Stories of the Daytona 200 and 50 years of Superbike Racing!

Welcome to the PsychoWorld podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer. I'm with Kevin Cameron, our technical editor.

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Today, we're going to talk about the Daytona 200. I just got back from the Daytona 200,

had quite an experience there with BMW.

Superbike racing in America is 50 years old.

The rules are written on the floor of an empty apartment by Steve McLaughlin and John Orich.

John Orich recently told this story to a large assemblage of BMW fans who were gathered for the three BMWs campaign

by Udo Giedel and Butler and Smith in the 1976 race.

And that was Gary Fisher, Steve McLaughlin, tuned by Udo Giedel and Reg Pridmore, of course.

And Steve McLaughlin barely took it at the line by six inches, they said,

after they developed the film of the photo finish, which took 45 minutes, and there was no podium.

But 50 years of superbike racing, it kind of all started there.

It reminded me very much of bagger racing because street bikes of the time were absolutely unfit for purpose.

They were not made to race. And everything that got changed had to get changed.

The rules were written suitably loose to allow for things to happen.

Repositioning of the shocks, for example, and the Butler and Smith BMWs, two of those bikes, not Reg's.

Reg preferred the twin shock. I think someone said he didn't want to be protested.

And he was sort of like, no, I'm going to keep those shocks. I like them.

But the other ones were converted to single shock.

And Udo's joke was, I repositioned one of them to the shelf in the shop because the rules were repositioning was allowed.

So there was a lot of interpretation. It was pretty good stuff.

Kevin's seen a few Daytona 200s and, of course, it evolved from beach racing and the dirt track.

There was a dirt track, a 200-miler that was somewhere local down there.

But it finally made it to the Speedway and turned into 200 miles.

There was a contingent at the beach who really wanted to stay at the beach, but they moved it into the Speedway to some protest.

But after a few years, it caught on and it became huge.

So you should transition here. I've set the stage probably too much, as usual.

Tell us about your Daytona days, Kevin.

Well, the early times were the period in which flathead or side valve engines were given 750cc displacement

because they were less able on a specific basis than overhead valve engines which were given 500cc.

So the Triumphs won Daytona in 66 and 67, I think.

And Harley-Davidson replied in a big way.

And it was quite an accident, really, because there was a group of people in Axel, CR Axel shop in SoCal,

and they were shooting the breeze and they were talking about flatheads.

And it turned out that there was one belonging to a rider whose name is not of record.

And they said, why don't we have a look at this?

So they took off a cylinder head and two of the guys are looking in there and they say,

one of them had worked with Hudson's, which were big straight-eight flatheads when the NASCAR first started.

300 cubic inch sixes.

And he said, well, it's nothing like what was developed by Hudson.

And the other fellow chimed in and he said, well, I've seen the Auburns and it's nothing like them either.

And so there's more conversation.

Finally, somebody said, really, what's going on here is that the roof, the head is too close to the cylinder deck

where the valve pocket feeds across to the cylinder and then down.

Well, why don't we make a quarter-inch head gasket for this and test it?

Well, Axel's bandsaw welder didn't work right then.

So one of them gets in the car and drives us off to somebody whose bandsaw welder is working.

He takes a couple of these blanks that they'd made with holes drilled

so they could feed the end of the saw blade through there and then weld it together,

put the blade on the big bandsaw wheels and then they'd be able to saw out the inside shape of the piston

and the two valves in the side valve pocket.

Well, they get the head on there and it made as much horsepower as the engine

with much higher compression ratio.

Imagine what a quarter of an inch spacing the head up towards space.

A quarter of an inch means like no compression.

Hardly puffing at all.

Yes, but because they had increased that slot where the flow went from the side pocket to the cylinder,

they gained as much as they lost from compression.

And at that point, they thought they sort of looked at each other like,

we got something here. This is something.

And so they put in a call to Dick O'Brien at Harley.

He had been the race manager since 57 and he got on a plane with the foreman of the race shop.

Harley not only had a race shop, but the race shop had a foreman.

Now that's real 1940 stuff right there.

So they get there and they make a lot of changes.

They find out they go to Daytona with 58 horsepower versus Triumph's 49 point something.

Well, it's a bigger motorcycle, but not 10 horsepower bigger.

And well, Calvin just left them for dead.

It was clear that the Triumph was stuffy material.

So far as Daytona was concerned, lots of people loved their Daytona 500 twins.

But there's nothing as old as last year's bike.

And I mean vintage bikes are new in our minds.

They're gleaming with dealer fresh surface finishes.

But in this case or the or the promise that's that's what that's what seduces us to buy them when they're crusty is like, oh, but it's how wonderful it could be.

And soon. So in a few years.

The new motorcycle, they took the thing to the Caltech wind tunnel.

They developed the the infamous whale.

That's what Buell's customers called it when he put that highly effective faring.

This is a faring that made two fifties faster than the little narrow fairings where the riders knees bulged out on the two sides.

Every just about every motorcycle that fairing was ever put on went faster.

So Calvin just blew them away.

And that was the end of an era because at the 68 pro comp board meeting, Triumph said, we want a 650 cc formula same for everyone.

You do.

Harley guys stood up and he said, well, you've got a 650, but we've got a 750.

So let's make it 750 while we're at it.

And they voted and it went through.

And what happened because of this was that because bigger motorcycles were just catching on in the US.

And I mean really bigger.

That what happened next was it was the fastest motorcycles in the world on the fastest racetrack in the world, written by an international field of the fastest riders in the world.

And that happened in 1972 when Suzuki and Kawasaki brought their three cylinder two strokes to town.

And in 1970 Honda with a CP 750 based racer won the event by the narrowest margin because the motors were eating camp chain tensioners and turning them into friction reducing powder in the oil.

Well, I had dinner with John Long and a bunch of these other retired road racers who were there.

And John was regaling us with stories about how they did rebuild that.

They were the ones who rebuilt that engine and the other guys who were running it didn't.

Yeah.

And suffered the consequences.

They suffered the consequences.

But they, you know what?

There's no asterisk like barely made it, right?

You won.

That's it.

History says you won.

Because because Dick Mann was a money rider.

He had grown up in that whole money situation where if you didn't finish in the money, you are going to have to borrow something from people you're going to be racing against next weekend.

And they probably would lend it to you.

But how does it feel?

So then he won again in 71 this time on a BSA three cylinder four stroke.

And in this case, they told him this is an 8250 RPM engine and in his own mind he thought it feels like a 7800 RPM engine.

And that's how he wrote it.

And one by one, the great names fell by the wayside with all the ills of the internal combustion engine.

And he wanted a second time for what could be better.

So then next year, the 750s are there, but they couldn't win because the tires all flew to bits.

The race was won by little Tiki 350 Yamaha's both years.

And then the 750 era, the TZ751 in 1974 and it went on winning until 1982, which was the last, the last time.

But that was from from 72 onward was the two stroke era Daytona.

And remember this, it was not the TZ750 that sent the four strokes home.

It was little 350 twins.

Not only were they easy on tires, they were also easy on riders.

So that was a first time I went to Daytona was 1969.

My rider was a junior and I was not eligible to be in the speedway on Sunday to watch the 200.

So that meant that I crept under the sleeping platform and pretended to be a toolbox.

A toolbox was pushed up against me so that it was assumed that there were other toolboxes and so forth in the space I was occupying.

And as soon as we got past the geyser guards, we were in and I was free to walk about.

Now, it is of note that Kayla was third after putting a move on another rider on the last lap in classic do Hamel fashion.

Well, that was really remarkable.

Kayleigh Ackov is 18. She's riding a Ray Hall Ducati.

And she hooked up with the lead group in the beginning of the race.

Six riders blanket over him, as they say.

But slowly, you know, some of those folks lost the draft. She was one of them.

There was a lot of drama at the race.

No, Josh Herron won again.

But it was Herron and Jacobson were pitted, you know, one, I think it was one slot apart.

Jacobson is is leading Herron comes in.

They both pit at the same time.

They're filming Jacobson leaving the pit and the Moto America film crew is on the hot side of the pit.

And as PJ's pulling out, the cameraman starts stepping back and Herron is exiting the pit.

And suddenly a cameraman is backing into his life leaving the pit.

He lifted the back wheel, hit the brakes, did not saw, did not crash, and I was able to rejoin.

But obviously frustrated and he lost something like at least four seconds, maybe more.

PJ crashed out of the lead passing in a lapper as you might be rushed,

because you feel like an angry Josh Herron might be coming.

But all the while it was Darren Binder and Kayleigh Ackov in the third and fourth.

Ackov was fourth and she closed the gap and caught up and then passed the lap before the finish

and drafted and I think got the line.

Everyone was cheering, but it wasn't over.

And you would think that Binder could have witnessed what happened on that lap

and done something about it the next lap, but didn't.

And it was, Kayla just did a freely expert professional draft pass to take third and get the podium

as a first woman on a Daytona 200 podium and in wonderful fashion.

And I think actually seeing her on the interview, it was great because she was, you know,

being a female in the paddock at all, I think historically may have been somewhat challenging

because she was up in Leathers and Race, like there's a lot of supportive people,

but there's plenty who are not.

And so to be an 18 year old in that situation and she's still, she's trying to not,

I think she was really trying to not be emotional because she just didn't want to be emotional, right?

She didn't want to be, you know, the 18 year old crying.

And then she teared up.

She's like, oh, I've been trying so hard to, you know, keep it together.

And I'm like, she had to cry.

I mean, I'd cry.

Like, if I could get the podium, watch me weep, buddy.

So it was cool.

It was really, it was really neat.

And she just did it out of pure grit talent and determination.

And, you know, she's had an incredible support, support crew like Ben Spees has been helping

with Ray All, of course, as the manager.

Well, she did it right.

She did it right.

She did the things she knew were effective at that racetrack.

Yeah.

Be second off the chicane.

Yeah.

And then do it to him.

Right.

Yeah.

Being thoughtful about it really.

Well, relevant to this is after Daytona in 69, I went to the AMA National in Annapolis

and I brought a woman with me and she was not allowed in the paddock.

She had to go and sit in the spectator seating and read a book.

Well, it wasn't too long after that, that a woman in the state of New York had applied

for a license.

AMA license and it was sent to her.

She showed up at the races and she was told, oh, you're a woman.

You can't do this.

Go out of here.

She went straight to the legal profession and said, do you fellows want to join

me in an easy one?

And the AMA was summoned.

Sit right here.

We will now read you the law which basically said, yes, you can create a private club

and so forth and so on.

But if you're going to exclude women from this sport, you will not do it in the

state of New York because it's not legal here to do that.

So just think about it.

So there was an important precursor and I'm sorry that I don't know her name.

But somebody did what Americans have done when they are wronged.

They took it to law.

And the law updated the interpretation rather than saying, well, I'm a man.

These are all other men.

We live in a society of men.

And this is the way it's always been.

So get back to the kitchen and mind the kids.

And I'll see you in church Sunday.

What is it?

Kinderkuchen und Küche.

So that was a good thing back then.

And I'm a person whose mother, when I was 10, was called upon by circumstances

to put a roof on the porch.

Three sides of a big old 1826 house.

She put the roof on there.

The flooring in the bridge had been there too long

and the boards were starting to go.

So she organized that there should be trees sawn in the woods,

that they should be sawn into planks.

And she and another person were down there with saw horses,

including all this stuff to put a new floor in the bridge.

So I am accustomed to capable women.

People getting done, yeah.

Yes.

My mom was like that too.

Get it done.

So hats off, so to speak, to Kayla.

No, it was awesome.

It was very cool to be there.

I was sitting with, watching a race with Thad Wolf,

who's a retired racer.

He was around quite a bit in the 80s.

Oh, he phoned yesterday.

Yeah, he was at Cycle.

And he did racing and he was around Cycle and all that stuff

and came up and raced TZ 750s and all that.

We were watching that with Curtis Adams,

who is my hometown is Whittier.

And I always admired Curtis because he was six foot four,

six foot six, really tall guy.

He saw he was tall and I'm six too, but I was like, oh wait,

I got a chance.

Curtis can road race and win.

So I was covering him when I was at Cycle and he was back

at Willow Springs and he was racing Chuck Graves on a 7-11.

We just watched, we were watching the 200 and we're like,

well PJ's raced to lose at this point and he did.

And then we watched Kayla hunt down Darren Bender.

He was racing on the MotoGP stage fairly recently.

So Daytona is a unique track and it was really something.

Well, Daytona is a place where the advice is don't run your new bike.

You don't know much about your new bike and you know last year's bike

really well.

So you might have a chance at Daytona because a lot of people

called it Daytona because a lot of people had to reduce their

compression ratio there because the engine holds a high note

second after second after second.

It just keeps on singing.

And so in that sense, it is like a destructive dynamometer test.

And once you've got your engine right, you know how to make

it run at Daytona.

That is a valuable piece of information.

And that's why they say don't run your new bike at Daytona.

But of course that doesn't apply today because we have computers

so that we can analyze everything and know the future in advance.

Good luck.

All right.

Good luck.

Ask AI.

60% chance of being right.

Maybe.

Yeah.

Never know.

So that is race there.

And I think everyone, Ella Dreyer, young road racer coming up,

she is 16 and she's the youngest racer to participate in the

200.

And Tad knowingly went over and said, you know, I think, you

know, the best advice I can give you is just finish the

race.

And everybody else said everybody already told her that.

But finish the race, you know, get experience it, get

across the line that she did.

So it's pretty neat.

Definitely.

And Heron, you know, Heron, that's four in a row for Heron,

which is Dan and Mark will own five totals.

So he's joining Russell on the Mr. Daytona list.

Scott Russell did it five times.

Do homo was always really good.

There's that epic win back in the day when he was fairly

injured and they had to kind of lever him onto the bike

off of his cane and put him in the saddle.

And then he went off and rode 200 miles and finished and

won his amazing drive up to the wall.

I don't know if that was the same year.

It's a little foggy, but that was amazing how hard he

stayed in the throttle as he was drifting up toward the

wall and you just thought, oh man, he's going to

splat and he didn't splat.

It was really impressive.

That's the thing about Daytona is over the years

you it is such an interesting and unique track.

And then we had international folks for so long.

And I think, you know, there's been the lull.

They didn't want super bikes to be doing, you know,

213 miles an hour or whatever.

So now we're we're doing next gen super sport,

which you're running, you know, mid 180s.

Baggers are running mid 180s, by the way.

185 at five, 186.

I don't know.

I had breakfast with Kyle Weiman.

He mentioned offhandedly that he thought they

might break 190 this year with the offseason gains,

but it looks like we stayed under under that.

That's a lot of air to crush on a bagger.

And that's a lot of air to crush.

It certainly is.

But that big refrigerator in the front,

that big obstruction that they have to push.

Yeah.

I understand the bags are not, you know,

you would think maybe the bags bags could be good

or the bags could be bad.

Only the tunnel knows.

But it turns out, you know, from what I understand from talking

to a few folks is that they aren't really hugely detrimental

and they are, they aren't a benefit.

And I don't think, you know, it'd be nice if you could sort

of fill the gap with the bags, you know,

make them a little bigger.

Try to try to enhance the continuity between the faring

over the rider and off the back of the bike,

but it's outside the rules.

Contrary to the spirit.

Another big change that occurred at Daytona in 69,

I drained the gearbox oil on the two new Yamaha's that we had,

TD2, 250 and a TR2 350.

And I'm walking around with the drain pan

and finally somebody in the AMA shirt

said, let me catch his eye.

And I said, what do we do with this?

And I showed him the oil.

And he said, well, I know what everybody else does.

See that ditch over there?

He said, you just kind of amble over there and pour it in.

So that's what I did.

And today, of course, the next thing that would happen

would be the black arrow of an environmental group

that would be sticking out between your shoulder blades.

Naughty behavior mustn't, mustn't.

So now they have little cabins, at least two little cabins,

and each cabin is staffed by an older experienced gentleman

of whom there are good many in Florida.

And there is a barrel for unwanted fuel,

a barrel for oil, a barrel for coolant,

a barrel for brake fluid.

So we're doing things right now.

Yeah, we got that out at the airport, too.

I've been going out to my local airport,

working on vintage aircraft and messing around.

And we make the run over to the big brick,

the cinderblock shed thrown by the county.

And away we go.

We've got a great big giant drain.

We can take our ashless dispersant oil

that we've just drained out of a Taylorcraft or Cub.

And put it in the right spot.

Hopefully we get it used for something else.

It was the classic old popular science.

It's an illustration from, I don't remember the year,

but it's say it's fifties-ish.

And it's, this is how you dispose of your oil,

and it showed you to dig a pit and fill the bottom with gravel.

Make it of this dimension and then you can pour your oil

in this pit that you dug in your yard.

From the earth, from the earth ye shall return.

Except when you want your groundwater to not taste like 2050.

Yes.

So I think we've done pretty well to pick that up

and put it somewhere, put it in the barrel, send it somewhere

that maybe we can do it again.

I know there's some very thrifty people who use their

use oil for the oil furnace that they've built for their garage.

And they, you know, I could see that happening in the colder climate.

Yep, it's been known to happen.

There are people that will come by and take your barrel

of unwanted liquid away.

You wonder where they're going with it.

There was one company that had an unfortunate reputation

for botched fuel stops.

And I won't mention their name out of natural restraint.

And I worked it out.

I saw them practicing one day.

And basically what the management was saying to the pay-ons

who were performing this minuet,

realized that the slightest error by any one of you

could make the difference between winning and losing.

I want you to be really tense.

I want you to be worrying about a misstep

and not paying attention to what you're doing.

So in comes Paul Smart.

I think this was Talladega.

And with decisive motions, the team manager

stepped forward with the hose.

This was overhead hose refuelers in this time.

And you had to twist lock them on.

There were three lugs on the connector.

And then you pulled a lever and a poppet valve

was pushed into your tank and the fluid rushed in.

He pulled the thing and you can imagine him counting

inwardly one and two and three.

When he got to about 15, he's looking all around.

And he's trying to, he's shut the valve by this time.

He's trying to get the thing off and it won't come off.

He put real effort into it so that the rear end of the tank

began to rise up off of its rubber cushions.

And Smarty is revving the engine as if to say,

could you snap it up where you're losing time here?

And I'm counting seconds.

I'm a bystander.

Finally, with a tremendous effort, he gets the thing,

breaks the thing off of the tank.

There's no leakage.

Paul smokes the clutch all the way down the pit lane

and loses the clutch.

And I saw one at, oh, what's that?

Paul Ricard in the south of France.

And similar business.

It could all be bad luck, of course.

And one time it definitely was.

Rider comes in, they hook up.

Nothing comes out.

Nothing is happening.

So they disconnect it, send the rider out frantically.

They're carrying draining fuel from the overhead can

and putting it into their B unit.

They had a B, a second tower.

What had happened was that the hose structure is,

it has a wire, a ground wire in it,

because you don't want to spark when you're handling fuel.

It has layers of fabric.

And it has an inner liner.

The inner liner, somehow a section of it detached

and went across the neck of the thing

and blocked the flow completely.

But because by this time, of course, they were expecting trouble.

They were expecting to drink deep at the font of bad luck.

And they were able to refuel them with the second tower.

But that's what those high-speed tracks do to you,

is they, you have to carry out these rituals.

You have to do all of these things right.

And there are people who can't get in step with that,

because what I told people when we were doing fuel stops

was the rider hates to stop.

The rider wants to stay in his rhythm.

That's the safest place for him or her.

And so making a fuel stop is a bore.

You just do it step-by-step and get it over with and get them out.

And the teams that were always successful

would run a couple of false fuel stops.

They would actually transfer fuel.

It was a live stop, but it was just practice.

And then the attitude was,

there, we can do that.

You see, it worked.

Okay, we're ready for Sunday.

And I'll, good stuff.

Daytona is not a place for experiments.

Daytona is not a place where you go to try stuff.

And when Rich Schlachter, rider, East Coast guy,

and I were given the use of a TZ250D in 1977.

In first practice, we got a baseline.

And then I pulled the ignition timing back to 1.8.

And that was better.

It tacked up.

Same thing.

Pulled it back to 1.6.

We picked up 300 revolutions on those two changes

with no change elsewhere.

Same gearing.

It's just going faster.

What Kevin means is on the top end.

Yeah.

So we're, they're in 6.

When you're on the banking and the tack is over here

and the tack, of course, is banging,

bouncing all around in its rubber mountings.

It's, it's quite a, it's, it's not exactly efficient

information transfer.

But we're not looking for, you know, we're not saying like,

oh, my top speed was 131 miles an hour when you're,

you have the bike, you have the tack.

And if you're in top gear and your gearing is the same

and you pick up 300 RPM, that's a huge positive

because you're going faster.

It's a biggie.

So that evening I widened the exhaust ports

and raised them a millimeter and polished the edges.

Another 300 revolutions.

Same gearing.

And we just kept doing stupid stuff.

We put on 36 millimeter carburetors and got them dials.

I can't believe how lucky we were.

I can't take credit for any of this because we are

two crazy guys that went to Daytona to try experiments.

Schlecher says, I'm going to go over to the AMA office

and see where we're at.

So he goes off after a while he comes back and he said,

we're third on lap time.

He said, we're third.

And that was the moment when he made the transition

from being a talented clubman to being something else,

you know, to be announced.

It was a great day.

But that's naughty.

You can't count on being that lucky.

It's a, those 250Ds they had, of course, steel tube frames

and horrible cracking tubular steel braced swing arms.

Right.

But they had certain problems.

And we just had that wonderful experience.

In 1982, Honda decided they were going to make this big push

at Daytona.

They brought 1,000 CCV4s called FWS.

And everyone is being sort of, oh, Honda's bringing a super weapon.

And Freddie Spencer on one, Mike Baldwin on the other.

And I don't know what Roberto Pietri was writing,

maybe another one.

But at any rate, they went tremendously fast

through practice.

It was just stunning.

And they were equipped to change tires during the race.

They had Suzuki eight hour stuff.

And that transformed Daytona because before that,

the tire companies were saying to themselves,

we have to make a tire that'll go 200 miles at the speed

with the extra load of the banking.

Just make something, you know, out of stone.

Well, in the race, Honda had tire trouble.

And so they were pulling in and getting a tire

and going back out, going fast, and earning their way forward

again, and then having more tire trouble.

And meanwhile, here's Graham Crosby plugging away

on a bike built at the last moment in the parts department

out of no longer wanted 0W31 parts.

And that thing was designed to win Daytona.

And it did.

It just kept chugging.

It didn't have any exceptional tire trouble.

But Freddie was second.

And Mike was in there too.

So they were, of course, horribly disappointed

because they wanted to make this big splash.

But it was a big splash, even if they didn't win

because it changed the nature of the undertaking.

And that was cool.

And of course, we knew that Daytona was going to turn

into a four stroke race eventually,

that the manufacturers were saying,

oh, AMA, you tell us what rules you want.

Then we comply.

But that wasn't really true.

It was sort of like, I'm in your country, so you rule.

And 1985, it became a super bike.

But the thing was that when super bike first came to Daytona

or when it first became a national class,

that the AMA had the good sense to make the races very short.

I'm sure that the sense was talked into them

by certain persons.

But a 50 mile race.

And the rules said that front forks

and swing arms may be altered or replaced.

And that was a good one too,

because it meant that put on real stuff.

Because as Mark noted earlier in this diatribe, duotribe,

that those bikes weren't built to be raceable.

They were built by engineers who had been told

USA has a 60 mile per hour speed limit.

Put in plenty of power, 1960s chassis,

tires and suspension, thumbs up okay.

And they weren't.

And the AMA had the sense to realize,

or it was explained to them.

And so those bikes, those first era super bikes,

the sit-up jobs had to be completely re-engineered.

All new suspension, all new wheels,

tremendous reinforcing of the chassis.

In 1978, Goodyear had had enough being told

that their tires were causing a certain other manufacturer's

motorcycle to weave.

And so Goodyear picked up the phone

and dialed Goodyear Aerospace.

And they sent over people who said,

yeah, we'll put strain gauges on this thing

and you go out and run a practice

and then we'll make a wire frame model

and we'll animate it with the motions

revealed by the strain gauges.

And they showed, on the screen,

they showed the chassis going,

it was wonderful.

Wow.

And it shut the complaints up.

The manufacturer went away

and attended to their own knitting.

Yeah.

Well those 76 BMWs, you know, I was there

in Daytona with the three that BMW

brought down the R90S's built by Udo Giedel

and it was so wonderful to talk to Udo

because you just got a lot of the back story

like what happened to Fisher

and the rear stand on the axle

goes into the axle, holds the bike,

the pipes are just above it

and Udo's like, yeah, he had gearbox problems.

Somebody bounced on the back of the bike

and bent the pipes and it jammed his linkage

and he was able to get through most of the race

but then it hung up between fourth and fifth

and it overrepped and it hurt it and ended it.

So it's just, you know, and talking to Udo

with all the changes about lifting the engine

and then moving it forward

and if you looked at the cylinder,

I think it's the left cylinder,

it's up against the frame rail,

the twin loop coming down,

it is like pushed up and forward

as far as it'll go until the cylinder

basically hits the frame.

It was remarkable and it was cool

because those early Kawasaki's

they were incredibly powerful.

They had plenty more power than the BMW R90S

but they couldn't make them turn or get off corners.

They just, they just were not working.

It took a few seasons and of course

everything changed and suddenly, you know,

ripping 10, 25cc four-cylinder

we're doing all the biz.

Well, this is the thing about handling

and that is that it,

it's like

the explanation is,

was made to BMW people

during the time of their S1000RR

when it was eating tires

and Marko Melandri said

in Formula One where BMW had tremendous

experience in Formula One

you work to censor data

but in this kind of racing

you have to work to what the rider says

because if the rider doesn't have confidence

a choir of engineers singing the praises

of their algorithm will have no effect.

And so

this kind of experimental handling

amelioration is necessary.

There is no computer that will just

give you a good one.

When Honda had to make

a proper superbike out of the

CB900F

the first thing they threw away

was that lead flywheel of a front wheel

and they put a little 16 in there

sweet little 16

and a tubeless slick tire

and lots of other changes

because riders could haul

on the bars and the whirling flywheel

Daytona really spins those flywheels

it doesn't want to steer

no I don't have to and I'm not going to

so they had to put little stuff on

they had to make huge changes

to convert a beach cruiser

into a road race bike

and this is why the baggers experience

is so wonderful because it shows

that the things that work in racing

will work on a bagger

and I think that's so wonderful

because I watched carefully

at Laguna

and those things change direction

at respectable speed they aren't

heavy and slow

like the McGrath highway in Boston at rush hour

they are nimble

and further they slide rather than high side

it's really quite a control mechanism

you instead of fearing

having the terrible fear

of the two stroke era

as it slips and grips

and one of those times you are going over the top

it just goes into this lovely slide

maybe it has something to do with

the 620 pound minimum weight

with standard road race weight

wheels and brakes and tires underneath it

good unsprung weight ratio

keep those pieces of rubber kissing

the pavement

so I think the baggers

experience has a lesson to teach us

and those McCandless brothers

in Northern Ireland who developed the feather bed frame

which was adopted by Norton

a frame that was the model

for so many frames

in the years that followed

that's how they developed that chassis

was by constant testing

and changing so that they got a feel

for what was possible with this chassis

good stuff

Kaleyakoff was talking about the banking

a police

were currently suffering about 2G

it's hard to breathe

you really got to get off the banking

and catch up on your breaths

pretty good jamming situation

the baggers in the early super bikes

76 here especially

that flexibility of rules allowing

just enough creativity

to make the bikes work and evolve to what we got

in 83 with interceptors

and stuff where it was actually handling became

a marketable trait

quarter mile and top speed

because one way of looking at the magazine

business is that it provides

young hot persons

with bar talk

about their favorite subject

or social media talk at this point too

that's a later development

one of the things that Daytona

you have to look out for is fuel starvation

in 1972 we brought our barn

job home made H2R

752 stroke

down there and my rider went out

and he said

the cut's dead at 8500

he said I thought it had seized but then

the tack needle went down when it got to 6

Bob it cut back in

so that told me that I had to

get rid of the fuel

no quick disconnects no filters

bigger float valve in the carburetors

and when I had fuel

flowing from taking the bull plugs

out of all three carburetors into a trough

that debouched into a jar

when I had 50%

more than what I had calculated

for fuel consumption on full throttle

it sang its song all the way up to the

let's stop here number

which was about 9200 in those days

so always something to think of

on other racetracks

your motorcycle the float bowls

might have enough fuel in them for you to do

everything without running it dry

but don't forget to a place where it has to sing

that dulcet song

for all those seconds it will pump the

bulls dry and cut

it's one of my favorite things that you've repeatedly

talked to me about over the years it's pounds

per horsepower hour

0.5 pounds per horsepower per hour

is a rule of thumb

for two strokes and 0.65

for two strokes

and

we ran our

I don't remember what year it was it was an 80s

250 Yamaha on

the dyno of the former

snowmobile expert out in

Buffalo and

the thing was working really well

its fuel consumption

was like 0.595

pound per horsepower

per hour and of course

where the rest of the fuel go out the tailpipe

I always wanted to put a spark plug in the tailpipe

it could discourage drafting

it could be a safety issue

it's common to blow a lot of fuel out the tailpipe

on a two stroke there's not

yes because when the door slams late

the mixture is innocent

it's brushing up these transfer ducts

some of it makes the turn

and it enters the cylinder where do I go

some of them go to the exhaust port because it's over there sucking away

the pipe signal from the

exhaust pipe is saying this way

this way little darling

and of course you'd like to talk

sweetly to that fuel and have it all go to the back of the cylinder

and perform the loop

but they were wasteful so

I have a question for you that's barely related

we used spark plugs that Daytona

just to confirm ok it's connected great

did you spend time

indexing spark plugs in your career

I never got to that I always had something to do

because you can buy these washers right

so indexing the spark plug is aiming

the open part of the positive and negative

toward the oncoming mixture yeah

so the spark is just unshouted

it's just pure spark here's the mixture

let me have it let's go let's light this thing up

and Paul Dean the great Paul Dean

has been involved with sprint car racing for a very long time

and he said that indexing the plugs on their

5 or 800 horsepower engine

pick them up something like maybe 5 to 10%

aiming them all at the intake

so that's a lot I mean that is a huge amount

and you just buy these washers of different thicknesses

you mark the plug where the

opening of the electrode is and you thread it in

and torque it down and just get it into that ballpark

I've considered it you know it's easy to do on a single cylinder

I could probably start with that and see how that goes

dare I say bella set I don't want to

there are plenty of other singles in the world where you could index your plug

you know I kind of want to do that on the XS650 too

well I saw that there was a

day when I saw a difference in between

ways of thinking about spark plugs

Gary Nixon was asked to ride his

1976

C&J framed

Kawasaki KR750

in a demo at Loudon

New Hampshire and I had

a box of plugs that we used then

so that's what I put in it

after practice he said

thing don't pick up real good off the corner

got some of them spark plugs stick out

yes in fact I do

because that was the last spark plugs

that we were using in TZ750s

as the 80s got underway

you could even see the insulator

sticking out and then the fine

platinum iridium wire

and the side electrode

and put a set of those in there and he

told me that was way better

yeah the P and the NGK plugs

it's the B you know you might get your B8ES

or your B7ES and your Norton or whatever

which can also get the P model where the protrudes

that stuff out and yeah

and when we started out

with TD-1s in the mid 1960s

they had we

they called out B10EN which was

a spark plug that had the cap down inside the shell

and finally

I asked

oh Bobby Strollman

Bobby Strollman who was the champion man

I showed him this

his little monocle yes

and I showed him a set of those I said this is what we used to run

he said today that's a top fuel plug

they got the plug gap down inside where it's

partly protected from the firestorm

so that projected

the tip spark plug by the way had a heat range

similar to what you'd put in a Triumph 650

if you were going on a long trip on the interstates

didn't want to burn things down

and it worked a treat

in TC 750s it was certainly better

oh yeah

well you know if we're in the 70s era

I have to bring up a story you told me about an unnamed

road racer who was

growing recreational crops such as perhaps Marijuana

on freeway interchanges yes

and so I had the audience of all these road racers

who were racing in the 60s and through the 70s and into the 80s

and I said oh yeah you know that Kevin Cameron

told me about this guy because they were all talking about how they

funded their racing and John Long is talking about

we need a race in Italy and he's driving to

the next thing and he's got to earn his money

and he's driving a van and he pulls in and he's like I don't know the difference between

Benzina and whatever else was on the side

but he's like there was fuel that was cheaper

I'm like well I'm going to get that cheap stuff and he put it in his van

and he didn't have a lot of money so he just

he just put a little bit in and he got like a mile down the road

and the van stopped because it was diesel

and he's like oh no you know it's diesel

and so he barely used it and he's like

drains it out and he gets some like

last bit of gasoline that he had for his race bike

and he gets in the van and they go back he sells the fuel that he drained out

back to the station and then he buys the right fuel

so they're trying to get money together so there are a lot of these stories

and he won this big race in Italy and he said you know he had a suitcase full of cash

millions of lira and he's like his wife Theo's like

he's like yeah you can buy whatever you want at the Gucci store

or whatever you know it's very cool to hear these stories

living in the van racing and I asked all of them

I'm like yeah do you know anybody you know who did that

who was growing weed in the freeway interchanges in Georgia and stuff

and they're like well that could have been this guy

it could have been that guy it could have been that guy

and there's that other guy who was a coke dealer

so it was pretty interesting insight into that

you're pretty cool

one time I was

at the fence

and I looked over and bought axlons there

and Nick Rikiki goes by

Nick Rikiki was a New York City

kid from Queens I think

and he

advanced really rapidly in road racing

he was spending everything that he could make

he got up at five o'clock in the morning and delivered orange juice in his van

and he was doing everything he could to scratch up the money

you know 600 bucks for cylinders

600 bucks for cranks

because the two strokes ate those things up

they lasted about 900 miles apiece

so he goes by

I think he was being timed at that point

and he went probably 183

which was good going in those times

and I could hear Bud Axlons saying something

next to me he said what he was saying was

now who is that

going about a million miles an hour

looks to me like one of those

black and scrungy east coast bikes

I think then Miles Baldwin

would get called that too

probably because he broke all the

fairing off his bike and he didn't have a lot of money

and so he raced one whole season with no lower on

didn't make any difference

pretty full behind the fairings on a TZ

John Britton

told me about testing his bike

the bike that he built including the engine

with a carbon fiber frame

on this 20 miles straight away

famous place in New Zealand where

the white helmet people

the people who tried to out do

one another in craziness

and he said let's take the lower fairing off

bike went faster

he said it only made sense because

here's the narrow engine and the foot pegs are out here

the rider's feet are here and there's this big space

just let the air through

well

might not be theoretically right but if

it goes faster isn't that what you want

because I have to remember

Daytona or any of Bonneville anywhere else

two strokes went fast

motorcycles go fast by just cramming themselves

through the air with brute force

and that's why I love the Winglets because

I know a lot of people are upset about Winglets

they wish that they would stop looking

that way

but imagine that you're nearing top speed

and the front wheels coming up

now

you don't have control are you going to go 200 miles an hour

on one wheel

you might feel caution was necessary

but the Winglets gently push the front

and back down restoring rider control

so that acceleration can continue

now

an anti-wheelie system cannot do this

because it works by closing

by squeaking the throttle towards closed

just enough to let the front wheel come down

and turn

so you're just reducing power

until the front wheel comes down

what you want is a helping hand from above

that is arrow down force

it's free well mostly free

there is lift over drag after all

and you attach all this stuff to your motorcycle

the old timers are shielding their gaze

or averting it all together

and it works

keep on accelerating

but at the same time there's a small but vocal group

in MotoGP who would like to see

what 600 cc's would be like

so

live long and learn

well if you're managing two world championship series

how do you want it to turn out

I guess who's going fast

who goes faster

production bikes are prototypes

one of the tales told to me

by Cook Nelson who was editor of

Cycle at one time

he was part of the west coast contingent

at AFM who was racing

super bike production

they were there

he was just a clever electrical engineer

who loved motorcycles

and was willing to test things

and think about them

he did not come out of Germany

tuning BMW's his entire life

father and smith said hey we got these 750's

and he just started messing with them

and then it became time to do 900's

and that for BMW saved the company

if you need spare parts

go to the warranty department

but Cook was there

that's the point

California hot rods

these production based super bikes

were and Cook and Phil are out there

trying to squeeze this new to Kati 750

into something else

proven by Paul Smart at the 1972 ML200

that it can go and that it will revs 9000

and it may not scatter

tell your Cook story

he knew that

Mike Baldwin from the uncool east coast

was making waves

and so he asked Kenny

what about this Baldwin kid

what about him

well I mean is he for real

and Kenny said I can tell you this

of the three things it takes to win races

he's got one of them

and what's that he's fast

and

this is a very important thing

Kenny is

not just playing with you when he says these things

because he knows that you have to have

a way of getting along with the people

who are paying

he knows that you have to bring your judgment

with you do not cast it to the wind

and

it's a complicated thing

that half of what's involved in racing

is getting on the starting line

with the running car

and the crazy stuff

the racing and remembering everything

about the way the tires and the pavement

and all this stuff are changing

that's essential too

so Kenny was telling it straight

well he's got one of them he's fast

just reminding everyone that

as Kevin Cameron has often said 100% doesn't make the grid

and

fiercely prioritizing what does get you to the grid

they may not be perfect but making those choices on the way

is probably part of Nicky Lott's conversation as well

one of the interesting stories from

the fellas I was eating with down in Daytona

John Long and McLaughlin and all those guys

Harry Klinsman was there

they were testing tires

for this 200 mile race

and he said they were trying to do it

without a stop I think they were looking into

whether they could get it done without a stop

but the speedway at the time

was kind of weathered so they had a lot of points on it

and he said they were throwing

tired chunks out and it was just tearing them up

and eventually it got paved

there was a lot of fun

it's really fun to hear about the paddock

hear about the life

you've talked about it so many times about being there where

you know on the fast end

and the eventual factory

and Calcarellis who were

no strangers to the Paxaw

just whatever it was cut the pipes

cut the steering head, re-angle the steering head

overnight

do and do

1976 we had a KR250

that was going pretty well

and the reason was that I'd made a little wear

around the two 4 inch gears

that joined the two crankshafts

it has two cylinders one ahead of the other

and I'd made a 1mm hole

to let oil in

so the gears were throwing it out

and the 1mm hole was letting it in

so instead of drowning in solid oil

what gears do? transmit power

run not even

so Ron Pierce qualified on pole

and Cal must have said to himself

oh shit I gotta go do it

which meant what I described

for the 250 widening raising the exhaust

port taking 20mm out of the headpipe

raise pushing compression up

there that ought to do

and my bike was out with a water pump drive shaft

failure how can a water pump drive shaft fail

anyway that's what happened

and Kenny prevailed

so

in those days

I wanted to go to Daytona and live there

and just try stuff

but I remember hearing

Gene Romero say

why do we have to be here all week

I want to just get in, race and go home

and I thought I'm not sympathetic

to this viewpoint

but

people come to Daytona for different reasons

well you know for it got popular

because it was there's so much of the country

and the death grip of arctic

fighting frost

and it's always the place where people got

to be set free it wasn't the cool west coast

all those east coast people you among them

getting in the van slogging through the slush

to the beautiful sunny climbs

and slightly humid spring air of Daytona beach

remember Phil Shilling the late Phil Shilling

arriving on a flight

from California wearing his puffy jacket

and he would wear it all week

because he was never warm

and Daytona we you know

we're basking in this wonderful sunlight

and he's in his in his puffy jacket

I always thought that was another take

on Daytona

you mentioned Ron Pierce he was down there as well

Ron was there he's got a big winery

that he makes wine at

the trailblazer's dinner is this week

and Ron always brings the wine

he's driving down with 25 cases apparently

for the trailblazers

they had signature autograph cards

at the tent where everyone was sitting around

talking to people and I picked up one because

if you look at this photo here

he's with Pops Yoshimura and that's Ron Pierce

and he's got his Team Cycle World shirt on so we had a little chat

about the days and Joe Parker's love of racing

and all that it was pretty remarkable

another thing about Daytona course is you can expect

the possibility of tire trouble

the rider comes in says

things vibrating in a funny way

the rear tire and it has pospimples that have burst

black rubber pospimples

that is blistering

components of the tire tread compound

are vaporizing at temperature

and erupting

and the other one of course is chunking

failure of the bond between the tread rubber

and the fiber carcass of the tire

Barry Sheen had his

bad accident in 75

with chunking the motorcycle

and the tire and everything about that whole episode

just disappeared in a twinkling of an eye

no nothing happened

what? and so

when Michelin tires were

being put on some bikes at Daytona

you could count on the Michelin people being there to make sure you had

some tremendous pressure like

42 pounds in your tires

because the one thing just as the AMA

wanted to avoid being criticized

in cycle news

Michelin didn't want bad Daytona luck

and so the riders responded

to these Michelin guys

stationed at the entry to Pit Lane

with air bottles and gauges

airing up every Michelin shod bike as it goes through

the riders had their men

down at the end to let that pressure back out

so they would have some grip

and Michelin carries on that tradition

to this day with the tire pressure rule in MotoGP

that you could be fined by people who work in offices

because they're going through sheets and sheets

of tire data

if your tire is below a certain pressure

for a certain percentage of the race

you are sanctioned

but the riders are tempted

to begin with a lower pressure

just because when you're drafting

other bikes your front tire pressure

will go up, up, up and your footprint

nice and healthy

will dwindle away and you'll find that the front

is locking when you're braking

so you're caught between

contrasting

goals

I picked up a bike from our office one time

and R1 had some DOT race tires

I think they were Michelin's

and I didn't know the correct pressure

and it's hard to find that info

unless you get that info from the tire person

it's not normally

it's not like on the swing arm

42 at the rear, let's go below that

and I was just like

we'll go with 32

it took three corners to figure out

that was absolutely wrong because it lit up

it spun like crazy

and so I'm like okay let's tiptoe back to the pits

I talked to a couple people

and did some more research

and I found it was meant to be 22

so I was 8 to 10 pounds over

depending on what my final decision was

it was superb

got some footprint now

well that's the Daytona 200

a little bit of this and a little bit of that

it walked down memory lane for us

recounting this year's very exciting race

and a lot of history going on

it was great to be there and see it again

be down in the spring in Daytona

we did a race lap

around the banking we did a lap

I lined up with Sad Wolf and Jason Yerebe

who's racing the Orange Cat factory backed BMW

and Moto America so he was there

on a press deal he wasn't racing

and it was fun

it was cool to check out one of those

I raced to BMW in Arma so it was a fun connection

to be honoured with Steve's bike and Steve was there

I believe he's as much Steve McLaughlin

as he ever has been

he was a little wound up because they were getting headlines

in Germany about 80 year old Steve McLaughlin

rides his old Super BMW Superbike again

because he did a parade lap himself

he's friends with Jim France and Jim France asked him to do it

Moto America said please don't cross the stripe

and if you don't have very much time go out pit lane

do the lap and don't cross the stripe come into the pit

and Steve said

you know this was Jim France's idea can you take that back

to the people telling us not to do this Jim would like me to cross the stripe

and so they took it back and said hey

this when they came back hey that worked

so he got to do his lap

well I just thought of something you know

Steve McLaughlin reminded me of a photo

one of those dim looking

black and white photos from World War II

that show the

King of England bestowing

some metal upon 19 year old

John Cunningham

an experienced night fighter pilot

who went up every night

on an engine airplane with his radar operator

kneeling on the deck plate behind him

with two scopes one for X and one for Y

and he's calling out

left a bit yeah that looks good

okay you should just about be seeing

his exhaust flames now

and there's nothing wrong with being

young and there's nothing about being young

it means that you're necessarily inexperienced

or lacking in judgment it just depends

on the path you've drawn to that age

John Cunningham later became chief

test pilots for a chess pilot I think

for to have one of the biggies

that they used to have in England making aircraft

well self-confidence

people helping you people not telling

you can't do it no or if they do

you you must be self-possessed enough to

overcome that and great confidence to someone

like Kayla who obviously would have faced

a lot of challenges to get where she is

so mad respect to

a really great and interesting

career path to follow

we have a story by Maria Gudadi on PsychoWorld.com

today at this recording

and Kayla gave a really nice

interview and she's a great read so go check it out

thanks for listening folks we'll catch you next time

definitely go check us out on Patreon we'll see you down in the comments

we love the comments somebody said do a swing arm

you guys have ever done a swing arm podcast

and I'm not kidding Kevin and I recorded it that day

or the next day so we're listening

alright thanks catch you next time

Stories of the Daytona 200 and 50 years of Superbike Racing!

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