Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

DNF' By Mark Hoyer j spent last Sunday morning cruising. But I wasn't on my bike. In fact, I didn't even leave my bed. What I was riding was possibility. Yes, the Los Angeles Times Oassified section is like a menu for the maniacal mechanic, a rapid-depletion system for your wallet and a road map for your future. All that, and more. Southern California has its smog, its drive-by shootings, people who drive by that don't have guns but whose driving by can be just as lethal as a bullet, and traffic jams. But I can take all of that, because the one thing we don't have is rust. Sometime after I became aware of cool motorcycles and cool cars, I took my first trip to the East Coast. This was in the Super '70s, a time when the build quality of American cars wasn't what it could be and rustproofing in general not too refined a science. I think I even saw some Opels rusting on the showroom floor. Anyway, most everything more than five years old, American or not, seemed to be missing its lower third of sheet metal. Motorcycles too were victims of the salt-accelerated corrosion. We vis~ted an old friend of my dad's in Pennsylvania who rode BMWs and had been doing so since the late 195Os. He showed me his old R69, which from across the garage· looked nice. It wasn't. The Chrome was pitted, the frame was perforated., all of it eaten away by the salt of 18 winters. I It made California look like a vehicular time capsule. Which, when you take one rook at the classified ads in the Sunday edition, it is. The other benefit of the consistently good weather is that not only does what gets sold in this part of the country last longer than anywhere else, more of the good stuff gets sold here. California ranks among the top states in motorcycle sales and I'm willing to bet that more British and Italian convertibles made their way off the showroom floor out here too. For a nut like me, it's the best. So when I don't get up at the crack of dawn to motor my way down the double-the-fine fun road called the Ortega Highway on a Sunday morning, I do the next best thing by £lotting my future with what I might buy. Buried in the back among the airplanes (another good place to stop, with the added benefit of never costing me anything because I can't afford one) and boats (ditto) is the motorcycle section. Thus far, with motorcycles I haven't taken the vintage route. Or not what I would consider vintage, anyway. The odd RD400 has lived in my garage, all two of them '79 Daytona Specials, but never anything older than that. They come up infrequently, but often enough to keep the flame alive. My cars, on the other hand, have all been vintage. The newest I've owned is a '74, the oldest a 1959. Though it numbers more than 10 years, between these years is what I consider The Decade. It was during this period of time that things seem to have been sorted out, when machines were unfettered in design by the insane maze of EPA and safety laws that would come later, and gas was cheap. The only reason I consider anyiliing newer than '69 is that the British kept building obsolete cars for about five years after that time. So The Decade gets 15 years. Looking at the motorcycles produced during this period, it seems that about the same holds true. Buy something from the early part of The Decade and you can be reasonably sure that you won't need to tum the throttle with one hand and advance the ignition with the other. It'll be a machine which takes care of things that should be automatic automatically, leaving the important activities, like going and stopping, to the pilot. Buy in the later part and they had most everything sorted out even better. You got going faster, and, with some bikes getting dist brakes, you got to stop faster too. True to form, though, the Brits got on the brake wagon a little too late. Bless 'em. My fundamental problem is that I don't know enough about the old bikes to make a truly stupid informed decision. I've got the Triumph TR6 car line all figured out. I've rebuilt every major component (some more than one time), got the YIN numbers sorted out and know, by reading 10 to 15 strangely abbreviated words in a tiny ad, whether I "need" that car or not. With my love of motorcycles centered on the modern, I get lost before 1979. Throw a Triumph TR6 bike in front of me and I wouldn't be able to tell'you for sure how many gears it has. What I do know is that there are these Ducatis out there with these cool bevel-drive cams. That there is a BSA with bullet-shaped mufflers that do little to quiet combustion noise and everything to add character to the sound. That there is a lot of aluminum out there that needs to be polished. I read our classifieds (they have more words and pictures sometimes too) in search of the one machine I just can't pass up. All it takes IS that one ad, and you too can drag some heap home to your garage, spend the weekend working on hydraulics, heating stuck parts with your torch (if you have any oxygen left - make sure you save some for your wife or girlfriend when she sees the "great deal" you just dragged home on a trailer) and bouncing your credit card off the rev-limiter for the next three months. For now, I'll just keep reading. Spend enough time doing it and my fmgers will even get black. It's almost as good as the real thing. £N riI~'il'"J"':"R""- _ the final round of the series _ 2S YEARS AGO... NOVEMBER 9, 1971 held in Phillip Island, Australia...Honda's Scott Summers won the AMA Grand Nalional Cross Country round held in Mount Morris, Pennsylvnia. {N e 'FIM grant- ' ed the AMA the opportunity to host the Inter- / national Six Days / Trials in 1973. Formerly, the honor of hosting the event went to the TI winner, however, Communist dominance and the U.S. teams' fourth-place finish in 1971 earned the honor of hosting...Triumph-mounted Terry Dorsch won ABC's televised "Race of Champions" held in San Jose, California. Dave Hansen and Jim Rice took second and third, respectively, also on Triumphs ... Suzuki's Sylvain Geboers won the Trans-AMA Motocross held in Orlando, Florida. Husqvarna's Heikki Mikkola got second and Pierre Karsmakers got third. Doug Grant won the 250cc Support class on a AJS. 15 YEARS AGO... NOVEMBER 4, 1981 ycle News covered the 68th annual C Paris Motorcyde Show. Singleshock rear suspension MX and off Road bikes by KTM and Maico drew crowds...Terry Kizer won the Funny Bike class at the International Drag Bike Association's World Finals at the Gulfport Dragway in Gulfport, Mississippi. Sid Pogue won the Pro-Stock class, Bo 5YEARS AGO... NOVEMBER 6, 1991 ycle News ran a review of the 1991 AMA MX season entitled, "Year of the Frenchman," in recognition of Team Honda's Jean-Michel Bayle's three championship titles that season: 250cc Su percross,. 250cc National. MX and 500cc Nalional MX. The issue also featured an interview with the 22-year-old Bayle, who spoke about his future move to GP road racing...Dutchman Racing, consisting of riders Chris Haldane and Mike Harth took their third consecutive AMA / CCS Endurance Challenge Championship with a win at the final round in Daytona Beach; Florida...Newly crowned World Superbike Champion Doug Polen and homecountry hero Kevin Magee split wins in C o C'") $.; Q) E u Cal Rayborn (left) and Mert Lawwlll (right) In a pre-race conversation In Kent, Washington, In 1970. Photo from the Cycle News Archives. o 7

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