Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1467308
They were getting fairly close to the Houston season opener when a surprise showed up at the shop. Brand new Harley- Davidson/Aermacchi 350cc ERS Sprint Scramblers. But they weren't the factory specials Brelsford was hoping for. "They were just showroom stock bikes, just like the old Sprints but with a little bigger en- gine," Brelsford remembers. "Mert was busy, so he told me, 'This is it, I guess. Just strip the bike down and put a big sprocket on it.'" After the bikes were prepped, Lawwill and Brelsford loaded up the Sprints and headed to a spot in Daly City where Brelsford had been riding for years. "It was an area they'd graded for development, and I had a flat track set up there, and we did a few laps on the bikes. We stopped and Mert said, 'Not much power, huh?'" Brelsford recalls. "And he was right, I think they only had 29 horsepower, but the bike felt good, and I thought I might be able to do well at the TT on it." O'Brien figured the TT course in the Astrodome would be so tight, that the 350s would be the way to go instead of the 750s. They arrived only to find the track actually was better suited to the big twins. Qualifying was mostly dominated by 650cc BSA and Triumphs. For the first time it was the British bikes that held a displacement advantage over the Harleys. In fact, of all the Harley riders only Brelsford and Lawwill qualified for the national. The other factory Harley riders, Bart Markel, Fred Nix, Dan Haa- by and Walt Fulton all watched from the sidelines. In the main TT, Skip Van Leeuwen took the lead at the start but got out of shape over the jump and yielded to another big Triumph of Dusty Coppage. A couple of turns later 20,000 fans collectively cheered with delight when the rookie Brels- ford, on the underdog Harley, took over the lead. Did Brelsford get nervous when he realized he was lead- ing his first national in front of a screaming throng? "I wasn't focused on that," Brelsford explained. "I was just riding like a wild man going as fast as I possibly could. Pretty soon I see a tire edging up on me." It was Van Leeuwen, who had recovered, passed Coppage and was now laying some black rubber down on the leg of the Brelsford's leathers. "Skip and I were really good friends because he'd let me race his spare [Triumph] 650 the year before at the weekly Ascot races," Brelsford said. "He was going a little faster than I was, and he was rubbing my leg, honking the horn, more or less letting, me know, 'Hey let me by, or I'm going to have to knock you down.' He was nice enough to give me a warning, so I let him by and followed him to the checkered flag. I was happy as can be to get second." As well he should have been. A rookie in his first AMA Grand National main event, on a new track, a new untested and un- derpowered motorcycle, and he nails down a runner-up finish? It goes down as one of the all-time great debuts in the history of the series. Brelsford would later win the AMA Grand National Champion- ship in 1972, and he tells me there's another great Houston Astrodome story to go along with that, "That'll be one for another day," he says. CN P144 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives CN III ARCHIVES "Then I remembered what Mert told me, so I flicked it over, twisted the throttle wide open and the thing somehow made the turn."