Cycle News

But finally, on July 22, 1967, on a summer night at Ascot, it all came together. Van Leeuwen took it seriously and played it cagey. Rather than rush to lead the 50-lap National, Van Leeu- wen followed Norton-mounted Jack Simmons for much of the race before making his move for the lead on lap 37. The two then diced for three laps before Simmons retook the lead. It ap- peared to be Simmons' night un- til the last lap, when he crashed away his chance at victory. Even then, Van Leeuwen's win was not a certainty, as his Triumph popped a fuel line and slowed considerably. "Go, blow, or put a hole in the fence" Van Leeuwen earned his first National win. He would earn a total of four before retiring from racing in 1973. By then, racing had gotten serious. "I'll tell you how stiff the competition was when I retired," Van Leeuwen says. "When I quit in 1973, I was 31 or 32 years old, and they were calling me George Blanda. I was the old man of the racetrack. Gary Scott and Kenny Roberts and all these young guys were coming in. I'd come in and I'd have marks all over my legs and elbows from where those guys were running into me. I could still go fast but got a job and went on the road. I never told anybody I was go- ing to retire, didn't say a word, because you hear about the guy who says that he's going to retire and then gets killed in his last race. That wasn't going to be me. I just waited until the end of the season, pulled into the pits, and said, 'I quit.' Nobody believed me." But Van Leeuwen did walk away, pursuing a career in the motorcycle industry that was only briefly interrupted by a career in the music recording business. As the head of his own motorcycle parts distributorship, Skip Van Leeuwen Enterprises, Van Leeuwen has been a main- stay in the industry ever since. As far as the racing-legend stuff, it's icing on the cake, but for Van Leeuwen the cake was the camaraderie and the enjoyment that he got out of racing with his pals, not so much the winning. "It [winning a lot of Nationals] never really entered my mind," Van Leeuwen says. "It wasn't really part of my consciousness. What made me such a big name was my craziness off the race- track. Like, every year, I used to go down to the St. Johns River in Florida, and off that river is a tributary called the Wekiva. The trick was that I'd take everybody up this little Wekiva, which was a wildlife preserve, and we'd just start shooting everything in sight. If they would've caught us, we never would've gotten out of jail. We'd have 15 shotguns and boxes of shells, and I'd say, 'Okay guys, don't shoot until we get down the river a little ways.' We'd get 10 yards from the dock, and the guns would just start roaring. Then I'd play like I was lost and scare the shit out of everybody. There'd be water moccasins in the trees and stuff like that. "Well, this one year I took all the factory racers, like Mark Brelsford, Dick Hammer, Art Baumann, Gene Romero, I forget who was all there," Van Leeuwen says. "Pretty soon it's getting dark, and I start taking wrong turns, and we run out of gas. We were screwed. I was sure we were going to spend the night out there, and here I had all these factory racers who had to be to the track the next morning. So, I'm tearing off bits of cloth and hanging it from the trees to mark my way so that I didn't go the same way twice, and Bill Manley says to me, 'What's the matter, Skip, you lost?' Wink, wink. He thought I was kidding, and he was the only guy who wasn't scared to death, but everybody else was freaked." For Skip Van Leeuwen, it was all in good fun. CN This Archives edition is reprint- ed from issue #5, November 16, 2005. CN has hundreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to pre- vent that from happening, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor P110 CN III ARCHIVES Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

• Cover