Cycle News

VOLUME 57 ISSUE 40 OCTOBER 6, 2020 P107 that he had grown up tinkering with. Unfortunately, this was largely lost on the buying public. Suzuki's ad hacks claimed that the TM400 was a race- ready production machine, derived directly from the GP—winning mounts of Joel Robert, Roger DeCoster and Sylvain Geboers. Buyers swallowed the ad hype hook, line and sinker, then moaned loudly in emergency rooms and group therapy sessions across the country. Through all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, Thor- waldson worked to build the TM400 into the bike that it should have been in the first place. "Suzuki was very nice to me in that they would let me make all kinds of changes and test and keep them apprised of what I was doing," Thor- waldson says. "If I did something good, they would have someone else test it and see if they liked it. I liked doing that stuff, and it didn't seem to bother them. I'd cut frames, change crankshafts and flywheels and cylinders. I'd scab reed cages from go-karts onto the cylinders. The TS400 had a heavier crankshaft, so I would use that. The TS250 had an external flywheel ignition, so we would use that. I used the trail model [TS] cylinder and did some porting so that the thing would rev a little more. I played with those things for an awful long time." In fact, Thorwaldson says, by the time Suzuki's first true production- based motocross machines, the RM series of 1976, were sitting on the docks, the TM400 had turned into a pretty decent bike. Though it never earned the reputation as a winner, Thorwaldson got the TM400 closer than anyone else, finishing second in the District 37 cross country series as early as 1972. "I would have won, but I was at a race in Red Rock Canyon that year, and I was about 10 miles from the finish when I came over a rise in the road and ran head-on into a truck," Thorwaldson says. "I wadded the thing up, and it ended costing me the championship. But I won an aw- ful lot of individual races on it. I used to win those Saturday Saddleback 45-minute [GP] deals every week that I was home." Thorwaldson finished his career with Suzuki in 1976, when the RMs were just a year into a lifespan that continues to this day. Naturally he acknowledges that the new ma- chines were much better than the TM400, but he still has a soft spot for the Cyclone. "The RMs were a quantum leap from the production TMs because they were actually based around the RH250 and the RN370. The first RH250 I had was just incredible. It was like a CR80 with 50 horsepow- er—so light. "But the TM's reputation was prob- ably not that fair," he continues. "I think that it actually opened the door of the new era of motocross bikes and closed the door on the old CZ and Maico era with the tractor-like power and relatively slow accel- eration of those bikes. It was the forerunner to the CR Elsinores and YZs and bikes like that. There were some horror stories, but they could be dealt with just like anything else." Thorwaldson moved on to found Thor Racing in 1976, making chrome moly handlebars, aluminum swing- arms and other motorcycle compo- nents that were vast improvements over those offered by the OEMs of the day. His ideas eventually manifested themselves on produc- tion machinery. After moving from Cerritos, California, to Gardnerville, Nevada, in 1985, he opened Big Valley Honda, which subsequently moved to Reno and became known as Big Valley Motorsports. After a prosperous tenure in the motorcycle dealership business, Thorwaldson sold the company to investors in 1999 and retired. In the past four years, Thorwald- son has taken up road racing. He is a fixture on the AFM circuit on the West Coast, and he enjoys mak- ing annual forays to Daytona for the motorcycle weeks held there. At 58 years old, he hasn't slowed down one bit. "I've had a lot of fun with road racing," Thorwaldson says. "I actu- ally started doing it because my hip got so worn out from kick-starting motocross bikes that I couldn't swing my leg up over them anymore. I've gotten that hip fixed since then. Now it's good for 500 years." And in the back room at Big Valley Motorsports, Rich Thorwaldson can often be found performing the same types of tricks on new machines as he did on those old "Throw Me" 400s back in the early '70s. How- ever unlikely, if another motorcycle should ever come down the pike deserving the same vile reputation as the TM400, he'd be the go-to guy. "I'd be all over it," he said. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from issue #9, March 10, 2004. CN has hundreds of past Archives edi- tions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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