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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VOLUME 58 ISSUE 27 JULY 7, 2021 P119 one of the best TT specialists of his era. That was a major accom- plishment, especially considering Wilburn never rode a motorcycle until he was 20 years old. Wilburn grew up on an alfalfa farm. Although motorcycle riding always looked like a fun thing to do, he was always too involved in other things to take it up. That changed around 1957 when he watched a neighbor jump on his bike and head off to the desert mountains nearly every morning on the weekends. That neighbor happened to be Bill Hannah, Bob's dad. "I went over one time to talk with him when he came back from one of his rides," said Wil- burn of his first meeting with the guy everyone called "Wild Bill." "He told me he liked to go riding up in the hills and I thought that sounded like a lot of fun. So, I went out and bought a 21-inch [350cc] Velocette. I rode the Velocette for a while and it didn't work out very well, so I sold it and bought a 500 Matchless. "I still couldn't keep up with [Bill] Hannah on his Triumph, so finally I ran across a '57 Bonn- eville and bought that. Bill was a fantastic balance rider. He could ride up these narrow and crooked mountain trails, and the deal with him, was if you touched your foot down you hadn't made it. So I got to be a pretty good rider just trying to keep up with him." Bob Hannah remembers going to see Wilburn race when he was a kid. "Larry was a talented guy," Bob Hannah said. "My dad thought he was great, and we'd go watch him race down at Ascot and other places. He was an innovative builder, too. After he quit racing, he made some really fast bikes for Tom Horton and helped out the Bevins boys, who raced out of the Yamaha shop in Lancaster." The elder Hannah and Wilburn traveled around the area and ran a couple "outlaw" hillclimbs. Another neighbor of Wilburn's wanted to start racing, and he wanted Larry to come along and race, too. "He told me, 'Man, as good as you are, you ought to start racing.' So the first race we went to was a quarter-mile short-track race out in Barstow. I took that old '57 dirt bike out there with knobbies on it. I ran up against Steve Scott on a Bultaco and he ended up beating me, but I thought, 'Man this is a lot of fun.'" Feeling good about his first outing in Barstow, Wilburn decided to go up to Hart Park in Bakersfield. There he raced in the novice class but was mes- merized by watching the "Ba- kersfield Bomb Squad" as Expert racers Sid Payne, Clark White, Dave Palmer and Digger Helm were called. "We were watching those guys go around, and I thought, 'Man, this is something else.' I guess watching them really made me want to get more serious about racing." Wilburn worked his way up through the novice and amateur ranks and eventually became an expert. Along the way, he became close friends with Jim Hunter, and those two ended up battling for the District 37 num- ber-one plate in 1965. In fact, Wilburn's friendship with Hunter might have ended up costing him the prestigious District title. "We were running one and two in the battle for the champi- onship," Wilburn recalls. "Just before the start of a race down in Perris, Hunter's BSA Goldstar wouldn't start. I asked him what was wrong, and he said 'I don't know. It won't start, it just won't start!' I took the mag cover off and found that the points had come loose. We tightened it up, put it back together and he won the race and beat me out for the championship by 11 points." Wilburn's mom became an enthusiastic race fan of her son's racing, so much so that at one event she tried to hit a rider who was blocking Larry with her purse. She missed and fell, breaking her wrist in the process. As a Junior, Wilburn nearly got a major victory in the Ascot TT 10- lap Junior National. He'd won the pole, setting a track record, and led the race by a straightaway when his Triumph started running on one cylinder. "I was running NGK spark- plugs in qualifying," said Wil- burn. "After I set fast time, the Champion Spark Plug guys came over and told me that if I