Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE B ryar Motorsports Park in Loudon, New Hamp- shire, was a legendary venue for AMA National Road Races for nearly 40 years. The tricky 1.6-mile circuit hosted a lot of club racing events, chiefly run by the Association of American Motorcycle Road Racers (AAMRR). The result was track specialists who had hundreds, if not thousands of racing miles on the track. Those locals would give the AMA Pro road racers regulars fits every June. Guys like Frank Camillieri, Jimmy Adamo, Rich Schlachter, Mike Baldwin, Dale Quarterley, David Sa- dowski and a host of others honed their skills, and in many cases, made their names by beating the big boys at their local national. The action on the track was always among the best of all AMA National road race courses. An AMA Superbike Championship was infamously decided there in a controversial manner. One of the all-time great passes in AMA Super- bike history happened at the track and there was no shortage of tire marks being left on a fellow racer's leathers from all the super-close and aggressive racing Loudon inspired. And then there was the equally epic and infamous partying going on in the camping grounds sur- rounding the track. To describe Loudon in the 1980s, imagine a mix of Woodstock, Daytona and the movie Apocalypse Now. A haze of campfire smoke would lend an eerie atmosphere if you were brave enough to venture up Animal Hill. Don Byrmer, who promoted the national in the late-1970s and '80s, had a security crew that would go up into the woods to try to maintain some semblance of order. "Mainly we were just trying to keep people from killing each other or themselves," Brymer admitted. "One time I pulled a guy out of a campfire. He was so drunk he didn't know what was going on. His clothes were smoldering." But the campers weren't the only ones partying late into the night. Brymer opened up the track's small oval to the racers to hold what was called the "Rental Car Nationals." "I think Bubba Shobert drove it in a Lincoln one year," Brymer recalls. "We had some pretty good rental car races on that little track. In one of them, my car ended up on the tire wall and we had to get the front- loader out to get it down." Rowdy motorcyclists had been coming to the area for the annual rally for decades. The national moved 18 miles down the road from Laconia in the mid-1960s. The La- conia/Loudon Classic was one of the oldest and most popular races in America and the weeklong rally, which dated back to the 1910s, drew tens of thousands of enthusi- asts up from New York and Boston. Things turned ugly in 1965 when a conflict between "bikers" and cops got out of hand at Weirs Beach and a riot ensued. The story of Bryar Motorsports Park began with an unlikely rac- P132 BRYAR MOTORSPORTS PARK Bryar Motorsports Park enjoyed huge popularity up until the late 1990s.

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