CN
III ARCHIVES
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
T
hings were differ-
ent in Grand Prix
motorcycle racing in
the early 1980s. If you
could convince racing
organizers you had a
good enough résumé,
you could race. But of
course in each country
you were competing
for precious wildcard
entries that the home
country of each GP
liked to dole out to its
own riders, so there
was a lot of bargain-
ing, fast talking and
convincing going on
to simply get a Grand
Prix entry. In 1981, there
was a fat, two-and-a-half-month break between
the AMA Road Race Nationals at Talladega and
Road America. Two-time AMA National road race
champion Rich Schlachter saw an opportunity.
There were four GPs in a row in the month of May
and he theoretically could make all four and still
not miss Road America.
Schlachter's mechanic, Kevin Cameron, crated
up and shipped his Yamaha TZ250 to West Ger-
many and off they went. The 250cc Grand Prix at
Hockenheim went well: Schlachter finished sixth,
not bad at all for a GP debut, and this caught the
attention of German Michael Krauser, a former
sidecar racer who'd started a successful motor-
cycle fairing and luggage company. As Schlachter
and Cameron were making their way out of Hock-
enheim with a mass of people, up ahead Cam-
eron saw Krauser's big, square head.
"As we swept by, Krauser said to us, 'Dat vas
perfect! Come and see me,'" Cameron said. "So
we thought, 'Yeah, that's what we'll do.' We got
to the 'Blue Bomb,' our Ford Transit van, and we
drove to Munich. "
When Schlachter and Cameron pulled up to
the Krauser complex, their jaws dropped. "It was
like something that had belonged to a nobleman
at one time," Cameron recalls. "There were rows
of garages, a great house, and shops. We were
told we that we were to have a shower and we
could sleep. We were assigned bedrooms in this
block of buildings."
The next morning, when the two wide-eyed
Americans went to Krauser's office, the first
thing they noticed were classic black-and-white
sidecar-racing photographs on the walls. That
SCHLACHTER'S GRAND PRIX RUN
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