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VOL. 50 ISSUE 35 SEPTEMBER 4, 2013 P101 Mungenast credited fellow ISDT competitor Leroy Winters as being a major influence. "Winters took me under his wing," said Mungenast in an interview in 2000. "I had been a motorcycle mechanic, but at the ISDT Leroy showed me what it really took to prepare for a six-day, 1000mile race. He was undoubtedly the best prepared rider out there." Of the nine ISDTs Mungenast competed in, he feels that the first event in Poland was perhaps the most memorable. "Malcolm Smith started a position behind me that year and he told me he's never seen someone crash so much and still finish. My bike looked like it had gone through a trash compactor. I thought I had to go out there and ride as fast as I could. It was later I learned that you had to pace yourself so you and the machine would last for six days. Despite all the crashes that first year, I made it through and managed to earn a gold." By the late 1960s, Mungenast was focusing much more on his burgeoning motorcycle and car dealerships. From the shop's humble beginnings, Mungenast's businesses grew to include large automobile dealerships selling Toyota, Honda, Lexus and Acura. On the motorcycling side, his dealerships over the years have carried 11 brands. Mungenast smiled at the thought of the evolution of his dealerships. "My first shop was nothing more than a hole in the wall. You couldn't even call it a Mom and Pop deal. It was more like just a Pop deal, it was so small." The demands of business caused Mungenast to focus his racing efforts primarily on ISDT qualifiers through the early 1970s. By the mid-1970s, Mungenast retired from full-time racing. His son carried on his legacy by racing ISDT/ISDE for five years. Towards the end of his career, his fellow riders often ribbed Mungenast for racing oddball machines, including the Rokon, an off-road motorcycle that featured an automatic transmission. Mungenast explained his tendency to ride something different from the norm. "At the end of my career I finally started getting paid to race for the first time," Mungenast remembers. "It was ironic that the slower I got, the more I was getting paid to ride. So I did ride some strange machines in my later days, but it was great. I'd fly to the races and a mechanic was there waiting with the bike and all I had to do was ride." After his racing career, Mungenast was asked to help do some motorcycle stunts for a movie and that led to a decade-long career working in the movies. His stunt work appeared in movies such as "Hooper" and "Cannonball Run," and he did all of this in his 40s. He retired from movie work at age 50 after one particularly grueling stunt session where he was forced to do a hard stunt over three times before the director was happy. During the 1960s and '70s, Mungenast began sponsoring races and bought large tracts of land and created off-road riding areas. His off-road parks featured enduros, scrambles and motocross races and even hosted a motocross school taught by world motocross champion Rolf Tibblin. Perhaps one of the most unique parts of Mungenast's racing career was that he spanned three distinct eras of off-road motorcycling. He raced in the early days of converted Harley-Davidson and Indian motorcycles, through the British fourstroke invasion of the 1950s, and finally the twostroke era that took off in the late-1960s. Mungenast was inducted into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2006, Ed Youngblood wrote his biography. On September 20, 2006, Mungenast died of brain cancer at the age of 71. He left a legacy as one of the biggest personalities and contributors to off-road motorcycling in the history of the sport. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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