C
al Rayborn rode hard and
made road racing look easy.
In any discussion of the best road
racer America ever produced,
Rayborn's name always comes
up. Rayborn emerged from San
Diego, California, in the mid-
1960s and immediately became a
contender on any road course in
America.
In the first AMA National road
race where his Harley KR made it
to the checkered flag, he finished
second. That was at the old
Greenwood Road Way in Indiano-
la, Iowa, in August of 1965.
During a three-year stretch,
from 1967 to 1969, Rayborn won
seven of the 13 AMA National
road races held. He won the
Daytona 200 back to back in
1968 and '69, and his victory
in '69 was the last 200 won by
Harley-Davidson. He also gave
Harley-Davidson its final AMA
National road-race victory. That
came in 1972 on the new alloy
XR750 at Laguna Seca, where he
beat Gene Romero on a factory
Triumph and then-rookie Kenny
Roberts on a factory Yamaha.
But for all his accomplishments
stateside, perhaps his most
amazing feat was going to Eng-
land for the Trans-Atlantic Match
Races in 1972, where he rode
one of the notoriously unreliable
iron-barreled Harley-Davidson
XRs.
"The DNF record of those
cast-iron XRs was so bad that
Harley didn't want to send him
over there," said Match Race
teammate and friend Don Emde.
"He convinced them [that] with
the cool weather it would be
okay. What he did over there was
incredible."
CN
III ARCHIVES
P128
Remembering CAL RAYBORN
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
Cal Rayborn never won a
championship but was regarded as
one of the best road racers ever.
