Cycle News

VOL. 51 ISSUE 3 JANUARY 21, 2014 on the ground and voilá! A company was launched whose bars were standard issue for Superbike racing before clips-on took over. Or how about the time Rudy was asked to be the 'rider' of a skateboard that made an attempt to set a world skateboard land speed record down Telegraph Hill in Long Beach, California? Or the fact that grips designed by Rudy (Galindo Designs) became the favored handgrips of road racers across the world, or the fact that Rudy once managed a singer who went on to become an American Idol star (Bo Bice) and he worked with some of the world's top golfers in designing club grips? Or how about the time he helped bring Budweiser into road racing and co-promoted some of the toppaying one-off motorcycle road races of the early 1980s, such as the motorcycle segments of the Long Beach Grand Prix and Caesars Palace Grand Prix Formula One races in Las Vegas? Put it all together and Galindo just might be the most interesting man in the room. In terms of racing Galindo was a strong, championship-winning club racer and he was a consistent performer in mostly West Coast AMA Nationals in the 1970s. The way he got into racing is amazing in itself. Galindo had motorcycles in high school and after school he applied for a job at Yamaha. "I applied for a position of parts picker," he said. "But when I went in for the interview they wanted to know if I wanted to become test rider. I was kind of thrown back, I told them I didn't have that much experience and they told me they just wanted normal guys to ride the shit out of these bikes and I said 'okay.!'" So for five years, just out of high school, Galindo had the job we all dream about – factory test rider. He tested it all for Yamaha - streetbikes, motocross bikes and everything in between. "We'd start out in the morning and head into the desert and then we'd ride back to the beach and lay out in the sun for lunch. I couldn't believe how lucky I was." Yamaha was coming out with a lot of innovative P109 motorcycles at the time and Galindo said so secretive was the R&D department there that they called it 007. Galindo described some of the lengths they'd go to at keeping prototype machines unnoticed. "We had ways of camouflaging the bikes," Galindo said. "Or we'd leave town real early in the morning. We were always watching to see if anyone around had a camera and never stayed in one place too long." After about a year of riding hundreds of miles every day Galindo found that he'd become a pretty good rider. He decided to go racing. And he was right; his day job served him well. In his first season of racing he became the fourth-ranked AMA novice in the country in a class that included Keith Mashburn, David Aldana and Don Castro. Galindo raced flat track and even some off-road events, but he became best at road racing, which is where he won most of his races and championships. Gradually he found himself on the promotional side of the sport, helping to promote some of the aforementioned big road races of the early 1980s. After racing he eventually ended up living in Alabama by way of the golf industry and now he's rooted there with family. He looks back on his days of racing motorcycles as where he made some of his best friends and had the most fun of his life. He said one of his proudest moments was getting into a battle with, leading and finally barely getting beat by World Champion Walter Villa in the AMA Lightweight Road Race at Ontario Motor Speedway. And what about one of the all-time great nicknames 'Endo Galindo'? For some reason Rudy failed to mention it during our interview but as fellow racer Steve Lang put it, "Rudy got that name because some of his crashes were almost as spectacular as Yvon DuHamel's!" CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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