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gensen for the Ascot finale that year. Clad in his skeleton leath- ers, Aldana finished third, behind first-time AMA Grand National winner Garth Brow and Spring- steen, who put the finishing touches on a second consecu- tive championship season. Wood wasn't through yet. For 1978, he built a third Norton. "I called that the lightweight frame," Wood says. "On the light- weight frame, I started by having a monoshock under the engine. I went to the war surplus store and bought a hydraulic ram with 5/8-inch shaft on it—no spring or anything. Then I made an accu- mulator with a bladder in it that had hydraulic oil on one side, and the other side I could put nitrogen in. It worked pretty good, but my problem was trying to educate a rider who believed that if it didn't have two shocks on the back then it wouldn't work." Ultimately Wood settled for a more conventional twin-shock setup controlling the rear, but the lightweight bike still bristled with other trickery. "I think I was the first person to ever use rectangular tubing for a swingarm," Wood says. "I can re- member people standing behind me and talking while I was work- ing on the bike, and they would say, 'This Wood is really nuts. You got to have round tubing for a swingarm.' Today, nobody uses a round tube for a swingarm." Whatever Wood's lightweight Norton had or didn't have, during the May 13, 1978, AMA Grand National half mile at Ascot, it was enough. Jorgensen remembers that everything just clicked that night. "I remember that it was a really fast track that night," Jorgensen recalls. "I remember being down in the pits and watching the first few qualifiers go out and think- ing, 'Jesus Christ, am I going to be going that fast?' It was hair- ball. Guys were going into the corners so hard. Watching from the infield, you didn't think they were going to get stopped." Jorgensen did go out, howev- er, and was fourth fastest in time trials and won the fastest heat race to land the pole position for the 20-lap main event. He then got the holeshot and checked out on the field, leaving Skip Aksland and Garth Brow to battle for second place. "After the race, Sammy Tanner came up to me and said, 'That's just the way I did it.' I was kind of running up high and squaring it off. "It was a good period in my career," Jorgensen said. "Ron [Wood] was the nicest guy, and he always put 100 percent into his equipment. We always had the nicest stuff at the track, the best-prepped and tricked-out bikes. It was a good time." The win marked the second and final time that a Norton would ever win an AMA Grand National dirt track. Ironically, Aldana, who was the first rider ever to win a GNC dirt track on a Norton, finished 11th again, on one of Wood's Nortons. For Jorgensen, the win marked nei- ther his last win at Ascot nor the last time that he retired a brand there. Jorgensen would go on to give BSA fans their last taste of National glory by winning the As- cot TT on September 15, 1978. All things come to pass, and Wood eventually retired the Nortons, but their success bred more success, as a Canadian outfit that had heard of his ex- ploits and wanted to get involved in dirt track approached him to hammer out a deal. "The Bombardier company had heard about some of the stuff I had done, and they wanted me to campaign their 500cc four-stroke engine when it first came out," Wood says. "So, they sent me a couple sand-cast engines, and we made some chassis for them. That was when I had Ricky Graham riding for me, and we went out and blitzed the field. Then everybody wanted to buy one." Wood Racing, also known as Wood-Rotax, was born. And the rest, as they say, is history. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from issue #32, August 9, 2005. CN has hundreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many des- tined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happen- ing, in the future, we will be revisit- ing past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor CN III ARCHIVES Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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