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VOLUME 58 ISSUE 6 FEBRUARY 9, 2021 P109 Jim Rice, Don Castro, Don Emde and Dave Aldana, were par- ticularly adept at using brakes. Romero says that Rice was the absolute master. "To me, it was just an added thing, but I came up in the time when—well, when we were novices, we had a rear brake, but the only time you used it was when you came in the pits," Romero says. "The first guy who I saw really make them work to his advantage [on big bikes], and a guy who I copied immediately, was Jim Rice. I learned how to use them, but I came from a time without them. If they would have said, 'No brakes,' we'd have went with it. But the racing kind of changed with the brakes." Mann agrees with Romero on that last point. "It [a brake] never changed my riding style, but I was lucky because it was a transition that came about very slowly. I think that it affected Mert Lawwill more than anyone. For years, he was one guy at the top of the ladder who continued to use that old style, and he was the fastest guy at the races with that style. But if he got into traffic, he was in big trouble. Lawwill, the 1969 AMA Grand National Champion, says that he hated brakes. "The one thing that really hurt us is when they went to brakes," Lawwill says. "I was against it then, and in retrospect, I still think that we shouldn't have done it. Even after we went to brakes, I never used them for a long time." However, Romero and former BSA and Yamaha rider Chuck Palmgren remember Lawwill's attitude as being a little different from that. "That might be a little hypocriti- cal of Mert, and the reason that I say that is because the two big- gest proponents of having brakes on the rear was Dick Mann and Mert Lawwill," Romero recalls. "They sold that package to the AMA." Palmgren says that Lawwill appears to have a selective memory, although he agrees with what Lawwill is saying now. "Mert wanted the brakes," Palmgren remembers. "We really didn't need them. "They did take away from the show, they didn't improve the sport, and you could no longer accidentally run over the referee [laughs]. The brakes weren't very good or reliable anyway, and that was partially due to our inexperience with them at the time. I remember one time at Ascot, Dud Perkins poured oil on Dan Haaby's brakes just to get his wheel to roll more freely. Of course, I don't know how you could go back to not having them today." Two-time AMA Grand National Champion Gary Nixon (1967-68) concurs with Palmgren that the brakes didn't work that well. "In fact, the day that I got hurt in Santa Rosa [California] in 1969, I had taken my brakes off. I guess we needed them because it was some sort of safety thing. But it didn't really affect me that much either way. We rode TTs with brakes, so it wasn't much different than that." And yet it was different, some- how, especially on the big mile tracks. "It changed the show," Mann says. "In some people's minds it ruined the show, but it is really stupid to have a vehicle that fast without brakes. The big sticky tires and the development on the engines changed it even more than the brakes. Until the tires got that sticky, you couldn't use the brakes that much. Today, you see the guys passing each other many times on the straightaways, but nobody really does much passing in the turns." CN This Archives edition is reprinted from issue #5, February 11, 2004. CN has hundreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many des- tined 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 (OR NOT ) Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives TO BRAKES