Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/720681
CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE I 'm certain there are enthusiasts out there who are passionate about the sports of cricket, badminton or handball. They spend all their lives spreading the gospel to try to popularize their activities in America with little progress beyond a small core of participants. In one way, that might characterize the life of Doug Bingham. Bingham was a lifelong sidecar enthusiast who for years promoted sidecar to the larger motorcycling com- munity, racing and otherwise. To hear Bingham tell it, adding a sidecar to a motorcycle made the activity that much more fun because more people were involved. He had a point. Even though Bing- ham's manufacture of sidecars with his company Side Strider, sparked a revival of sidecar interest in the 1970s, ultimately sidecars, also known as sidehacks, never quite caught on the way Bing- ham thought they should have. Being on the wrong side of the law was origi- nally what got Bingham into sidecars. "I lost my driver's license back in the '60s," Bingham said in a 1990 interview with Rider. "I met a friend at a Harley shop who raced side- cars, so we took my bike and his sidecar and we started racing together in desert events like the Greenhorn Enduro and up at the Jack Pine in Michigan." Bingham, first as passenger with partner Terry Hansford and later as driver, won a slew of presti- gious off-road events in the sidecar class, includ- ing Greenhorn, Jack Pine, the Moose Run and the Shamrocks Annual European Scrambles. Bingham joked that the big advantage riding as a team in desert events was "if you broke down in the middle of nowhere, at least you had someone to talk to." Not only was he the leading sidecar driver in off-road events, but Bingham also won a slew of flat track and road racing events in sidecars, including capturing the inaugural AMA Sidecar Road Racing Championship in 1968 with co-pilot Ed Wade aboard a Harley-Davidson-powered, Bingham-designed racer. They took the title again in 1969. In 1969, Bingham incorporated his sidecar business, Side Strider Inc., in Van Nuys, Califor- nia. He then began production of the Bingham Mark I, which was the first new sidecar design in decades. The sidecar was featured in the De- cember 1969 issue of Popular Science as being innovative, handsomely designed and reason- ably priced. Bingham was on the leading wave of a brief period in American motorcycle racing where sidecars became fairly popular, mostly in the decade of the 1970s and into the early 1980s. One of the funniest stories Bingham used to tell was the time he and a friend named Pam MR. SIDECAR P116 Doug Bingham was a pioneer in sidecar building and racing.