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later moved on to become race team manager at Yamaha, where he helped a young Kenny Roberts get his ride. Apparently, Barda had an eye for talent. "He had a Hodaka with a springer front end, and he would let me ride it. Art wanted me to try flat track and TT, and I did some of that at the old El Toro Speedway. But I re - ally wanted to race motocross, and I started winning some races. When Art went to Team Yamaha, he let me ride one of the first new DT-2 racers. It was a prototype model, with a red frame and the motor was paint - ed green. It was a great bike." Hodakas, Yamahas and a few rides on Greeves, McDougal rode whatever he could get his hands on. When the clutch broke on his Yamaha 250 at a SoCal race, his good friend Chuck Bower loaned him his own bike, a Penton 125. A Penton was a good bike in the day, but there was something special about this one and when McDougal won the 250cc Pro class with a 125cc bike, he was ecstatic. "I loved that bike and I just had to have one," McDougal says. "And that was when I met Fred Hayes. Fred's company was called Mettco and he would get new Pentons, tear them down and modify them. He would swap out the heavy steel rims for D.I.D and he would do a lot of porting on the motors. Fred was always on the dyno, trying to get more power out of those bikes. By that time, I had a part-time job at Bassani Ex - haust, so when we put a new ex- pansion chamber on that bike, it really had some top end. In 1973, the starting line for the 125cc Pro class at Saddleback would be filled with Mettco Pentons." On that same starting line sat a Swedish-made bike called a Monark, piloted by another young Californian by the name of Marty Smith, whom McDougal and Bower would battle all season long. "Marty was a rocket ship," McDougal remembers. "He would get out front and want to beat everybody so badly that he would sometimes break that bike." California kids could race four days a week, and the three riders set themselves apart from the pack. In 1974, the AMA wisely gave the 125cc class national championship status, and the powerful Team Honda quickly locked down the young, fast guys to contracts to go get the number-one plate. With a reli - able works Honda, Smith would no longer need to worry about breakdowns, easily winning the inaugural championship. Mc- Dougal had a good season as well and was lured away from Honda to Team Yamaha, who also topped the $500 monthly salary he had been receiving. The 1975 season was a mixed bag for Bruce McDougal. He would grab a second-place fin - ish behind Smith at the Herman, Nebraska 125 National, but struggled at most of the other events. "The Yamaha had a Pro Fab frame, which was really great, but it started breaking, so we replaced it with the stock, and the bike just didn't handle as well," he said. His fifth-place finish in the standings wasn't enough to keep his Yamaha ride, so for 1976, he rode for a local performance shop called TM Engineering. His pro career would wrap up soon after. "Racing was becoming pretty serious. It had stopped being fun for me. I was never in this for the money and never thought about doing it for a living. I had been doing it for eight years, and so I moved on, doing some drywall and construction work." Today, at 71, Bruce McDougal calls Silverado, California, his home. "I drive past Saddleback Park every day," he says. "I can make out Banzai Hill, though it's covered with weeds and trees now. It's sad to see it sitting there, not being used for any - thing. I remember riding my old, broken-down Hodaka, riding all day long. Other than getting married and becoming a father, those days were the best times of my life." CN "It had stopped being fun for me. I was never in this for the money and never thought about doing it for a living. I had been doing it for eight years and so I moved on." VOLUME ISSUE JULY , P147 Subscribe to nearly 60 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives