CN
III ARCHIVES
BY SCOTT ROUSSEAU
P108
GIVE 'EM A BRAKE! (OR
the straightaway speeds weren't
so high, and you could slide the
back wheel by just shutting the
throttle off. It was supposed to
be a safety feature for extreme
conditions. We never thought
that somebody would put the
brake on while they were racing."
But many riders did begin to
use brakes to their advantage,
racing down the straightaways
and applying the binders, thus
gaining the ability to hug the low
line. Mann remembers that the
young lions of the day, such as
brakes on them," Mann says.
"But for years, we had been in
favor of putting brakes on all the
dirt track bikes."
It sounds as if it should go
without saying, but the ideology
behind the adoption of brakes
was safety. The rub is that no
one actually anticipated riders
using them in normal race condi-
tions.
"Let me tell you, I had no idea
that anybody would ever put the
brakes on to go around a cor-
ner," Mann says. "In those days
WHEN FLAT TRACK RACING SAID YES TO
I
f not the end of an era, the start
of the 1969 AMA Grand National
Championship dirt track season
was the beginning of the end.
For it was then that the AMA first
allowed the use of rear brakes for
dirt track racers.
Before that, part of the spec-
tacle of flat track racing lay in the
racers' abilities to race inches
apart from one another before
pitching their machines into
the corners purely with throttle
control.
"It all depended on the track,
but there were places like Sacra-
mento where you'd run it in there
deep and gather it up and then
just get right back on the throttle
without ever using a brake," 1970
AMA Grand National Champion
Gene Romero remembers. "I
doubt that there are many riders
who could do it like that now."
In actuality, says brake propo-
nent Dick Mann, who notched
a title each in the different eras
(1963, 1971), the brake rule came
about as the result of what was
happening in the short track por-
tion of the discipline.
"Brakes came about because
the two-strokes were beginning
to dominate the short tracks,
and they needed to make it fairer
for the four-strokes, so they put
