Cycle News

VOL. 50 ISSUE 28 JULY 16, 2013 Rayborn knew the bike was a winner as soon as he took to the track at IRP. He dogged Nixon's Triumph the entire way, finding it easy to keep pace with the leader and occasionally taking the lead. About halfway through Rayborn decided to make his move and try to break away from Nixon. He passed and started pulling away, but Nixon never had the chance to respond. The ignition on his Triumph failed and two laps after Rayborn took over the lead, Nixon was out. Rayborn won by 20 seconds over Triumph's Dick Hammer. Lawwill rounded out the podium. Chalk one up for Harley-Davidson and O'Brien. The new Low Boy was a resounding success, winning in its debut and with just two of them in the field, they both finished on the podium. The debut at IRP had a decent fan turnout in spite of very little advertising for the event. In '68 Rayborn, in the prime of his career, won it again, but that race illustrated a gradual turning point in the balance of power in road racing. Yvon DuHamel had gotten off to a poor start on a Yamaha 350 and began slicing through the field at a torrid pace. DuHamel finally got through the field to second and then made up a big gap and chased down and passed Rayborn to take over the lead. The little Yamaha later suffered ignition problems and DuHamel was forced to pit. But his 350cc two-stroke was clearly faster than the 750cc Harley KRTT ridden by Rayborn and it was a precursor of the future of road racing. The '69 IRP race was a classic. Again the players were Rayborn and DuHamel – Harley vs. Yamaha. For the first half of the race the two riders swapped the lead no less than 20 times, breaking the track record nearly every lap. Then Rayborn made a rare mistake and ran off the track. That left DuHamel in a safe lead, but two laps later his Yamaha blew up on the long front straight. Ron Grant led briefly on a factory Suzuki, but Rayborn caught and passed him to win his third IRP National. The IRP National went away for a couple of years before making one last hurrah in 1972. IRP's waning days as a road race National mirrored that of P119 Harley-Davidson as a road race winner. By '72 the Japanese two-strokes were becoming ever more reliable and better handling and only the supreme road racing skills of Rayborn kept the new aluminum barreled Harley XR's in contention on road courses. Coming into IRP that year the Japanese two-strokes won the previous three road races Don Emde at Daytona on a Yamaha, DuHamel at Road Atlanta on a Kawasaki and Gary Fisher at Loudon on a Yamaha. The disparity was no clearer than in IRP's heat races. DuHamel's heat on his Kawasaki H2R was nine seconds faster than Rayborn's win on his Harley XRTT. In the main DuHamel overcame a slow start and after taking the lead from Nixon (also Kawasaki mounted) ran off and hid. But then, as in his previous appearances at IRP, DuHamel suffered bad luck. Little puffs of blue smoke began coming from his green machine and it was slowing with a fouled plug and Rayborn was coming up fast. Rayborn took over the lead and DuHamel hit the pits for new plugs. Rayborn went on to win making it four for four at IRP. Indianapolis racer Sam Ingram saw firsthand what made Rayborn so good at IRP. "That first corner, we called it the 100 mile per hour corner, Rayborn would come through there on that Harley and never let off. Then he'd sweep through that next set of fast turns with so much momentum. It was the north end of the track where Rayborn was just so much better than anybody else." IRP's major event became the U.S. National Drag Races and that was the track's cash cow. The road course was neglected and without big crowds supporting the AMA National, the race never returned. WERA continued running on the increasingly dilapidated IRP road course through the 1990s. Today the course remains, continuing to crumble and largely unused. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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