Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

~ . ,~",.,: . I· Q 24 . l~ ~~--,,---- By Joe Scalzo n the Pomona Fairgrounds in Los Angeles this May, the night's National race was ending, the parking lots were emptying, and the carnival sound was on . Sportsters were sounding off, fulldressers were joining in, and a few antique K models were going: Boom-. f1ah! Boom-flah! No such staccato Harley-Davidson rhythms were audible from inside the race track . Instead, the full-race XRs of Parker, Carr, Morehead and everybody else were emasculated as ever by their gruesomely ugly and bulbous mufflers whose sole and highly successful function is to choke out the sound and make sterile what used to be the most alive and dangerous of all racing motorcycles. It used to be different. Used to be before environmental and political considerations took hold - you could judge how aggressively a Harley-Davidson was being raced just from the waves of sound it was making. They were bred for i t. They were bred for Daytona Beach. Not the Daytona of today, but the Daytona of the Fifties, when the season 's 2ao-mile brawl was fought over a sand and coral battleground four-oddmiles-long right along the Atlantic. Sand swirled and blasted faces. Startled shore birds buzzed riders. And gassing a dreadnaught Milwaukee vibrator up to and in excess of 135 mph without benefit of vision was just part of the beachfront mystique. And then there was Jungle Road which was old Daytona 's back straightawa y of two miles piercing dense foliage, including bushes as big as houses. Barely two lines wide, the jousting K models took its undulating measure while grappling three- and four-abreast in hellbent wolf packs. Pavement laid on top of asphalt, it was marked by violent dips and rises for the entire life-threatening two miles. One year Dick Mann and some others took an automobile out on Jungle Road to see how fast it could go. At a speed of only 65 mph , the automobile heaved out of control. Meanwhile, it so happened that with the benefit of just two wheels, the likes of Brad Andres, Everett Brashear and Joe Leonard were clocking around 140. There were two sets of handlebars, a big set of bull horns on top and then a set of pegs clipped to the fork legs. The throttle was left on the big bars and set to run wide open. A rev-kill button accommodated speed-shifting through the gears. For the length of the jungle, you hung low behind the clip-oris . No streamlining was required; the K's already had more firepower than anybody wanted. The whole nerved-up experience on Jungle Road really amounted to a speed wobble lasting two miles. As a result, life and death existed as partners. The team Harley-Davidsons had huge hearts and the greatest riders needed colossal cojones to fuel their demands. Spectators who apparently flipped out just from watching them occasionally wandered dazed across the road, and some got hit and run down to the great discomfort of all. Museum pieces with their ancient flathead motors, the heavy-gauge K's were quite famous in their own right. One especially noble engine won Daytona four times as well as Laconia. And in 1964, three long years after the 200 miles had moved inside Daytona Inter- national Speedway, the same engine raised a familiar battle cry and set the fastest qualifying time all over again . Its earliest rider was a prodigy: Brad Andres. Besides Daytona and Laconia, he won Dodge City, Langhorne and Torrey Pines. But during 1955, while he was in the process of becoming the first teenaged Grand National Champion, Andres got well chopped up in the slaughter of the Basney-Hawley spill at Gardena Speedway and missed much racing while convalescing. Back he came, however, to win Peoria, Watkins Glen and, repeatedly, Laconia and Daytona . The rider who used the ex-Andres engine to establish the fastest flying lap at Daytona in 1964 was named Mel Lacher. He was some kind of daredevil medical student, a friend of the later martyr Cal Rayborn, and little-known to the riders of the Harley-Davidson factory team. His out-qualifying them was an embarrassment, so they ran him out of road in the Daytona infield. Lacher and the old Andres engine never won a National race, but never, ever, got passed on a straightaway. Still later, Lacher became a demon of flat track on Friday nights at Ascot Park, before getting put on suspension for crashing out six times in eight starts. Bart Markel was another warrior who really knew how to race a big K; his own were always the most recklessly out-of-control of the period. Imagine Markel, for example, 35 years ago at the 1959 Daytona, his very first 200 miles. Pulling the trigger, he swerved ahead of Andres, Brashear and Leonard to arrive at the hellish end of Jungle Road near the lead. But he couldn't tum and crashed. It wasn't a debilitating crash - he was able to resume the battle- but only a few .miles afterward, this time attacking hard on the beachfront and unable to see in the blowing sand, he had a 135mph smash with a BMW that was traveling 35 mph slower. The Harley immediately emptied its saddle of Markel and proceeded to go on a rampage of its own, somersaulting and plunging for the length of the beach, until hurling itself at a parked car, completely wrecking the car. Except for almost strangling on sand impacted in his throat, Markel got away unharmed. Through the seasons, the count reached a new intensity. Various K's from the Markel stable spilled Dick Dorresteyn at Ascot Park, knocked Sammy Tanner through a fence at Columbus, flattened Joe Leonard at Peoria, roughed up Dick Klamfoth at Mannsfield, and at Springfield took down Dick Hammer, Darrel Doval and Al Gunter one year, and Gary Nixon the next. His K's turned on Markel, too, especiall y on pa vement, where he seldom showe d one the respect everyone else did. Getting rough with a K at the inaugural 200 miles inside Daytona International Speedway, Markel was repaid for his disrespect by gelling well thrown. He landed in a heap, right hand out to cushion his crash landing. But he wasn't wearing gloves, so his palm was ground to pulp. People came to his aid, but were sickened by the gore. So he visited a hot dog concession stand and stopped , • the bleeding by packing his wounds with the contents of a salt shaker. Another K spun him off the rainsoaked course of Greenwood. Still another flung him on h is head at Loudon. Markel could get away with tank-slappers all afternoon long winning dirt track Nationals, but regularly came away from road races well bitten. Yet the mauling a K gave to him one yea r at Bossier City, Louisiana, was almost too much , even for MarkeL He mounted four successive charges at the same corner. The first charge knocked him down and broke the front brake lever in half. The second collision ripped away the rear brake pedal. The third one reshaped the handlebars and fork legs. The fourth one almost finished off the gas tank. Then this ponderous, ill-tempered K really turned its rage on Markel, throwing him off three more times on three different comers. Markel somehow got the heavy cripple back to the pits, but just when it seemed to be completing its noisy and slow process of dying, Markel rode it back into the National instead. He somehow managed a few more laps without falling, and finished a battered fourth. Markel, just like George Roeder, could dominate the dirt. Brad Andres and Roger Reiman were best on pavement. But the only legitimately versatile flathead K hero able to go fast on any surface was Joe Leonard , and, following him, Carroll Resweber. Those who continue insisting that Resweber was the most uncanny K luminary of them all are probably right. Resweber was no creampuff. If he had to, he could do the pain number just as well as Markel. In his macho moments, Resweber competed with the handicap . of a fractured wrist, and the dull pain of a broken leg. But he preferred to finesse instead of bulldog. He was the only K soldier able to understeer instead of broadslide dirt comers. He also sought to civilize a K by . removing much of its combat armor - he hacked the frame away from the engine, used thin-wall handlebars borrowed from bicycles, lightened drastically the gears in the transmission and was repu ted to be such a weight fanatic that he saved grams by using bicycle instead of motorcycle innertubes. Minus all its protection, Resweber's K smashed the life out of itself in a 1962 collision with other motorcycles and a thick wooden fence in Lincoln, Illinois. That was also the finish of Resweber's dream of capturing a Grand National Championship for the fifth consecutive year. A fiercely compe titive and egotistical streak ran through all the tuners building up the K. When Leonard Andres, who was the tuner-father of Brad Andres, and Tom Sifton were crossing Nebraska, their car and trailer filled with Harley-Davidsons went out of contr ol and turned ov er, presumably becau se they wer e in the middle of an argument over whose K was the fastest. Ralph Berndt could make factual claims about K horsepower, as could Everett Brashear, Babe DeMay, Eddie Warren and Mert Lawwill, who was the last of the great tuner-riders. But 1968, which became the next-to-last season of model K superiority, the factory tuner who was on top wa s on e Roy Bokleman . Part of the reason Bokleman was on top was because his pilot was Freddy Nix, at 118 pounds the most flyweight flyer in the whole Harley-Davidson factory arsenal. The very first time that Bokleman and Nix combined, at Springfield for the National of 1965, Nix broke the mile track record and established a new one. At first there was hostility between Bokleman and his rider. Nix was so anxious to avail himself of the K's power he had absolutely no fear of it - that he was gassing th ings wide open before Bokleman's trick camshafts and cylinders were ready. After a few scoldings, Bokleman broke him of the habit. Their very first win together at a National came in 1966, when Nix took the important step of stopping the Gold Star BSA of Sammy Tanner from ruining Harley-Davidson prestige in the Sacramento Mile. Their big, unbelievable season together, however, was' that of 1968. Life at Milwaukee was in ruin following a bitter 1967- Harley-Davidson's most humiliating season in 13 years. It had won only eight of 17 Nationals and lost the Grand National Championship to Triumph. Failure fired everybody up . The K engine Bokleman built up was in response to Harley-Davidson losing the No.1 plate. Arguably the most overpowered K ever, all of its speed goodies were laid out on a bore machine right in

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