Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

e0FF·R0AD Larkin Wi hI's excellent adventure e A 1967 Triumph, $200 and a lot of enthusiasm made jt all possible. Larkin Wright crossed the Baja 1000 finish line in La Paz, 38 hours after the start. The Larkie O'Show By Anthony Tellier Photos by Carrera Photography and Tellier ust riding the Baja 1000 sounds extremely serious to most riders. But riding for 38 hours...on an ancient vertical twin? That sounds particularly grueling to almost any rider you might ask. But the prospect sounded pretty damn bueno to Larkin Wight In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Ensenada-to-La paz race, the 34-year-Qld member of California's Lucerne Valley Checker M.e. assembled a traditional desert sled, a 1967 650 Triumph. And the test driver (he helped develop the LTV Hummer, driving it from California to Baltimore on the first leg of its round-theworld test run) rode it all the way to La paz last November. $010. Like, by himself. In 38 hours. With no formal pits and no chase crew. . "Hey, it's 25 years of Baja and it's a 25 year old bike," Wight said. The '60s desert sled mystique is certainly there, from the Ceriani forks to the Progressive Suspension (street model) shocks to the high pipes. And the huge pre-WWll designed TR6C engine with its out-dated super-bulky lower end and towering twin cylinders totaling 650 British ccs. A"4O-incher/' as they used to say. It looked as if the bike's center-Qfgravity was about four inches off the ground. Which is about the same as its suspension travel. Concessions to the'90s are evident in the plastic Acerbis fenders and five-ga1lon XT600 tank, the twin SuperTrapps, the 100 watt halogen Cibie Super Oscar, the pair of 50 watt KC HiUters, and the single 34 rom Mikuni. The frame - ".. recovered from the desert" - is a nickel-plated aftermarket item by Sonic Weld "that used to belong to Dave Aldana." The front wheel was off an old Honda - "a Super Hawk ... maybe." But the traditionally-beefy snowshovel skid plate is right there, as is the tiny side-mounted air filter. Sticking right out in the breeze ready to grab everything that blows by. "Maybe I should build an air box," Wight said "I broke it in on a ride up to Lucerne Valley (from San Diego's Harry Brattin Motors in San Diego. Harry grew up in Chicago with Larkin's dad and he paid Wight's entry fee for the Baja 1(00). A patrol officer stopped me and impounded the dealer plate...and wanted to take J 24 the bike. I talked him out of it I waited until it got dark, then, with my racing lights pointed down, I took off for the high desert." Brattin's Triumph specialist, Steve Shirk, rebuilt the engine "pretty much stock, except for a Harmon & Collins '#9' cam and the Mikuni. It has a special 180 watt Lucas (!) lighting system with two zener diodes". A quick punch on the old calculator tells you that he couldn't run all the lights at once, but then he didn't need to. Skip Van Leeuwen tossed in the tires the front was a 19-incher - which were mounted on ridged Akronts, yet. They each collected about five pounds of dirt, which is not so swell for that unsprung weight. Of course, if you were worried about that, you wouldn't have even started the project (three months before the race). The Arai helmet was from Billy Robertson at Honda-BMW of North Hollywood and the nylon pants and Kevlar gloves came from Phil Stumbo at Malcolm Smith. Larkin was happy: "Man those gloves were great. I never got a blister." It's true, his hands were unmarred - on the surface, anyway. A week after the race his "fingers still didn't work right I couldn't pick up a quarter or pull my socks on in one shot." Smith Goggles supplied eye protection, "I knew them from my AI Baker days." Asked about "The Larkie O'Show" stickers on his gas tank, he said that he had been a protoge of the late (and great) Al Baker during the same time that Johnny O'Mara was being groomed for motocross ("The Johnny O'Show" became "The Larkie O'Show"). Wight became a test rider (along with Drew Smith) for Ai's Honda development oper- ation, putting miles and miles on prototypical XRs out in the high desert. "AI really helped me out. I hadn't been riding much for a couple years - just laying around and getting lazy. When I went to work with him, we would ride 200 miles a day and, at first, it would kill me. But soon I was riding up with Drew and AI and then eventually I was able to race 0-37 in the top five. AI was such a great guy; when you spend two years in a box van with a guy you get to know him real well. Baja '92: "At the Checker meeting before the race, I told all the pit captains that I would use (Steve) Holladay's extra race gas. (Holladay won the pre-SCORE Mexican 1000 in 1968, riding a Husqvarna with Whitey Martino, who drove a buggy to second place in the Unlimited c1ass in this year's race.) I carried a bunch of Unis (filters) in my back pack and would change them after every silt bed." Wight's pit scheme was just that simple: rely on the nine Checker car pits that were spread all down the course and have them dump in whatever gas was left over from Holladay (and co-driver Billy Robertson's) stock. Of course that sort of plan requires that the race car has already been through. It's not a good practice for pit crews to blithely dole out gas stashes before they know how much will be needed by the rightful owners. Can you see it: "Wow, Billy. We gave your gas to Larkin. Sorry." But, luckily (for Larkin, anyway), some of the other Checker cars were out early on - unofficially and all that - so Wight was able to convince the crews ilt San Felipe and Gonzaga that it was okay to go ahead and splash him. When Billy got to L.A. Bay, it was time to pull the off covers and adjust the lights. "Larkin was over there, smoking a cigarette. He snuffed it out - they were fueling me - and he came over, said 'Hi' and did the lights for me. You gotta love it," Robertson said with a laugh. Larkin was relieved to see Billy leave - after that he knew he was cleared for fuel all the way. Larkin smiled in his unflappable way. "Yeah. And then at San Ignacio I helped work on Lou's car, too." he said, referring to Checker member Lou Peralta, the puJ>. lisher of On Dirt magazine. • A lot of race people were aware of what he was up to and were really getting into it. Rounding the northern end of La Sierra de la Giganta - the massive volcanic backbone of Baja Sur - chase crews could receive a smattering of a broken-up radio transmission: "Larkin just left La Purisima." That was in the dead of night. The switchbacks through lava beds out of the Comandus had to be bru taL•. under the best of conditions. "I stopped at a Honda pit and they put on a 'new' used rear tire for me. Then I was starting to see things in the dark those big 01' cactus would look like men or something waving at me," he said with a smile. H( Triumph icons) Eddie Mulder and Karl Krohn told me that would happen, but I just laughed at them. (Hallucinations are now recognized to be a common side-effect of sleep deprivation.) But I kept trudging along. "The cars were very inconsiderate only two honked at all. They assume you can notice their lights shining through yours. No way. I'd get in the habit of stopping after climbing a hill and looking back down into the valley to see if anything was following me. HI was haVing some kind of trouble with the countershaft - it was moving outward and putting a bind on the chain, putting a drag on the engine. So after really wailing on it, I would have to stop and let everything cool down. I'd sit 10, maybe 15 minutes. I was havin' fun." Shirk pointed out that they "couldn't put an O-ring chain on the motorcycle due to severe clearance constraints, so we had to run an old-style number (what else?) that stretched and bound up pretty bad." Larkin lost some transmission gears thir and fourth - later in the race. "Going through the silt beds by the fish camp and then in the sand whoops. It was tough. You couldn't go fast enough to power through, and the countershaft deal didn't like full throttle, either. "I was getting tired. These spectators at Punta Conejo - from Huntington Beach, I think - waved me down and said that the Triumph was coming. I got off and had a beer and smoked a cigarette. They asked me if I was hungry and I said 'Sure' so they put this big 01' lobster on the grill. It was a big one. I ate it all. I washed my hands first. Then I had another beer and smoked another cigarette. I smoked a pack during the race. Plus what people gave me." Taking the minimalist approach, Larkie was self-sufficient - as much he could be, anyway, harking back to the days when people rode Triumphs and were snobby about it, and when people did Baja like this and it was considered somewhat normal. He carried everything in his pack: a bunch of air filters, a few post-race clothes, and snacks. "Everyone asked me, 'Why no big wheelie at the finish?' I did this radical wheelie off the start in Ensenada, but I couldn't do it at the finish, 'cause of the tranny and all. Hey, I could only do about 35 on the highway comin 'in."· Wight's elapsed time was 38 hours, 3 minutes and 31 seconds, good for 26th in Class 22 (big bore bikes), and he was the 89th bike rider to finish - and not the last one, either. In La Pa z after the race, you could tell who were the old desert dogs. The Hilltoppers' Bob Bacon spotted the bike and scooted right over for a critical design review. Stuart Powell, a British District 37 rider (who also soloed, but on a' contemporary Allsport XR600), was suitably impressed by the Empire's iron, fully appreciating the effort - and the machinery, "Bikes of iron, n;ten of steel." His two brothers said: "Stuart, you did really well, (long pause with a glance at the Trumpet) but he did, also." Then they laughed. '1 gatta thank all the 0-37 people who donated money to help me, Everybody gave $20 - except the Lost Angeles (Motorcycle Club), They all laughed. But everybody else believed in me." He expressed a desire to ride a real long race - like a marathon raid ala Paristo-Dakar. "I'd put CR forks on this if I did that," he kidded. "No, I'd really like to do a major rally and I think I proved the point that I can do the long distances OIl a heavy bike. It was a pUblicity trick, in a sense, to show that I'm capable of it. I'm a desert Danny LaPorte, but I'm not a National Champion, so I have had to do this to show that I am a long distance rider. I'm doing the Barstow-ta-Vegas dual sport ride over Thanksgiving - on the same bike." In keeping with the tenor of the adventure, after the race Wight simply hitched a pick-up truck ride for the Triumph and himself with Holladay and Robertson from La Paz back to San Diego. He was fed, he was housed, and he was "beered" all the way. . While on that trip, laid back on the beach at Punta Conejo - a hot surfer spot, he smiled over a beer and a steak. '1 was afraid I'd get a ride back with people who were in a hurry and who didn't like to have fun. Who loves ya, baby?" I can see it now: "Do the Baja 1000 OIl $200 - the Larlue O'Show way!" 01

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