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given $500 per weekend just to race the Yamaha in the 250cc class. Nicholas was hot coming into the Meadowdale debut in '63. He'd won Laconia in June and was certainly one of the favorites at Meadowdale. Unbeknownst to anyone but Nicholas, he'd seri- ously tweaked his shoulder in a regional cushion-track flat track in Marion, Ohio, a couple of weeks before Meadowdale. He could barely lift his left arm at all, but fortunately the BSA and the Yamaha he'd ride in the National and 250 races, respectively, had low clip-on bars. "I could get my arm up enough to put it on the bars, and, once I did that, I was good," Nicholas remembers. "I lived in Nash- ville at the time and BSA paid me $100—which was worth a lot more then than it is now—to transport the BSAs from Nutley, New Jersey, to Chicago [Mead- owdale]. Joe DiSimone, a dealer outside of Philadelphia, was helping me and he'd arranged for me to race that Yamaha TD1A." Nicholas won the 250cc race on the TD1A that day at Mead- owdale, becoming the first rider to win a 250cc National on a Yamaha. "I felt sort of guilty," Nico- las said. "That little two-stroke was so fast compared to the Harley Sprints. [Gary] Nixon and [George] Roeder were on Sprints and I just walked away from them." In the 150-Mile Na- tional, Nicholas didn't have it so easy. Riding the unfaired BSA, he battled Dick Hammer, who was riding a Harley KR with a full fairing. The two battled wheel to wheel most of the way, with Nicolas nervous running the un- der-geared BSA up to 120 mph, singing the motor past redline to 8000 rpm in Hammer's draft. "That BSA only had a five- gallon tank versus the Harley's big, hand-fabricated eight-gallon tanks," he explained. "That pit stop cost me about 30 seconds, and I started chipping away at Dick's lead, and I had it down to about 13 seconds with a few laps to go, but he had me covered." But the race took a sudden turn when Hammer ran off the track with two laps to go, his Harley having suffered a flat rear tire. He pulled in the pits, but his crew waved him on, and he limped home to second—slithering around with a completely flat tire. Nicholas' double marked the first time a rider won both the National and 250cc race on the same weekend. The Meadow- dale race lasted for two more years. Mann won both the 1964 and '65 races on Matchless racers. In '64, Hammer had it won until a shift lever broke. In '65 Lady Luck was with Mann again. Roeder was leading with a 20-second lead until his bike began sputtering on the final lap. Three turns from the checkered flag, Roeder's Harley rolled to a stop and Mann zoomed by to win the final National held at Mead- owdale. By the mid-1960s things were not going well financially with the circuit and at one point an un- paid contractor smashed his bull- dozer through a guardrail in the middle of an SCCA race. Barely 10 years after the track was built it fell into disrepair and closed for good in 1969. Today Mead- owdale's grounds are a forest preserve and weed-infested rem- nants of the original pavement still exist. Walking the grounds, you can easily make out the course and some guardrail posts remain. The Monza Wall was leveled years ago and little of the infrastructure remains, expect for an old landmark—a grain silo with a faded Pure Gasoline logo painted on the top. Meadowdale will always be re- membered by those fearless rid- ers who braved its steep Monza Wall and tracks like Meadowdale went a long way toward moving along the trend of European- style road racing in America. The sport quickly gained momentum, which eventually led to a sepa- rate AMA National Road Racing Championship by 1976. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from March 10, 2010. CN has hundreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to pre- vent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still plan- ning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives CN III ARCHIVES

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