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powerband of the engine—not enough horsepower and then... too much. We had a ribbed tire then with maybe a 2 1/2- or 3-inch rim. So when you hit the powerband—well, it cost me a few times on the ground." Despite the Kawasaki's brutal riding characteristics, DuHamel was able to master the bike well enough to give the company its first AMA National road-race win at Talladega in 1971. "I remember that race, I was on the H1R, the three-cylinder 500," DuHamel said. "It was hot, like maybe 110 degrees. The race was like Daytona. It was so bad, when riders came in to pit, they couldn't continue racing. Some of them ended up in an ambulance. It was hot. In my life, that was the hottest race I was ever in. I was trying to swallow, but it was like a dry stone. Later I devised a tube to be able to drink water during the race." From 1971 to 1973, DuHamel was the winningest rider for Kawasaki, earning five National victories for Team Green during that period. A true national star racing in Superbike, he gave early respectability to the fledgling class in the mid-1970s before it became a national points-paying championship. "It was called Production Superbike then," Yvon said. "It was fun racing against Reg Pridmore and Steve McLaughlin and guys like that. The Z-1 was a good bike—a little heavy, maybe. The problem we had was with tires. If we used the ribbed tires, it would slide around too much. If we tried slicks, it had too much grip and would twist the frame. I tried everything, but I found the best [setup] was to put a front slick and a ribbed rear tire. That way I could get on the brakes late and have a good feel with the front end, and then I would just try to be careful coming out of the turns, not giv- ing the bike too much gas." A move to NASCAR racing might have been possible, but the time wasn't right. In spite of scoring a very solid 10th in the NASCAR Winston Cup race at the North Wilkesboro Speed- way in 1973, he never made the jump to cars. "I think it was my age," said Yvon, who by then was ap- proaching his mid-30s. "Plus, I was still getting paid well to race motorcycles, so I wasn't quite ready to leave that." One funny part of DuHamel's NASCAR debut was that before the race, he did a couple of hot laps around North Wilkesboro Speedway on a production Z-1 as a favor to a local dealer, and then he ran to the pits and quickly changed from racing leathers to a driving suit. Thinking the diminutive Yvon would have a tough time physi- cally completing the 400-mile race in the hot and hard-handling stock car, the team owner had a backup driver on hand, but Yvon's fitness was one of his strengths and he had no problems driving the car that distance. By the late 1970s, with Du- Hamel in his late 30s, his sons were beginning to race, and he began to scale back his racing schedule, even though he still turned in occasional top perfor- mances, namely in the Cana- dian round of the Formula 750 World Championships in 1977, in which he finished second to Gregg Hansford. To Yvon DuHamel, a motor- cycle was a motorcycle. If it had two wheels, he loved racing it. "I never thought about two- stroke, four-stroke, one cylinder, four-cylinder, shifter on the right or left," he says. "I just got on the bike and after a few minutes I was comfortable." CN This Archives edition is reprinted from the May 28, 2008, 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 P106 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives