Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

AHRMA Steamboat Motorcycle Week (Left) Dave Russell took a commanding lead In the F750 race and held on for victory. despite this near· crash. (Right) Vintage racing In style: Tom Mellor and John Collett brought this 1950 Rolls Royce Sliver Dawn 1400 miles from canada, with a tent In the back seat and two race bikes on the trailer. (Below) TIm Stenclll (1 m) tekes the lead In the 500cc Sportsman race disgorged motor oil, but the only oil slick visible at the start of Saturday's vintage racing was the long trail in a hilltop condo parking lot left by a modern bike (the Mountain Racing Association race the next day on the same circuit) with a blown seal caused by one overly enthusiastic owner and cold oil. However, there would be oil on the tracks by day's end. Once more, the biggest problem was turn one, the slightly off-camber, decreasing-radius left-hander that meanders down toward the condominiums from the mairl startfinish straight. The tum is installed at the end of a left-tum lane, and a only a narrow strip of asphalt is provided for the corner: Before and after, there's a raised curb running along the middle of the road. The turn has it all: the length of the main straight (which runs downhill) before it, a narrow entry, a seam between changes in pavement, stutter bumps on the entry, and a tighter-thanexpected turn at the apex. To say it catches people out is a classic understatement: This year the race organizers should have parked a fork lift inside the tum, to load up the truckloads of bikes that crashed there. He didn't crash, but it wasn't Jeff Elings' day. The 25-year-old Santa Barbara, California, native raced his original Matchless G50 in both Oassie '60s and Premier classes. Modern updates to brakes, wheels and engine are allowed in the Premier class, but originality is the stuff of Oassie '60s. And it seemed like Eling's bike was the most original on the grid at Steamboat - and the aJ]:conquering Barber team was not around with its modem, slightly faster yet still AHRMAlegal G50 replicas. A surprise was in. store for Elings, even though he started out the race in fine style, taking the holeshot and jumping into the lead on his G5O. Steadily, he pulled ahead, building up a lead of three seconds by the fourth lap of the eight-lap race. But soon his lead was down to two seconds, then on the last lap it was down to one, as BSA Gold Star-mounted Bobby Winters clawed back the lead, and, on the last lap, overtook Elings for a surprise win. It seemed to surprise Winters just as much as Elings. Winters was a BSA-supported rider back at the start of the '60s. He kept his BSA Gold star, which the factory quit making in 1963. As it turned out, the Gold Star single was faster than the factory replacement. It was a step back for BSA in the mid-'6Os, when they changed to 500cc A50 twins in the AMA Oass C competition. Winters was supported by the East Coast BSA distributorship, out of Nutley, New Jersey, and also rode for Yamaha in the 250cc class. Then Yamaha started running 350s in Daytona 200, so Winters went all-Yamaha until his retirement from racing. His last year of racing was aboard a Yamaha TZ700, a far cry from the Goldstar he started with - but somehow, it was the Gold Star he hung on to. "My nephew Bart Winters tunes it for me, and he's my sponsor!" said Winters. "The BSA is a box-stock piece. We put it together, tune it, time it, and it's ready to go. It' 5 a '62 model Gold Star, one of the last ones they made. That year they assembled some bikes with GP engines and knobby tires, and it was called a competition model. BSA gave me the tank and road race equipment at the time. I've half-miled this bike, I've scrambled it, road raced it, ridden it on the road, and I've made up my mind to enter a trials on it someday. It's a very versatile machine. You can do a lot with one, depending on what gear you put on it." Tim Stancill, the number-one pIa te holder in AHRMA's 500cc Sportsman class, took the lead from the holeshot of the 500cc class, riding his 350 Honda twin. Usually, all the opposition sees of the Honda rider is his broad back, but this time there was some serious competition in the wings. Even as he came around to pass the start-finish at the end of the first lap, competitors were clawing at his heels, and by the end of the second lap, Patrick Shieffer, on another Honda 350 twin, and Tom Antor, on a BSA 500cc B50, were both past the Fallston, Maryland rider. On the second lap, a rider fell in tum one and the oil flags came out again. The flags had no effect on the order, which stayed Honda, BSA, Honda until Antor tried a challenge on Schieffer for the lead in the fifth lap. The leader pulled out all the stops, and started to put some daylight between his old Honda twin and the even-older BSA single. Stancill seemed to be relegated to third place, until Antor tried a little too hard to make up time and pitched the Beezer in turn one. Schieffer took the win, and Stancill settled for a rare second place. Back in midpack in the Sportsman race, the only woman in the AHRMA road race event, Kat Kovacs of San Francisco, California, on a 450 Honda, was tussling with the only motojournalist, Jon Thompson of Cycle World Magazine, riding a Ducati 350 Sebring. The pair raced neck-and-neck until Thompson snuck by with a pass that clipped' Kovac's muffler and put her off the pace slightly. The pass stuck, and Thompson inched away, only to retire before the flag. Kovacs pressed on for a seventhplace finish. The first two places were a repeat of the results in the 350cc Sportsman event, where Schieffer again pulled out into the lead ahead of the hard-starting Stancill to take the win. In the Formula 250 race, run concurrently, Richard Merhar justified his number-one plate as he built up a commanding lead over second-place Rick Doughty. Bill Boyce completed the Yamaha domination of the class, though just behind him John Louck brought his automatic-geared Rokon special into fourth place. This year, the 350cc GP class has been marked by tough competition between Team Obsolete rider David Roper and Barber Racing's Chuck Huneycutt. With the Barber team away for an exloratory look at the Manx GP, Team Obsolete was the favorite to win this popular class. Sure enough, Roper took the holeshot on the AJS 7R with David Chrone in his wake on a Ducati 350. By the next lap, teammate John Cronshaw brought his 7R AJS into second pl~ce, just a second behind Roper, followed several seconds later by Tom Marquardt on a '62 Honda CB77 machine. Californian Jim Neuenburg held fourth place on his Aermacchi 350, and another Aermacchi Harley-Davidson, piloted by Kurt Mund in place of the injured Lee Steinmetz, held fifth pla~e. .Roper stayed ahead of Cronshaw to the end, with some spirited riding that saw the lead pair la I' hali of the field before th.e finish of the eight-lap race. Formula 500 is one of AHRMA's faster classes, the refuge for many genuine ex-racers that just happen to be two-strokes. This year, Dave Rosno gave them a run for their money with a win aboard his 1976 Honda 475cc twin: The win was more surprising given that the Honda was the only four-stroke among the 20 entrants; all of the rest relied on two-stroke power. More two-strokes filled out the 200cc GP class, and once again it was a four-stroke versus two-stroke battle as Byron Blend, on a 1965 Honda 160 struggled for the lead with 125cc Maico-mounted Gordon Pull is. While the lead pair battled, Quinn Swift brought his 175cc Montesa into third place, and as Pullis faded in the final laps, Swift snuck by to take second to the four-stroke Honda. Meanwhile, in the pre-'40 race, the battle was definite- . ly four-stroke against four-stroke, but here the fight was ancient against slightly less-ancient, Indian against Triumph, handshift side-valve V-twin against foot-shift V-twin. Blake Wilson used the superior low-speed pulling power of his 1930s vintage Indian Sport Scout to stay in front of the more modem-looking 1939 Triumph Tiger 100 of Gordon Menzie, while behind the lead pair, Butch Baer extracted amazing speed from the positively antiquated 1926 Indian Scout. Try as he might, Menzie couldn't catch the leading Indian, which he reckoned later actually had a handling advantage over his rigid-framed Triumph, which is fitted with non-damped telescopic forks. On the last lap, the order seemed set until Baer's gas cap vibrated off, spraying him with a race-gas rinse under his faceshield, He slowed, and fellow Indian rider "Doc" Batsleer brought his '35 Indian Scout up to fill the gap for third place. The battle would be repeated in the Class C race, as Menzie brought out another Triumph - his 1951 model - to try and beat the Indians. Menzie took the holeshot, but was soon passed by Batsleer on his Indian. Wilson pulled into the lead, and Menzie nipped back into second spot. Meanwhile, Carleton Palmer got by the other Indians, Harleys and BMW riders to bring his 1950 Vin-

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