VOL. 50 ISSUE 24 JUNE 18, 2013
local restaurant to pick
Clarence Czysz
up some sandwiches for works on 100-mile
amateur winner
the boat trip, a fan recDon Evans' Manx
ognized him and asked
Norton.
how he thought he'd do
in the race later that day.
the race began.
Klamfoth replied, "Don't
He the led
you mean tomorrow?"
The fan showed Dick that the race from
start to finish,
day's newspaper headlines, which reported that setting a new
conditions had improved, lap record of
92.50 mph on
and the race was going
his opening
to be run as originally
lap, to score
scheduled.
his third
Klamfoth rushed back
Daytona 200
to the Norton garage in
victory.
downtown Daytona, only
Norton's
to find that the team had
little-remembered
left for the beach figuring
quintet of Daytona
that he wasn't going to
200 race victories on
show up. Fortunately,
the old Beach Course
they'd left his race bike
marked the first time that
behind, so Klamfoth
scrambled into his racing European motorcycles
had successfully challeathers, hopped on the
lenged the transatlantic
Norton racer, and sped
dominance of Indian
off to the Beach Course
and Harley-Davidson in
through race-day traffic,
American competition,
to arrive on the starting
and represented the start
line just in time before
Plus, you have to reach up to
the gear lever with your right foot
that's already folded because
you're sitting so low, in order to
up shift on the one-up four-speed
cluster, and this is quite awkward.
Since the front eight-inch twin
leading-shoe drum brake faded
quite badly after a few at Mallory
Park, it became rather important
to rely on some degree of engine braking to get the Norton
stopped. At Daytona this wouldn't
have been any problem - with just
of a similar success
story for British manufacturers in showroom sales
charts in the USA.
Indeed, in some ways
Norton's Daytona dominance outranks its success in Grand Prix racing, with a single 500cc
World Championship in
1951 for Norton-mounted
two turns per 4.2-mile lap - so it's
not fair to criticize that unduly. It
just felt awkward.
However, where the Norton
excelled was in slower turns,
where its Roadholder forks ate
up bumps as I slowed the Manx
for the Hairpin, then turned deftly
into it, or flicked it from side to
side in either of the chicanes.
Beart discovered by experimentation that the Manx would
handle better on the sand with
fork yokes ('triple clamps' in
P91
Geoff
Duke, and two
350cc world titles in
1951/52, before he
switched to Gilera to
earn a further trio of
500cc crowns aboard
the Italian multis. It was a
proud chapter in the long
history of Britain's most
famous sporting marque.
American parlance) from a Norton 500T trials bike than with normal Manx yokes, especially with
a 19-inch front wheel fitted. This
replaced the 21-inch wheel used
previously, with Borrani aluminum
rims laced to the Norton hubs. It
steers nicely, and the Avon rubber fitted to the bike allowed me
to ground the big megaphone
exhaust all too easily on the right
– again, not a problem on Daytona's left-hand turns.
But on fast sweepers like Ge-
