Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 15 APRIL 14, 2015 P133 launched a pro career on the level with some of his contemporaries such as Joe Leonard, Al Gunter and Brad Andres, but Parriott married and started a family early, which would eventually grow to nine children! Demands of work as a truck owner-operator and raising his growing family largely confined Parriott to racing in Southern California events. Parriott became one of the early stars of the bur- geoning Southern California road racing scene of the 1950s. Perhaps because he wasn't pursuing racing as a career, or maybe it was because he just loved the sheer thrill of racing, whatever the case former Cycle editor Gordon Jennings said Parriott was very well liked by his fellow racers. "Buddy was quick and as steady as a freight train," Jennings told Cycle World's Edwards in 1992. "He was also the only genuinely nice guy I knew who went fast. He never really wanted to beat anybody, like most racers do. He just liked to get out on a track and go real fast, and in doing so he ended up in front." Buddy raced any a number of motorcycles, but his favorite was an immaculately prepared Manx Norton, which he raced to second behind the MV Agusta of Mike Hailwood at Daytona in '65. Famed tuner Clarence Czysz built the Manx Par- riott became most closely associated with. "It was a real fire engine," remembered friend and sponsor Art Esquerre. "We stripped it down; everything was drilled for lightness, even the frame. I think we had it down to 270 pounds. We were the first ones to run a disc brake in a GP. Buddy could go into the corners so much farther than anybody else. We also had an inverted-con exhaust instead of the open megaphones every- body else used. [At Daytona] Hailwood's father, Stan, came over in the pits, looked at it and said, 'It won't run with that.' Well, his kid ran away from us, but we ran away from everybody else." Parriott's USGP runner-up finish at Daytona '65 was a revelation to those on the U.S. rac- ing scene. To that point making any money at road racing in this country was impossible, but that was beginning to change. In the mid-1960s Yamaha was coming into the States big-time and throwing a lot of money at road racing. It appeared in 1966 that Parriott was about to earn his first real money as a road racer and possibly break through to even more fame when it was announced that he was part of Yamaha's factory squad in '66 and would be part of a three-rider contingent Yamaha would send to the Isle of Man that summer. But fate was not on Parriott's side. At the AMA races at Daytona in '66 he crashed in practice and broke his shoulder. His factory TD-1B was given to Bobby Winters, who went on to win that year's Daytona Lightweight event and the big payday that went with it. To add insult to injury a shipping strike later that summer prevented him from making the trip to the Isle of Man. He continued to race local events in South- ern California, but Parriott's last big shot in road racing was done. He was nearly 40 years old with a big family to take care of and was fighting diabetes. By this time he'd also clearly broke the mold of a typical motorcycle racer of the era when he became a community leader. Parriott served as councilman and vice-mayor of the City of Industry, California. Don Vesco once said of Parriott, "He was an idol,"—an idol perhaps to some of the biggest names in racing of the era, but now a largely forgotten hero. So on this, the following week of the MotoGP at COTA, take a moment to con- sider the first American to ever break through to score a podium, a hero whose accomplishments are largely lost to time. CN HISTORY MAKER Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

• Cover