CN III ARCHIVES
P86
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
THE MAGIC SETUP
John Glover (96) leads Tracy
DeMuro (52), Chris Steward
(30) and Donny Greene (20)
en route to his victory in the
AMA 250 Grand Prix race at
Willow Springs in 1984.
J
ohn Glover was asked by a friend to race his
Yamaha TZ250 to try to sort it out. The guy had
crashed the bike and, after repairing it, couldn't get
it to handle properly. He knew if anyone could figure out what was wrong with it, it would be Glover.
Glover raced the bike at Sears Point and immediately figured out the problem.
"The frame was bent, the swingarm was bent,"
Glover explained. "You could just feel it. Basically everything on the bike was bent except for the
fork."
Strangely though, while the bike would hardly go
in a straight line, much less turn, Glover found one
thing really stood out on the bent-up TZ. "The suspension rode like a Cadillac," Glover recalls with
a gleam in his voice. "This guy was an excellent
mechanic, he kept old Jaguars running, and he'd
figured out the perfect adjustments on the TZ's
suspension settings and you couldn't even feel the
bumps on the track."
That discovery indirectly led to Glover, who'd
previously been a regular club racing winner and
occasional top-10 pro finisher, to not only win,
but dominate the AMA 250 Grand Prix National at
Willow Springs in September of 1984.
In those days tuning the suspension on a TZ
was a black art. It was no mystery why however
- all you had to do was to take one look at the
"roughly" translated owner's manuals.
"We'd always get a laugh at what was in those
old manuals," Glover says. "For example in explaining how to set up the shock's compression
damping on the TZ, one manual read 'Click it until it dicks.' And there were way too many adjustments on the suspension for the bulk of amateur
racers to figure out. They had no idea."
Glover was so impressed with the shock on his
friend's TZ, he asked if he could borrow it to use
on his bike. "I put it on and it completely changed
my bike," Glover explained. "It rode smooth, but
it made the front end push. Even at tire-warming
speed you'd lose the front. I thought, 'holy mackerel, what is this?' The only thing different was the
length of the shock."
