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him I wanted a pillion pad and he said, 'Well then, you aren't going to ride this bike.' So, I didn't get a pillion pad." Riding Mahan-tuned bikes, Mashburn was nearly unbeat- able as a novice. He even beat the experts at the short-track program in Daytona. Yamaha hired Mashburn as an R&D test rider where he worked with Don Dudek. He tested prototype Yamahas in the vast desert around Las Vegas to keep things top secret. "We'd get back to hotel in the evenings and the Japanese engineers would head off to the casinos and leave the underage guys like myself behind," Mash- burn recalls. One of the bikes Mashburn tested was Yamaha's first four- stroke, the XS-1, a 650cc vertical twin. In 1970, he rode the XS-1 to its debut victory in a Yamaha Gold Cup race at Ascot Park. "That first race bike was actu- ally built from top to bottom by Ray Hensley of Trackmaster," Mashburn said. "I never rode the bike until it was delivered to the track by Ray the night of the event. Shell [Thuet] later built a road-racing version of the 650, and being Mr. Loyal, I agreed to ride it at Daytona. The bike tore itself apart after just a few laps." Mashburn discovered early on that road racing was never going to be his forte. "I used to see how quick I could get through the fast left-hand kink in the infield at Daytona as a guide to how well I was catching on to road racing," he says. "One day in practice, I went through there and thought I was really hauling ass. 'Now I'm starting to get this,' I thought to myself. Just then Dave Smith went around me on the outside and tapped me on the shoulder." Mashburn scored six top-10 AMA Grand National finishes his rookie season, including a podium on the Terre Haute (Indi- ana) Half Mile. At another race, a chain broke on his bike in one practice ses- sion, and he ran hard into the back of Bart Markel as he was freewheeling into a turn. "I'd heard all the stories about 'Black Bart' and his box- ing career and what he'd done to people," Mashburn said. "I decided walking back to my pits to keep my helmet on in case he came over to punch me. I walked around with the helmet on for the longest time. I finally took it off and worked up the courage to go over to his pits to explain to him what happened. He was sitting there and looked up at me and said, 'If I was going fast enough, you wouldn't have been able to run into me." Ultimately racing many of Yamaha's prototype machines often hurt Mashburn's results over the course of the following two seasons. "Whenever Yamaha wanted to test something, I was the first one to raise my hand," he said. "The result was a lot of DNFs as Yamaha tried to perfect its new four-stroke against the more established Harley-Davidsons." After being dropped by Yamaha, Mashburn made a half- hearted attempt to stay in racing in 1973, but when someone of- fered him decent money for his Triumph race bike, he jumped on it. It was tough for Mashburn to race as a privateer after four years as a factory rider. Mashburn went on to become a fire investigator and totally walked away from motorcycling for over a decade. It was Skip Van Leeuwen who encouraged him to come back and be a part of the sport that had been such a big part of his life. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from the December 5, 2007, issue of Cycle News. 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 CN III ARCHIVES P124 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives