CN
III ARCHIVES
BY SCOTT ROUSSEAU
Y
ou could say that privateer
Grand National flat-track
racer Steve Eklund won the
1979 AMA Grand National
Championship just in the nick of
time.
It wasn't as though non-
factory-sponsored flat-trackers
had gone completely unnoticed
in the decade of the '70s. Some
of the sport's most prominent
names, such as former titleist
Gary Scott, his brother Hank,
and the man who would come
to epitomize the term with a long
and prosperous career, Steve
Morehead, were all capable of
stealing wins from the mighty
Harley-Davidson factory effort.
And they did so with regularity,
but down the stretch of an invari-
ably long Camel Pro or Winston
Pro or whatever Pro season, a
lack of funding was the primary
cause in the odd mechanical
breakdown and/or missed
National that would often make
up the difference between going
home with the number-one plate
and just going home.
Not since Dick Mann's title
during the 1963 season had the
privateers been able to wrestle
P
124
YEAR OF
THE PRIVATEER
to epitomize the term with a long
-
up the difference between going
In 1979, Steve Eklund became
the first privateer rider to land the
AMA Grand National title since
Mann some 16 years earlier.
