Cycle News

VOL. 53 ISSUE 3 JANUARY 26, 2016 P103 (then called Lightweight and not yet recognized as a national class by the AMA). He won a handful of 250 races, including what was considered his breakthrough victory in the Daytona International Lightweight event of 1968. In 1971 Kawasaki had hired DuHamel to try to tame its hair-trigger 500cc two-stroke triple called the H1R. The bike either ran–or more often than not spat–DuHamel off in seizing defiance. Yvon described the Kawasaki Triple: "They were pretty fast," he says with a smile before launching into one of racing's great understate- ments. "Those bikes were not so easy to ride. The handling was not so hot because of the power- band of the engine. Not enough horsepower and then… (snaps his head back) too much. We had a ribbed tire then with maybe a two-and-a-half or three-inch rim. So when you hit the powerband, well, it cost me a few times on the ground." Gradually, with months of tinkering, the team started getting a handle on the temperamental machine towards the end of the '71 season. In August, DuHamel scored a podium, taking third behind Dick Mann's BSA four-stroke Triple and Kel Carruthers' 350 Yamaha at Pocono Interna- tional Raceway. Everything came together for Kawasaki and DuHamel two weeks later at Talladega. The 200-mile event was a race of attrition and DuHamel's supreme fitness came into play. Pre- cisely because of this race Yvon went on to devise an early version of a Camelbak to help give him an advantage in the heat and humidity. "I remember that race I was on the H1R, the three-cylinder 500," DuHamel recalls. "It was hot, like maybe 110 degrees. The race was similar to Daytona. It was so bad when riders came into pit they couldn't continue racing. Some of them ended up in an ambulance. It was hot. In my life that was the hottest race I was ever in. I was trying to swal- low, but it was like a dry stone. Later I devised a tube to be able to drink water during the race." Kel Carruthers qualified on the pole on a Ya- maha 350cc two-stroke at an average of 109.190 mph. Don Emde was second on a 750cc BSA Rocket III. DuHamel was fifth fastest in qualify- ing, two miles per hour slower than Carruthers. Former Grand Prix rider Ginger Molloy blasted off the start on his Kawasaki and led the 42 starters on the first lap, but DuHamel drafted by him on the front straight starting lap two. And from there DuHamel just kept stretching out his lead. The only rider keeping DuHamel in range was Carruthers, but the Australian ended up get- ting mixed up with a lapped rider and tumbled off the track, putting him out of contention. DuHamel had to pit to fuel the thirsty Kawasaki three times, yet in spite of that he pulled away in the grueling conditions to win ahead of BSA factory riders Mann and Emde. The Kawasaki team knew they'd have to take one more pit stop than most other teams in the long race, so they'd practiced their fuel stops and had them down to perfection. The first stop for DuHamel took just four seconds. Kawasaki was so grateful to finally join the list of Japanese makers to win a national road race it paid DuHamel a $10,000 bonus, that in addi- tion to the $14,100 purse for winning the race. In today's money DuHamel made an incredible $140,000, very likely the biggest payday any motorcycle racer had ever earned to that point. From 1971 to 1973, DuHamel was the win- ningest rider for Kawasaki, earning five national victories for Team Green during that period. By then a true national star, DuHamel went on and gave early respectability to the fledgling AMA Superbike class in the mid-1970s, riding Kawasaki Z-1s during the mid-1970s before it be- came a national points-paying championship. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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