Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 44 NOVEMBER 3, 2015 P93 year's AMAs 100-mile championship. Harley- Davidson star Ralph Hepburn crashed in practice and injured his hand badly enough that he wasn't able to race. Hepburn approached Petrali and offered him his bike as long as he would agree to split whatever prize money Petrali might win. Pe- trali agreed, entered and won. He split the $1000 prize money with Hepburn and promptly hurried to the train station to catch the first train back to Kansas City, where he was working in a shop owned by Al Crocker (who later founded Crocker Motorcycles). When Harley-Davidson heard of Petrali's vic- tory, it set out to sign him to a contract. The only problem was that no one knew how to reach Petrali. Harley put out the word to all of its dealers that it was looking for Petrali. After several days of searching, he was found working on bikes in the back of Crocker's shop. In an amazing turn of events, Petrali found himself on Harley's payroll almost before he could get his hands washed. Petrali quickly proved his Altoona victory was no fluke when he won three national titles (the 10-, 25- and 50-mile championships for 61-inch motors) on September 7, 1925, on the boards in Laurel, Maryland, once again setting a new record in the process. While the sportswriters of the day were still arguing about how to spell his name and exactly where he was from, Petrali suddenly found himself crowned the national board track cham- pion. All of his years of struggle and bad luck had vanished in one magical summer. From there, Petrali started on a course as the most dominant rider of the next 10 years. He rode for Harley-Davidson until it decided to temporarily withdraw its support of racing in 1926. From there he talked Ignaz Schwinn into getting Excelsior back into racing and he worked and raced for Excelsior through 1931. He helped that company design several racing motors that proved very suc- cessful, especially in the hands of top hillclimbers. In a unique deal, Schwinn agreed to let Petrali run his own Harley-Davidsons at tracks where he felt it was more competitive. By 1937, Petrali, then 33, began to scale back his racing efforts. He was still winning, but Class A racing was fading quickly. Class C was sweeping the country and, as Petrali saw it, the change wasn't for the better. Instead of a track full of seasoned pros who had spent years get- ting to the pinnacle of the sport, Petrali saw rank amateurs taking to the track and he wasn't eager to get in the middle of these young and wild rid- ers who competed against one another on heavy street bikes. Petrali left racing with a bang. On March 13, 1937 at Daytona Beach, Petrali rode a specially built streamlined Harley-Davidson to a new one- mile motorcycle speed record of 136.183 mph. That record would hold for 11 years until Rollie Free finally broke the mark on a Vincent at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Petrali won his 49th and final AMA national on August 29, 1937, at the national hillclimb in Muskegon, Michigan. Petrali, who made his home in the Los An- geles area, often gave talks on the old days of racing to motorcycling clubs and was famous for always carrying an AMA membership card that identified him as AMA Life Member #1. Petrali died on the road in Casa Grande, Ari- zona, from a heart attack on November 10, 1973, while conducting an economy run for Buick. By the time Petrali retired from motorcycle racing in 1938, Class A, which featured purpose- built, high-dollar racing machines, had faded and the new Class C racing formula, which called for lightly modified production motorcycles, was tak- ing center stage. Petrali's retirement symbolically marked an end of the great three-decade era in motorcycle racing, where it was the cream of the best racers in the country competing against one another on the best racing machines the factories could build. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

• Cover