced the WERA to eliminate that type of start in the interests of safety. There was a LeMans start again this year; Fisher vol unteered that the Texas riders like a LeMans start, and that the Texas World pit row is wide enough to accommodate a crash-free LeMans start. He proved to be right. Yamaha's 1985 lineup includes two small playbikes, the PW50 and PW80. Both are air-cooled, single-cylinder two-strokes, but the PW80 has a large air filter shaped and positioned to look like a radiator on a watercooled YZ racebike; the PW50 has a shaft drive. Both have COl and IJil injection; the PW50 is a one-speed automatic and the PW80 has an automatic clutch with a three-speed transmission and chain final drive -both upper and lower runs of the chain have guards. The PW50 has stamped steel wheels, the PW80 has wire-spoked wheels. Wheelbase on the PW50 is 33.7 inches, dry weight 81.6 pounds. The PW80 has a 41 .5-inch wheelbase and 8 dry weight of 126 pounds. Retail price for the PW50 is $499, but the price tag for the PW80 hasn't been set yet. When we saw our team listed fifth on a piece of paper posted on the tech building wall, we made the mistake of thinking that meant we were supposed to line up fifth-from-the-front; when we tried to do so we ran into the extremely-vocal objections of one Paul Smith, a Texan who complained that we were allowed to do .so just because we were who we were, whomever that is; Smith went on to tell me that he did his racing on the track - the implication being that I did not and that the start positions were firstcome, first-serve. It was my first experience with self-serve gridding, as it were. The Texans have their own way of scoring endurance races, too, two or three or maybe four women volunleers scoring every body from the slowest point on the course - the corner just after the second river crossingunder the direction of Connie Brothers, one of the nicest, hardest-working, most dedicated people you'll ever meet. The system is computerized these days, the numbers on the passing bikes fed directly into the electronics. There was some sort of difficulty gelling the numbers out of the computer for the rules-required hourly results postings, and another glitch of some sort or another kept the points from being calculated and forwarded post-haste to WERA headquarters in South Carolina but, if so, it wasn't for lack of Mrs. Brothers' trying. It's easy to dismiss the CRRC and Texas World'Speedway as being useless; it's easy to talk about never going back; it's easy to say that the track should be considered as a nuclear waste dump site. Talk to road-racing Texans and they are not self-deceived. They know that Texas World Speedway is a pit, a wasteland, a high-speed concreteand-asphalt washboard. "It's all we've got," one racer told me. The track management is unconcerned and uninterested in improving the course, so the Texans have two choices: race or don't race. They chose to race, 39 teams making the grid for the bike-punishing eight-hour, hundreds of other riders entering the sprints ~hat followed. They are enthusiastic, these Texans, and they ride hard. The best of them, upon leaving Texas to race elsewhere, will find that any bike that will handle at Texas World will handle everywhere; that courses like Sears Point and Nelson Ledges - noted among non-Texans for bumps and ripples and rough pavement - are, relative to their training ground in College Station, billiard-table smooth. They will find that a man who is fast at Texas World Speedway is likely to be fast on any course in the country; that the only difference between winning in Texas and winning somewhere else is that winning somewhere else is easier. • 7

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