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/1501730
"I really loved to go fast." Tammy Jo put her affinity for speed to the test on a historic night, June 25, 1983. At the Knoxville Half-Mile National, about 100 miles from her home- town of Dalton, she tucked in behind Jay Springsteen, as they both chased down third-place man Rob Crabbe in their heat race. As she told Cycle News: "Jay moved up about two feet higher than the line I was riding to around Crabbe, so I did the same and passed Rob like he was tied to a stone." In the main event, a loose con- denser knocked her down from a probable eighth to a 14th-place finish at the checkered flag. But nothing was going to rein in the jubilation that Tammy and her team felt. The future was bright and the sky was the limit, right? "Things started to change for me, just because I was a female," Tammy says. "In those days, you couldn't just order XR750 parts from Harley-David- son. They wanted to know who it was for. All of a sudden, parts weren't available to me. We couldn't get rods, cranks, cases, etc. All of the things that the guy racers had were off limits to me." Professional racers know how to work the system, so Tammy and her father enlisted the help of a friend named Art Delore. Art worked at an H-D shop and had the right factory connections; still, he had to tell The Motor Company that the parts he needed were for another racer and not for the woman who was now regularly defeating many established dirt track stars. Despite the struggle, Tammy had a long career on the AMA Grand National Circuit. Her sixth-place finish at the DuQuoin Mile in 1986 would be her best ride. She raced her last National in 1989 at the Springfield Mile, where her beloved XR punched a rod through the front cylinder. Tammy parked both the Harley and her AMA career that day and soon would embark on a successful four-wheel run in both the Craftsman Truck Series and the NASCAR Busch Series. In 1994, she won the Snowball Derby, a 300-mile asphalt race for super-late-model stock cars. Tammy would eventually open her own Honda shop, Kirk's Cycle in Dalton, Georgia. She looks back on her racing career and says, "we did good for what we had. It was a mean busi - ness sometimes and there were some very big names in dirt track who I knew weren't playing by the rules. At least two differ - ent teams once begged me not to protest them." Still, Tammy says, "the good times outweighed the bad." A sports' dad and his daugh- ter develop a special bond. Tommy Kirk passed away in 2020 and Tammy is flooded with emotion as she remembers her biggest supporter, the man who took on the system and stood behind his girl racer as she played a boys' game. "A few years before my dad passed away, we had Don Tilley rebuild my old XR, which had sat for 20 years with that broken rod. We got it running again—it could go racing today! I was so glad he got to hear it run one more time!" CN CNIIARCHIVES P124 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives Her best finish was sixth at the DuQuoin Mile in 1986.