C
urse it, if you wish, the
bland, disillusioning years
of the 1970s. Five more
years of Vietnam, the Watergate
scandal, disco music and the
invention of perhaps the greatest
oxymoron of all time, the leisure
suit. Toss in elephant bellbottom
pants, stuff it all inside the AMC
Gremlin, and it is fair game to
wonder if anything good hap-
pened during this decade.
Anything, that is, except AMA
road racing, which, at least in
the early to mid-'70s, was pretty
darn groovy. From the Daytona
200 of 1973 to the running of
the Daytona 200 in 1974, road
racing in the USA experienced
perhaps its greatest era, a time
when the world's best riders and
the motorcycle companies' most
sophisticated machinery would
all be found at race
paddocks in America.
It was a time of meta
-
morphosis, techno-
logically and, sadly,
tragically. To borrow
from Charles Dick
-
ens, "It was the best
of times, it was the
worst of times."
Right smack dab
in the middle of it
was an AMA National
Road Race in Flow
-
ery Branch, Georgia.
A winding course
that one journalist
brilliantly described
as "sinewy," Road
Atlanta's 1973 June
event provided
drama all weekend
long. Watchful eyes looked to
the skies, waiting for inclement
weather that never arrived. Top
racers and tuners, like Gary Nixon
and Erv Kanemoto, battled with
mechanical gremlins. And every
rider took at least a moment
to pause and reflect on a road
racing crash three weeks earlier
that had taken the lives of two of
their fellow competitors, Jarno
Saarinen and Renzo Pasolini.
Both men had shared the race
-
track with these AMA riders just
months earlier at Daytona.
Every major team was on
hand at Road Atlanta, along with
several private entries that could
give the factory-sponsored rid
-
ers a good run for their money.
The 1973 season was also a
year when American-born riders
CNIIARCHIVES
P136
IT WAS THE
BEST OF
TIMES...
BY KENT TAYLOR
Road racing was
booming in 1973,
but rising star Geo
Perry was one of five
prominent road racers
who lost his life by the
end of the year.
New Zealand's
Geoff Perry
(right) chats
with Cal Rayborn
at the Road
Atlanta National
in 1973. By the
end of the year,
both riders had
lost their lives.
The 23-year-old Perry won his
first and last AMA National at
Road Atlanta in 1973.
