H
e may have jumped his
Triumph out of a POW
camp in The Great Escape,
chased down bad guys in his
Mustang GT in Bullitt, and kept
pace with Mert Lawwill and Mal-
colm Smith on his Husky in On
Any Sunday,
but on an early '70s
ride day at Indian Dunes, Steve
McQueen messed with the wrong
motorcycle racer.
"Don't you ever," said the future
MX champ, "do that to me again!"
McQueen was getting an up
-
braiding from a 17-year-old SoCal
kid
named Nancy Payne, and even
though she had only been riding
for a few years, she wasn't going
to be intimidated by anybody—not
even the "King of Cool."
"I was practicing at Indian
Dunes," she recalls from her home
in South Carolina, "when I heard
a rider behind me. I thought he
just wanted to go around me, so
I held my line. Well, he comes up
alongside me and pulls up, really
close, and we lock handlebars.
I was like, 'Are you kidding me?'
And then I looked over, and it was
Steve McQueen, just grinning at
me! Then, he leaned his bike away
and just took off!"
The journey from "Hey Dad, I
want a motorcycle" to banging
bars with an ISDT-level rider like
Steve McQueen had been a pretty
quick trip for Nancy Payne. A Hon
-
da 90 and a Yamaha 125 enduro
were
the entry-level machines,
but she soon graduated to the
more serious mounts of the day,
including Bultacos, Maicos and
Rickman-framed Zundapps. She
was the first officially recognized
women's MX champ in America
and even raced overseas. And
then, almost as quickly as it had
begun, it was over.
"I didn't even really know what
motocross was when I started
riding," she recalls. "Some friends
told me about motocross, so we
went to a race. There were two
other girls, and they put us in
with the minibikes. We raced up
the hill and then back down, and
I remember all of the mini riders
passing us on the downhill."
Eager to learn more about
this new sport, Nancy and her
MX friends would soon have
the incredible opportunity to get
schooled by the best. In 1973, six-
time World Champion Joel Robert
was invited to host a motocross
school just for women. Cycle
CNII ARCHIVES
P140
BY KENT TAYLOR
NATIONAL
POWDER PUFF
CHAMPION
In the early
1970s, Nancy
Payne was
among the
country's
top female
motocross
racers.
A talented motocrosser, Nancy Payne
raced just long enough to make a
name for herself.
