Cycle News

Cycle News 2021 Issue 13 March 30

Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles

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CN III ARCHIVES BY SCOTT ROUSSEAU W hen Jack Milne stood atop the World Championship Speedway Final podium, ahead of fellow Americans Wilbur Lamoreaux and brother Cordy Milne in London's Wembley Stadi- um on September 2, 1937, becoming the country's first World Champion in motor- sports, who could have known that he would also be speedway's last American World Champion for the next 44 years? But that's how it went down. For over four decades after that historic and as yet unmatched American sweep in the World Championship, Americans were off kilter in the World Speedway scene. It would not be until the dawn of the 1980s that a new breed of Americans—California surfers, no less—would come along and restore America's presence in the sport. The seeds for the renaissance were actually sown back in 1969, when former World Champion Milne himself and an employee of his, an entre- preneurial lad named Harry Oxley, decided to start holding weekly speedway races at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, California. Set on a gritty, groovy track not much bigger than an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a stone's throw away from the Pacific Ocean, Costa Mesa was light years from the prim and proper European scene replete with its high-dollar professional leagues and groomed-from-youth World Champi- ons-elect. Yet, like the fabled astronaut movie of the same name, Costa Mesa somehow attracted the guys with "the right stuff." Maybe it was the P 116 OUT OF THE WILDERNESS USA'S RETURN TO SPEEDWAY GREATNESS close proximity to the beach, maybe it was the sheer excitement of taming an unrideable 50-horsepower, 180-pound, alcohol-burning missile of a motorcycle with no brakes, maybe it was the lure of the kind of money that you couldn't even make with a real day job back then, but the surfers started trading in their wetstuits for leathers when the summer sun went down, and a new era of profes- sional American speedway racers was born. For the first seven years, America had nothing for the world, but then along came Scott Autrey's brilliant third-place performance in the 1978 World World Championship Speedway Americans Wilbur Lamoreaux and brother that a new breed of Americans—California Bruce Penhall (left) and Bobby "Boogaloo" Schwartz won the World Best Pairs Speedway Championship in 1981, putting the USA back on the speedway map after a long hiatus.

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