VOL. 50 ISSUE 24 JUNE 18, 2013
P87
Its History
I
t's been more than
50 years since a
race was last held
there, but if you
ever go to Daytona
Beach, Florida, and
head south along
the sand from the
high-rise hotels and
low-rise bars, you'll
eventually come to
the distinguishable
remains of the old
Beach Course that
hosted the running of
the Daytona 200-mile
road race until 1961.
First used for motorcycles in 1937, the
Beach Course's North
Turn is marked today by a
weather-beaten hostelry
aptly enough named the
Old Timers' Bar. There's
a cut through the sand
dunes on to the road
leading down to Ponce
Inlet, which although
now largely remodeled,
in some parts still shows
traces of the narrow,
bumpy tarmac straight
along which riders ran
flat out for two miles
in a southerly direction - along the sand
bar dividing the ocean
from the Florida Inland
Waterway. There, they'd
slow down before flinging their bikes to the left
for the flat South Turn out
onto the beach, sending
up rooster tails of sand
The 1950 Daytona
200: (From left to
right) Winner Billy
Mathews, runner-up
Dick Klamfoth and
fourth-place finisher
Bill Tuman.
as they accelerated wide
open out towards the
water where the sand
was harder, and gave
better grip.
Then it was north for
another two miles, again
flat out in top gear, but
this time treading the perilous path between water
and land, before slowing once more - but this
time not as much - for
the banked North Turn,
which took them left
back onto the tarmac. A
4.2-mile track with only
two corners may not
sound like much, but as
a grueling test of man
and machine it had few
equals anywhere in the
world.
It was in those difficult
days for European manu-
facturers after WW2 that
the British motorcycle
industry discovered
America, a vast potential market that for
many years provided
rich pickings for
them. Success in
competition, and
especially in the
crucial Daytona
200, was an
important
yardstick by which
a marque's excellence
was judged, hence the
reason that in 1948 Norton's managing director
Gilbert Smith decided to
enter a team of speciallyprepared factory machines for the 200-miler.
That initial foray,
under the guidance of
noted British tuner Steve
Lancefield, yielded
a second place
for Canadian rider
Bill Mathews. He'd
already scored Norton's debut Daytona
200 win in 1941,
when he registered
the first victory for a
non-American bike,
by defeating the
array of factory HarleyDavidson and Indian
machines in the final
race held there before
Pearl Harbor.
Mathews did so riding a 1939 single-cam
Norton International
customer model tuned to
Manx spec by Norton's
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