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VOL. 54 ISSUE 4 JANUARY 31, 2017 P99 hung up. Understanding this, you begin to appreciate the co- operative spirit that off-road rac- ing garnered and still remains to this day. All of those old (and as it turns out largely wrong) ideas about the ideal machine for off- road racing started falling apart with Leroy Winters' run in the 1956 Jack Pine. It all began for Winters in 1950, when his father told Leroy to head up to Michigan and find out "what all the shouting was about, each year, up there in brush country." The tall, lean youngster from Fort Smith, Arkansas, undoubtedly turned a lot of heads when he lined up for the start of that year's Jack Pine, all legs and arms dangling above a diminutive Harley-Da- vidson 125cc Model S. Winters' bike was the Amer- ican-made single-cylinder, two-stroke Harley manufactured starting in 1948. These motor- cycles were based on the DKW RT125, the drawings for which were taken from Germany as part of war reparations after World War II. One of the reasons fellow riders might have had a chuckle looking at Winters' little Harley was the fact that the tiny two- stroke motor produced a grand total of three horsepower! In order to overcome his lack of power, Winters did everything he could to lighten up the 125, including fitting bicycle wheels! Winters only managed to finish 218 miles of the 500-mile event that first year, but he went back to Arkansas with a good deal of knowledge and went to work improving his bike each year. He returned to the famous race annually and got pro- gressively better. In his fourth attempt, he actually finished the race for the first time. Finally, in 1956, now racing the upsized Harley-Davidson Model 165, and sporting an eye-popping six horsepower, Winters got it right and astounded the experts by taking victory on the diminutive machine. Rains for weeks ahead of that year's race made condi- tions picture-perfect for a small machine, easy to maneuver and lift. Instead of dry, relatively easy to ride trails, riders were greeted with a series of mud bogs and slippery creek cross- ings. Mud was reported to be waist deep in some places and many of the riders on the traditional Harley and Indians got helplessly stuck. That, combined with the layout men, who'd been criticized for mak- ing the course too easy in 1955, designed a much tougher route for '56. It was said afterwards that no rider made it through the two-day competition without some kind of outside help. The '56 victory for Winters set off a complete rethinking of off- road machinery. The old ideas of heavier, bigger horsepower began giving way to lighter, easier to handle off-road mo- torcycles. The Winters win was soon followed up by two Jack Pine victories for John Penton on a small NSU. By the early 1960s the ripple of lightweight machines became a tidal wave, and the days of lumbering big American V-Twins on the trails were over. Later in his racing career Win- ters went on to become an in- ternational ambassador for U.S. off-road racing. He competed in the International Six Days Trial from the mid-1960s through 1972. He won a silver medal twice in the World Champion- ship event riding for Team USA. Winters' connection to the ISDT was so enduring that in 1995 his club, the Razorback Riders in Arkansas, organized an ISDT reunion ride. Winters died in 1998 and the event was renamed the Leroy Winters Memorial. He was inducted posthumously into the Motor- cycle Hall of Fame a year after his passing. No one knew it at the time, but Winters left a legacy that forever changed the course of off-road motorcycling with his famous Jack Pine victory. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives