Now available on Kindle!

On Motorcycles: The Best of Backmarker is now available for $9.99 at the Amazon Kindle store, here. My friend and ad partner Mark Eimer nailed another awesome cover, eh? The print version of this book is over 400 pages and will be available soon at Amazon for $27. If you're on my mailing list, I'll send you an email offering a signed/inscribed copy with free shipping, as soon as I have the first copies in hand.

Support our film - The Monsters of the Salt - on Indiegogo. This is a story inspired by a guy who lived the American Dream, two guys who had an American dream, and three filmmakers with a dream of their own

The Monsters of the Salt is a documentary film about two French guys, growing up in Paris and idolizing American rock 'n' roll and hot rods. One is a graphic novelist, and the other is one of France's top restorers and custom builders. When we watch the news, we're shown pictures of foreign crowds shouting 'death to America!' but the truth is that all over the world, ordinary people dream of coming here.

Laurent and Denis, for those are their names, serendipitously came upon a photo of a motorcycle racer on the Bonneville Salt Flat, taken in 1967. That photo inspired Denis to draw a comic book character, and Laurent to create that character's motorcycle. 

They didn't know that the guy in photo was Nira Johnson, a pioneering African-American drag racer. Nira's life, too, embodied the American Dream.

Now, finally, my dream is to bring the French guys and their motorcycle together on the Bonneville Salt Flat, with Nira and his motorcycle. I hope you'll help me achieve this dream by contributing to The Monsters of the Salt Indiegogo campaign here.

Here, then, is the story of The Monsters of the Salt...

Ten years ago, I was in Paris at a vintage bike show. A gaggle of French bikers were gathered around an old Triumph, elbowing each other and pointing at it.

I heard one say, “C’est le monster du lac salé!”

French cartoonist Denis Sire, with bike builder Laurent Romuald in background.

That piqued my curiosity, so I asked the owner–a guy named Laurent Romuald–if the bike was an old Salt Flats racer. “No,” he told me wistfully, “but it’s my dream to run it on the Bonneville Salt Flats.”

Romuald's replica. This bike is known to thousands of French bikers as, Le monstre du lac sale

They say art imitates life, but Laurent’s bike was a case of life imitating art imitating life. His bike was a replica of one that figured in a comic book written and illustrated by Denis Sire. Sire was an avid motorcyclist and a popular ‘bande desinée’ artist in the ’70s and ’80s. His stories were set in Rock ’n Roll-era America–hot rods, flat track, desert racing, Buddy Holly; he loved that stuff.

Denis Sire, in his Paris studio.

This was the photo that Sire used for inspiration. That's '60s drag ace Nira Johnson, on the bike.

One day while he sat in his studio seeking inspiration, he flipped through an old car magazine and found a photo spread, of action on the Bonneville Salt Flats from 1967. A single, grainy, black and white photo of a guy on a Triumph motorcycle, captioned with the name ‘Nira Johnson,’ caught his imagination. With nothing else to go on, he made up a little story about an American racer with that name, and a fast Triumph he dubbed, ‘Le monstre du lac salé’. That translates as, the Salt Lake monster. (Salt Lake and the Salt Flats are a hundred miles apart, something Sire might have known if he’d ever actually been to the United States.)

A spread from Sire's bestselling graphic novel 6T Melodies, with detail of the drawing, based on the old photo of Nira, below...

The story appeared in a comic book called 6T Melodies. It was so popular that Laurent decided to build a replica of the bike in the comic. I was born in 1959,” he told me, “the same year as the Bonneville.” He grew up to become one of the top French experts on British twins, with a beautiful shop on the outskirts of Paris called Machines et Moteurs. He called Denis Sire to tell him his plan.

“Good luck,” Sire told him. Then he explained that he’d made it all up based on a single old photo. “But,” he went on, “I think I still have the magazine, I’ll bring it over.” The two were soon fast friends. They blew up the magazine photo but there wasn’t much detail to be seen there. They also searched for any mention of Nira Johnson in other old magazines, hoping to trace him, but came up empty. So in the same way that Sire had imagined his American stories, Laurent had to imagine the bike.

“I could see it was an early Bonneville motor in a rigid frame,” he told me. “It looked like a drag bike, so as I built it, I asked myself ‘What would an American drag racer have done in the ’60s?’” The French have held America in special regard since the days of Lafayette; deep in their subconscious, they see the American Revolution as the one that worked. I loved the idea of these two French guys creating an in-the-metal version of an imagined bike, ridden by an imagined rider, in an imagined version of the ’States.

I promised them that I’d do what I could do to help them live out their fantasy about bringing their bike over to run it on the Salt Flats. When I got back here, I did my own search for Nira Johnson and also drew a blank. I wrote about Laurent, Denis, and le monstre du lac salé on my blog, and forgot about them for years.

Then, out of the blue, I got an email from a stranger that read, “I’m a friend of Nira Johnson, and I have his old motorcycle. Call me.”

Nira Johnson, at MMP in 2008, with his bike (now in the collection of Rodd Lighthouse.)

I just about crapped. The stranger–a consulting engineer and AHRMA racer from Nevada named Rodd Lighthouse–had grown up with Nira as a family friend. He’d recently convinced Nira to sell him his old bike. He told me that Nira had been quite a successful drag racer in Southern California in the ’60s. “You may not know that he was a black man,” he added.

He gave me Nira’s phone number, and I called him up. He laughed when I told him that he was famous, at least to French motorcyclists, as a white guy.

I finally got the American side of the tale, from Nira Johnson himself, in September, 2008. The occasion was a round of the American Historic Racing Motorcycle Association’s road racing championship, held at Miller Motorsports Park, about twenty miles from Salt Lake City, in Utah.

Nira was there, doing a little wrenching for Rodd Lighthouse and his dad, Ken. Since they knew I was coming to the race, they brought along Nira's old bike, which was known to thousands of French bikers as ‘Le monstre du lac salé’.

Nira was born in New York of African-American and Native-American parentage. He went to a vocational-technical high school, and joined the Air Force after graduating. He flew on B-36 strategic bombers.

“That’s when I got into motorcycles,” he told me. “I learned as I went. I threw a primary chain through a case when I had my first BSA. An Air Force buddy had a background with hot rods. He was from California, and probably inspired me move to California when I was discharged.”

In ’58, Nira did just that. He got a job at an aerospace company that became Rockwell International, where he helped make Minuteman missiles, and hold the Russkies at bay. In his spare time, he hung with two bikers who raced a twin-engined Triumph dragster they’d bought from Joe Dudek, a legendary Los Angeles tuner. One day when their rider–a fellow named Bill Johnson–didn’t show, they said, “You’re about the same size as him, why don’t you ride it?”

Johnson only went to Bonneville once. His natural habitat was the SoCal drag scene. Note the exquisite front engine plates. Keepin' it light!

Nira was hooked. He bought his own bike in ’63, from a guy who’d started to build it then lost interest. What he acquired was basically a rigid, pre-unit Triumph frame that had a Cub front end and a tiny, trick fuel tank with no filler cap. He bought a few hot rodding books and built his own 650cc motor. Another famous tuner named Shell Thuett had one of the only dynos around, and Nira did a lot of his tuning in Thuett’s shop.

“I liked to keep things reliable,” he recalled. “The pre-unit Bonnevilles had a three-piece crank, and when they went to unit construction, they put in a better, two-piece one. So I used that. I polished it, and took off some weight. I ported it; lightened and polished the rods… I wanted to put in bigger valves but it was too expensive.”

His bike wasn’t overly powerful; he remembers it making about 56 horsepower, but it was light. He even thinned all the gears in the transmission. And, it was reliable; in six years of racing it almost every weekend, he blew up one motor.

“I ran what they called Class B/Gas. In the beginning I ran in the high 11-second range, with trap speeds around 110 mph. At the end its development, the bike was hitting 116-118 mph. Sometimes, when other guys saw that I was there, they’d just roll their bikes right back onto their trucks and go home!”

The time that Nira was photographed on the Salt Flats was the only time he ever raced there. “I was using Harmon-Collins cams, and they had some they said were ‘too radical for drag racing’ so I got them to grind me some of those. Other than that, I just swapped the rear tire and gearing. My bike ran good, but the record was set by Dudek and Johnson, at speeds that were unattainable on gas–they were either running alcohol or fuel–so they ran in the high 140s, and my best runs were in the 130s.”

Not long afterwards, Nira moved to the East Coast for his job, and he had no time to drag race. Ironically, he traveled to France for work in 1983, when Denis Sire’s comic book was a best seller.

“I had no idea I was a character in a comic book over there, until Rodd clued me in,” he told me, adding–surely an understatement–“I was kinda’ surprised.”

This is why I don’t write fiction. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

The first half of this story was one of the first Backmarker columns that I posted on the old RoadRacerX.com site. Even that part of the story was cool enough that, when I returned to the U.S. from France, I hoped to get a documentary filmmaker sufficiently interested to bring the replica 'monster' to the Bonneville Salt Flat. When the blog post about the replica resulted in my finding the original monster - and Nira - I updated the post and again begged documentary filmmakers to get in touch with me.

Well, after all these years, I'm now working with Tom Guttry, a veteran producer of documentary and reality TV content, to bring Monsters of the Salt to the screen. Tom recruited Kevin Ward, the cinematographer who shot 'Dust to Glory', and the three of us agreed to work on this film for free, in order to ensure that this heartwarming and inspiring story gets told while Nira (who is in his 80s) is still alive. I got back in touch with Nira, Laurent, and Denis to make sure they were all still interested, and still had access to their bikes. They're all game.

Please contribute to the Monsters of the Salt campaign on Indiegogo, by clicking here.

Bastille Day Blues

An American entry encounters a peculiar Frenchman in his underpants – at the inaugural edition of France’s Bol d’Or Classic in 2003...

The French have a penchant for endurance. Witness the Tour de France bicycle race, or the Paris-Dakar. It’s no surprise the 24-hour Bol d’Or, held every fall, remains the country’s highest-profile motorcycle race . 

As big as the ‘Bol’ is now, its heyday was 30 years ago. Kevin Cameron called endurance racing in the ‘70s “the privateer’s last stand” meaning that it was the last time truly independent teams competed for an FIM world road racing title.

In order to recapture that glory, the Bol’s organizers created the Bol d’Or Classic in 2003. Since a full 24 hours would be too much to expect from motorcycles from that period (to say nothing of vintage riders) the format of the race was three one-hour sessions spread over 24 hours. Two-rider teams were mandatory; the winner was determined on cumulative mileage. As a bonus, the format offered spectators not one, but three Le Mans-style starts.

Patrick Bodden, was the child of a French mother and an American GI, raised in France, he vividly remembered seeing his first Bol in 1975. So when he heard about the inaugural Bol d’Or Classic, he was determined to provide an American presence.

He already had a bike in mind. Through his Heritage Racing AHRMA team, he’d met Connecticut-based superbike collector Brian O’Shea. O’Shea’s collection is focused on historic AMA superbikes, but he’d acquired a 1979 Honda factory RS1000. Only three of these were ever built in endurance specs; Honda sent one each to France, Britain, and Australia. O’Shea’s bike was raced by Ron Haslam and Alex George at the Bol d’Or, amongst other races. It was later shipped to the US, where it was used at one Daytona test, then left to languish. So a return trip would be something of a homecoming for the bike, as well as Heritage Racing. Once O’Shea had agreed to the loan of his RS1000, only three things were missing: the two riders, and a budget. 

Reg Pridmore’s definitely a Californian now, though he was born in London. He was the first-ever AMA Superbike champion, riding a BMW R90S. He also rode an R100 for the French BMW importer in the 1975 Bol d’Or. Charlie Williams is known as one of the best-ever TT riders, but he also rode Honda RCBs (the predecessor of O’Shea’s RS1000) for Honda in several Bols. After Bodden convinced those two to give the Classic a go, the rider corps seemed qualified.

Sponsorship came from the American Honda Rider’s Club, and Champion Honda of Charleston, North Carolina; Shell UK provided fuel. Thanks to them, Heritage Racing’s team came together at the Circuit de Nevers-Magny Cours, in the Burgundy region of central France, on the Bastille Day weekend in mid-July, 2003. I helped only a little; since I was living in Paris at the time, I handled some logistics at the French end. Mainly, I rented a van from over in the 15^th arrondissement and drove to Charles de Gaulle airport to pick them, and the bike, up.

The first practice sessions on Friday took place in blazing heat  (the summer broke all French temperature records.) Charlie Williams was first out for Heritage Racing, and brought the bike in noting that the brakes felt soft, and the motor seemed rich. While Williams slumped in the cool of the garage, with a towel soaked in icewater around his neck, it was Pridmore’s turn in the leather sauna.

In the next-but-one garage, a guy fettling a pair of Bimota HB-9s had stripped to his underpants. Not shorts, or a bathing suit, but actual Y-front briefs, on body as pallid as a frog’s belly, except where it had already been sunburned. (He’d been outside in the line up to register for the event, in the same utterly unselfconscious state, at high noon.) His ‘team’, which was on the entry list as Forza Bimota, seemed to be sponsored by a lap-dancing club, that had sent along a few girls, dressed for their part Bimota T-shirts the size of Barbie clothes. 

The team in the next garage was actually sponsored by a strip club

“Why don’t we have any hookers?” O’Shea asked, in a tone suggesting that by comparison, Bodden had already failed as a team manager. A pretty-but-world-weary blonde tanned in the doorway of their garage, near a hand-scrawled sign that read“T-Shirts – 15 Euro – Aidez-nous!” (Help us!)

All in all, they made quite an impression.

“Is that a French thing? Wearing nothing but your underpants in public?” Pridmore wondered out loud. Bodden (who, if truth be told had become downright defensive about post-Iraq Franco-American relations) was quick to say “No!!” 

(Actually, I’d noticed in the check-in line that Patrick had tried to position himself so as to block his team’s view of the near-naked Frenchman. When we got installed and discovered that the garage walls were see-through wire fencing and the underpants crew was in plain site from our space, Bodden scowled in their general direction.)

Despite the fact that Patrick had been visibly proud when others came over to admire the RS1000, when underpants man and his rider, a kid in his 20s with dreadlocks down his back walked over to look at the it, poking and marveling,  Bodden bristled. For a moment, it seemed he was about to snap, “Get away from there!” but instead he muttered something to himself, in an ‘Inspector Clouseau’ accent.

After another session, with the riders complaining of a dreadful flat spot in the middle of the rev range, Bodden and O’Shea set about removing the carburetors to see why – despite running the smallest jets O’Shea had on hand – the motor was still rich. 

Patrick Bodden now lives in France, I believe.

Brian O'Shea. One of the best guys ever.

While the float levels were being set, the riders compared Bol d’Or notes. The race had never been lucky for either of them. Pridmore remembered the RS100 as being a bit of an oil-burner. “They were putting some oil in each time we stopped to refuel, but not as much as it was burning,” he recalled the inevitable conclusion “it stopped once and for all somewhere around the sixth hour.”

Williams rode Honda RCBs in World Championship endurance events from 1973 to ’78, winning at Barcelona and Nurburgring, but scoring only one finish in five attempts at the Bol d’Or. “I remember going around Virage du Musee, one of those years when the Bol was held at Le Mans. The rotor had broken off the end of the crankshaft, and broken through the cases, dumping all the oil onto the bike’s back tire, and that was the end of that,” he said simply.

On Saturday after timed qualifying, it seemed Pridmore’s and Williams’ run of Bol luck had changed. Pridmore’s best lap, at 2:14.8, would have been good enough for tenth on the grid. Williams, though, had put the team into the fourth spot thanks to a 2:06-flat. 

In front of the U.S. entry, there was a legendary Godier-Genoud Kawasaki, piloted by Alain Genoud and Gilles Hampe (one of France’s most charming and fastest motorcycle cops.) There was also a brutal but effective Yamaha TZ750; “It won’t go the distance,” Heritage Racing told themselves. Finally, there was a deceptively quick Moto Guzzi Le Mans, which again set Bodden to muttering.

On Sunday afternoon, Charlie Williams lined up on the far side of the track with 40-some other riders. The flag dropped, and there was an eerie moment of silence, but for the patter of feet in racing boots, as the riders ran across to their machines.

O’Shea walked down to turn one, and returned a little shocked after seeing Williams riding his irreplaceable motorcycle in hot pursuit of ex-world champ Jean-Claude Chimaron. “Man!” he said, “those guys are having a duel.”

According to the rules of the race, rider changes had to take place between the 20^th and 40^th minute of each session. Pridmore brought the first hour to a close without any trouble, and the first official score sheet showed Heritage Racing in a respectable 6^th place overall.

Sunday evening, the night session. Again, Williams got off to a good start, but after a few laps, the announcer mentioned that he was off the track at “180”, a hairpin turn about as far from the pit straight as he could get. With no additional information from the loudspeakers, Heritage Racing didn’t know if he’d crashed or broken down. Bodden trotted off to race control, where the entire track (built to Formula One car specs) was covered by a CCTV system. In the cool, dark control booth, facing a bank of video monitors, he watched Williams pushing the big Honda up a long hill. Meanwhile, O’Shea had taken off at a run, back along the track’s service road, hoping to find him – but unable to understand any of the track announcements, or the yells of French corner workers.

“Here he comes!” someone yelled. Williams – soaked in sweat but now back on the machine – was pushed the length of the pit lane by Bodden and O’Shea. Hope springs eternal in endurance racing. Could it just be fuel starvation? The fuel tank vent hose seemed kinked. O’Shea ripped it off, and punched the starter. It started all right – it started making loud metal-on-metal banging noises inside the motor. Pridmore pulled off his leathers. 

Williams – once he’d cooled off – evaporated into the night air, while Bodden and O’Shea considered an apparently hopeless situation. The team had brought virtually no spare parts, as most were simply unavailable, “As much as this looks like a street bike motor,” bemoaned O’Shea “inside it’s so different.” 

Morosely, they performed a rudimentary compression check by jamming wads of tissue into the spark plug holes. When the motor was turned over (the electric starter, which Honda included for dead-engine Le Mans starts, came in handy) three cylinders blew their wads, but #1 generated no compression at all. Peering down the spark plug hole with a microlight was inconclusive. They’d have to pull the head to know what was wrong.

Problem #2: Honda had packed the motor in so tightly that even removing the magnesium valve covers meant dropping the motor onto the lower frame rails. One by one, the garages were falling silent, and dark. Pridmore and Williams wandered back in, staying only long enough to say that they were headed back to their hotel. 

Bodden and O’Shea pored over Brian’s copy of the RS manual. The oft-photocopied sheaf included pages of setup notes, handwritten by engine builder Udo Gietl who worked for American Honda at the time of the machine’s one Daytona test.

They took turns: one would find the situation impossible, while the other proposed some solution that was merely improbable. “I’m sitting here, and I can’t think of anything that’s gonna work, and it sucks the wind out of me,” said Brian. 

“Has anyone walked through the swap meet? Maybe there’s a CB1100F valve set down there.” Patrick countered. “If the valves were the right size, the head might work converted to shim-over-bucket…” then his voice – and optimism – waned in mid-sentence. 

That went on ‘till midnight. Through the garage door, somewhere off on the horizon, Bastille Day fireworks went off. From the infield, behind the darkened and empty grandstand,  came the sounds of a band covering old American rhythm and blues songs. 

If the two of them had ever given up hope at the same moment, the story would have ended right there. But a sentence stuck out at the top of the parts list, “The motor is based on the CB750/CB900F series.” 

Brian: “What if we could just take the head off a CB900, and drop it straight on?”

Next door but one garage, the guy in his underpants was still puttering around. Their team’s spare Bimota had just such motor. Patrick went over to ask if they could try it. Underpants man didn’t hesitate before answering, “Bien sur.” Of course. The decision was made to at least pull the RS head. If there was a serviceable piston left in cylinder #1, the next step would be to pull the CB900 head, and see if it would swap onto the RS1000 barrels. The Bimota was pushed around into Heritage Racing’s garage, where underpants man quietly went about prepping the machine as a donor.

2:00 a.m., and the last lights burning anywhere in the pit lane were in garage #39. A few moths fluttered and clunked around the neon tubes. Bikers were drawn in, too; walking from paddock parties back to wherever they planned to sleep. Mostly, they stayed a few minutes and kept a respectful distance, but if there was heavy lifting to be done, or oil to wipe up, they helped, then slipped away in the next lull with a quiet “Bon courage.” 

The underpants guy was in the background, not wanting to get in the way, but ready to help if he could. “Ca, c’est la passion,” he said, smiling to himself in a way that conveyed  there was nowhere else in the world that he’d rather be. Later he said (I’m translating for you here, because he spoke no English at all) “No matter what happens, there’s already enough to make a beautiful memory.”

Maybe, but the cylinder head was ugly. One of the original Ti exhaust valves broke and slammed into the roof of the combustion chamber. Luckily, it sliced into the aluminum head and stuck there; while the piston crown was scarred, it looked (barely) serviceable.

The kid with the dreadlocks turned out to be underpants man’s son. He came in shyly, too. “Le carter est magnesium?” he asked. Brian got the gist of his question, and gestured towards the pan from the RS dry sump, which was sitting on the work bench, “Pick it up.” The kid did. “Putain!” he said, raising his eyebrows and grinning at his father. He had to ride the next day, so he went off looking for sleep, but his dad stayed, watching.

At 2:54, the first wrench was thrown. The cam chain slipped down just far enough for a few links to kink and jam under the lower sprocket. They jerked  and cursed like Tourette’s patients for five minutes before it came free. 

3:33 a.m.. Patrick, who speaks fluent French, turned to the guy in his underpants (whose name we’d learned was Denis Malterre) and asked him “So, where are you from?”

He was from Ault, a little town near Dieppe which is in the upper left hand corner of a map of France. It’s a tough port town, down on its luck now that there’s a tunnel under the English Channel. 

Denis Malterre was a ‘cantonnier’. We didn’t recognize the word, but he mimed his job,  and we recognized it; he swept the local streets. Lest you think that he drove a street sweeper, I’ll point out that he did it with a broom. These guys, who wear orange high-visibility coveralls, are fixtures in every French town. You can imagine that it’s not exactly a high-paying job. In fact, it’s about the lowest-paying job in France.

Denis Malterre attended every Bol d’Or from 1970 to 1986.“All my life,” he told us “I dreamed of being on this side of the straightaway” (meaning part of the event, not part of the crowd.) As a street sweeper, with no background in racing, he may as well have aspired to ride an Apollo moon rocket. In 1986, he was injured in a terrible accident; his wife was killed. Then he knew: the dream wasn’t going to come true. 

The street sweeper raised his son, alone. The dreadlocked kid became a biology prof in Switzerland. 

Denis Malterre’s pair of Bimotas were both bought as wrecks, out of junkyards, for less than a thousand francs each. (Call that about $150 a piece; i.e., they were total writeoffs.) It took 15 years of street sweeping to save enough money to restore and race prep them. This event (for which a full race license was not required) was the little family’s once in a lifetime shot. “For me,” Denis said “racing is impossible. But now I hand the baton to my son.”

When I translated this story for Brian, a tear literally rolled down his cheek. While he himself had – more than once – drained his bank account to save some aging superbike from the crusher, he was rich by the standards of the hamlet of Ault’s street sweeper. And Patrick was spending money he didn’t really have, running up his credit card, to field the Heritage Racing team, too. Again, no comparison; he had credit cards. Yet it was the French street sweeper – his Bimotas had stickers supporting the French communist party – who, without a second thought, volounteered to lend ‘Les Americains’ his cylinder head.

After all that, the CB900 head did – to mild surprise – drop right on the RS1000 barrels. At 5:00 a.m., Denis ran over to his pit, returning with a beautiful torque wrench, and we heard the “crea-ak, click” of the head being tightened down. It was too late, and everyone was too tired, to reinstall the motor. Heritage Racing needed a few hours sleep. Denis slipped away, and the sun came up as Patrick and Brian drove their rented van back to the hotel. They were giddy with fatigue. Everything they said or saw along the way was #ü¢&ing hilarious.

Monday morning. The trickle of curious bikers from the previous night picked up at garage 39. They whispered and pointed into an oily cardboard box shoved out of the way in a corner. The factory cylinder head had been ported by the legendary Jerry Branch, who had once tuned Kenny Roberts’ Yamaha flat trackers. Now, it looked as forlorn as some hunted deer, dangling off the tailgate of a cowboy’s pickup truck with its dead tongue lolling. 

When the time came to wrestle the motor into the frame, with maybe an hour to go before the final session, there was no shortage of hands to lift it into place. Then there was a lull; a weird feeling that was hard to place until you realized there was no noise, no bikes running, no one even seemed to be talking up or down the pit lane. Brian looked at Patrick and gathered his nerve and pushed the Honda’s starter button and it roared back into life as though nothing had ever been wrong. There was cheering and applause from all ‘round. 

“Wow,” said Brian under his breath “that’s never happened to me before.” He didn’t mean that motors he’d reassembled never started right off the button; he meant that a crowd of spectators had never burst into spontaneous applause when one of his engines had fired. The loudest cheer had come from over at Forza Bimota. Denis came over to shake hands.

In the Hollywood version of this story, Heritage Racing would win the race. But even a cursory examination of the compiled results from the night session made it obvious that was impossible now. Pridmore and Williams were in 31^st place, 25 laps behind the Guzzi. (Ironically, TZ750 had lost its gearbox and would not come back out; had the Honda remained intact, a podium would’ve been on the cards.) 

The new plan was to baby the motor, and circulate. Just get to the checkered  flag. That, everyone repeated trying to believe it, would constitute a victory of sorts.

That was the plan. On the third and final drop of the green flag, Charlie stalled the bike. Somehow, it’d been gridded in second gear. The entire field streamed past him. You don’t win nine TTs without being a racer; the plan exploded in a red mist. 

Charlie passed 12 riders on the opening lap. Then eight more, in the next four corners. The track announcer went hyperbolic. Then, we heard a fateful “Williams has pulled off!” This time, he’d rolled to a stop at a spot where Patrick and Brian could see him, though it would be a two-mile run around the track perimeter to reach him. There was no point anyway; even at that range, Charlie’s body language made it clear the problem was terminal. Pridmore wriggled out of his leathers without turning a wheel. Again.

The race? The win went to the Guzzi, despite a late-session stop-and-go penalty for making their rider change outside the prescribed window. Forza Bimota, Denis Malterre’s private dream, with his son and his son’s childhood friend as riders, finished eighth in their only motorcycle race. Every team ahead of them had a real racing pedigree, as did most of the 30-plus teams that finished behind them.

“This has been,” the biology prof told me, “the weekend of my life.”

The Honda? Charlie finally arrived back in the garage with the bike, after baking in one of the circuit’s vans for well over an hour. He’d stripped his leathers down to his waist to avoid heatstroke. “It just tightened up,” he said. To emphasize it, he struck a little pose like a bodybuilder’s “crab” and made a sound, “Cr-r-ck”. Then he repeated, “It just tightened up.” Even his voice was tight, which is not at all like him.

As usual, people started loading up right away. Since taking off the borrowed CB900 head would involve removing the motor again, Patrick asked Denis (who was back in underpants, though not technically just underpants – he was also wearing a pair of white latex gloves) if it would be alright if they took it back to Connecticut on the bike, and returned it later. “Bien sur,” was the answer. “Of course.” After all, he’d only worked half his adult life to buy it. Of course he’d let a group of complete strangers fly away to America with it. 

Heritage Racing pretty much shut down the beer concession before even starting to pack. “Next year, I’m coming back with a cheater motor from hell,” Brian vowed. Finally, the RS was rolled into its shipping crate. Charlie headed back to his home in Cheshire, Pridmore and his girlfriend went off to do a little sightseeing, Patrick and Brian drove back to the freight terminal at Charles de Gaulle. 

In a final Freudian slip, Patrick and Brian left their little Bol d’Or Classic ‘participants’ trophy on the rental van’s dashboard when it was returned. After having traveled the longest distance, fielded the rarest of machines; after having their hopes raised and dashed, raised and dashed; after working through the night; after all that, no one deserved to see the checkered flag more. 

Except for Denis Malterre.

I've spent a good part of my life writing about motorcycles and motorcycle racing
 and I have little to show for it. Meeting these guys and hearing their story,
however, felt like a rich reward at the time.

Best of Backmarker: California Dreamin'

Mother Nature has dumped two late-season blizzards on Kansas City in the last week. Wintery conditions here have coincided with emails from Mary, who spent the week in Big Sur, where it was 70 degrees. That reminded me of a story I wrote for Hugo Wilson, then the editor of Classic Bike five or six years ago...

I blame Hugo.

“All we want you to do is go and ride a few classic Southern California roads on your BMW, and tell us about it,” he wrote. “The weather’s still crap here, but you’re out in the warm sun. I’m calling your story ‘California Beemin’, but I’m sure between the two of us we’ll come up with a better title before it goes to press.”

Thanks to Hugo, that Mamas and the Papas’ song is stuck in my head, so it had better be the title of this story–if only to provide me with a little closure–or I’ll be humming it until summer.

The truth is, the BMW (like just about everything I own) may well have to be sold as part of my divorce settlement. I’ve been a little out of sorts over it, and needed a kick in the ass to get out riding anyway. I can’t go too far without hitting snow in the mountains, or torrential rain up the coast, but I can think of three or four roadhouses the /5 and I can hit for old times’ sake.

First stop: Mother’s Kitchen, Mount Palomar, San Diego County

From where I live, in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, I wind through orange and avocado groves, and past a couple of big Indian casinos. (We took their land and forced them onto reserves–almost always land white settlers imagined would never be of any use. Now, they’re ripping us off. Fair’s fair.)

There are two roads up to Palomar’s summit. The South Grade makes the 3,000-foot climb in seven miles of linked hairpins; the East Grade is longer, faster and bumpier. I used to road-test contemporary bikes up there on one of my old jobs; it was like having a target on my back. That’s one of the nice things about riding the BMW–I’m not compelled to have a death match with every 20 year-old on a ’blade.

All the leaves are brown gone/and the sky is grey trees are black

The recent wildfires burned right over the mountain, and subsequent heavy rains have left a few patches dirty. I roll slowly past two guys who are standing over a crashed Yamaha. They don’t need my help.

As I climb towards 5,000 feet, I feel the power soften, but I’m in the mood to flow anyway, not race between corners. I feel the limits of the old bike’s suspension, and wonder if I’ll ever get around to updating the shocks and revalving the fork. It sags and wallows, though there’s plenty of leverage in the wide handlebar to bring it back under control.

At the top, there’s a pretty good café, Mother’s Kitchen, though it’s vegetarian–how California is that? I park up beside a GSX-R1000 painted in U.S. flag colors. The rider’s about the size of a bantam rooster, but when he tells me he’s from Oceanside, I know he’s a Marine based down there at Camp Pendleton. It’s the home of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (1MEF), which has been doing most of the heavy lifting in Iraq. A second glance, and I can see that despite his size, he’s capable of pulling his weight.

Second stop: Cook’s Corners, Live Oak Canyon Road, Orange County

‘The OC’ used to be orchards and ranches, although since WWII it’s been malled, walled, and turned into Los Angeles’ sprawling bedroom. There are still a few good roads in the hills, though. Live Oak Canyon Road is one of them. When I get there, a squall has just passed over, and the overhanging trees and glistening pavement put me in the mind of Leyzare Parish, on the Isle of Man. That impression is reinforced when I find a roadside memorial to four or five bikers.

My next stop, the roadhouse at Cook’s Corners, puts me right back in the U.S. Thanks to the rain, there’s only one other bike in the parking lot when I pull in for lunch, but on a sunny Saturday, there’d be 200 or more Harleys out front.

Cook’s has been a roadhouse since the ’20s. Originally, the customers were local farmers, but it was gradually taken over by a pretty rough crowd. For a while, in fact, the air force squadron that leant its name to the Hells’ Angels was based an easy ride away, in Fontana. 

The food’s pretty good, especially if you’re a cardiologist. Despite the lack of hogs in the parking lot, just about all the customers have ZZ Top beards and order beer by the pitcher. I can’t tell whether the guys grumpily leaning on the pool table are still waking up, or already passing out. Then Jeff ‘Meatball’ Tulinius, a semi-legendary mechanic wanders in. He, at least, gives me someone to talk to. He tells me that he’s just been the subject of a documentary film, Brittown, about L.A.’s britbike culture, and invites me to the premiere in a couple of weeks. Cool.

Third stop: The Rock Store, Mulholland Highway, Los Angeles County

I’d be safe, and warm/If I was in L.A. 

Or, maybe not. My third roadhouse, Newcomb’s Ranch, is up on the Angeles Crest Highway, which is one of the best roads out of the Los Angeles basin. Unfortunately, the 7,000-foot San Gabriel Mountains that overshadow Pasadena are deep in snow for the first time in years. 

So I cut over to Highway 101, along the coast. In Santa Monica, I meet up with Paul and Becca Livingston, of Falkner-Livingston Racing. They’re two-up on Ducati Hypermotard. I let them choose a route to the Rock Store on Mulholland Highway. Of the classic SoCal roadhouses, it’s the closest to Hollywood, and one of the places stars go, when their publicists tell them it’d boost their image to seem like bikers.

Since the Livingstons are on a Hypermo’, they choose a particularly winding back route into the hills, up Latigo Canyon.  Malibu was recently burned over, too, and winter rains have washed a lot of mud over the road, again. Downshifting to first for the countless hairpins reminds me that matching revs is not just a matter of blipping the throttle for this big old twin. I need to take an extra moment to really let the engine get up to speed and even then it’s still a BMW tranny. I’m sure they can hear the clunk back there on their Ducati.

It’s funny; L.A. riders think they have winter, too. So the crowd’s much sparser than it would be. Still, there are vintage café racers, modern crotch rockets and supermotards, as well as the usual cruisers and choppers. Rock Store’s a sort of demilitarized zone, where they all get along. The Livingstons and I go into the café for burgers, and they tell me about their plans to run Malcolm Smith in the vintage class at Pikes Peak this summer.

The bikes in the parking lot all made the beemer seem pretty dowdy. Since splitting with my wife, I’ve been staying with a friend a few blocks from the beach, where the salt’s taken a toll. The ally’s growing white fur, the beautiful wide handlebar is shedding its chrome, and the seat’s developed a deep crack. As I ride back south, I wonder if I’ll ever get around to fixing any of that stuff, or just sell it and split the money, since there’s no way I can buy out her half.

Stopped into a church/I passed along the way. 

Well, I parked in front of one anyhow. I just needed a coffee. There’s an old mission in San Juan Capistrano that dates from the time when this was all Mexico. It occurs to me that the bike’s running fine, despite showing its age. So maybe I could just keep going south, and cross the border into Baja. Her lawyer would never find me there.

If I didn’t tell her/I could leave today
Oh California dreamin’/On such a winter’s day

UPDATE: I did, in the end, have to give the BMW to my ex-wife. She left it parked outside, a mile from the ocean, for several years before telling me that if I wanted it, she guessed I could take it. By that time I'd married the correct wife, but didn't have the resources to resurrect the bike. I traded it to my friend Jim Carns, who drove out to California from Kansas City to collect it. He's since restored the machine and Mary and I have since moved to Kansas City, so I suppose I have visiting rights to it.

What writers do when they're not doing anything

A note from Best of Backmarker: Time flies. Six years ago, I moved from Texas back to California. I wrote this column that February, and it appeared on the old Road Racer X web site. Since that's now down, and since I ran across this file while resurrecting an old hard drive and liked the essay, I'm reposting it here. Of course, I've since moved from California to Kansas City, and I'm a long way my old home surf break. That's about all I miss about SoCal, but I do admit that rereading this, I find myself wishing for a little getaway, as the forecast here is for an ice storm...

February, 2007

A while ago, I moved back to California from Texas.  So now I live in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, which is one of the beach towns strung out north of San Diego between Interstate 5 and the coast. The town’s unofficial logo is a yellow “pedestrian crossing” sign, but the pedestrian’s carrying a surfboard. Every second vehicle has a Surfrider Foundation window sticker or a Pray For Surf bumper sticker. There’s a popular local breakfast joint called Pipes, which takes its name from a nearby surf break. There’s a little office building next to the café, and its parking lot is posted with signs that read:
NO PIPES 
PARKING
WE WILL 
TOW, BRO!

Until a few years ago, Cardiff was mostly little bungalows. But Southern California’s real estate boom has resulted in most of those being torn down and replaced by much bigger places that start at well over a million bucks. So there aren’t many rentals left that archetypal surfers can afford–guys whose work life is so sketchy that they can book off whenever the surf’s up. That doesn’t mean there are fewer surfers. When I walk from my house, straight down Dublin Drive towards the beach, I always pass a few open garage doors. I see a predictable mix of Porsche Cayennes and Lexuses (Lexi?) but there’s usually a quiver of longboards, too. So most of the current residents are rich, born-again surfers.

My street ends at a little bluff that overlooks the San Elijo lagoon. From there, a footpath leads down across the railroad tracks towards Highway 101. Once I’ve crossed the highway, I’m there, on the beach. And I am there, quite often. A writer’s life involves a lot of waiting. (Come to think of it, it often involves waiting on tables, but the terms of my visa won’t permit that.) So in my case it’s waiting for the phone to ring, or for the email that assigns a story, tells a story; as clichéd as it might sound, I do wait for the muse to strike. 

While I wait, surfing serves a purpose; paddling’s a great cardio and upper body workout, holding your head up in that posture closely mimics a sportbike workout on your upper back and neck. Sitting on the board waiting for waves is its own balance exercise, too; without realizing it, you constantly shift your c.g. to keep it above the board’s center of buoyancy. Learning to relax out there is like riding in the rain, and it attunes you to that split-second’s warning you get that before some highsides–where you instinctively transfer your weight from the seat to the pegs, letting the bike rise and break underneath you while you think, No big deal. 

There’s a bunch of overlapping sponsors and a general surf style that’s close to the vibe in a Supercross paddock. But the rhythm of surfing’s more in tune with road racing. Timing waves is analogous to initiating turns; wait, wait, wait for it, then commit totally.

So physically, it’s one of the best possible ways to cross train for motorcycling. All in all, it can’t hurt my riding (there are those who’ve seen me ride who are now thinking, Nothing could hurt it. But maybe some day I will finally teach myself to commit to the turn as fully as I do to the wave.) Anyway, the main benefits are mental. Something about those long waits at sea sharpens one’s powers of observation.  Ask Herman Melville.

The path to the beach skirts the outlet of the lagoon, which looks like a small river, except it changes the direction of its flow twice a day. On dropping tides, it releases sediment into the Pacific. That sediment is carried about 100 yards out to sea before settling. It creates the sandy reef that, in turn, makes for consistently good waves. Not great, but good. That’s my home break. From the time I put my coffee cup down in the kitchen sink to the time I was wading into the waves, it used to take me no more than 15 minutes on foot. So I didn’t even need a car, which was lucky because I don’t have one. 

I say “used to” because now I have to detour around a deep, concrete storm drainage ditch that runs parallel to the highway. For a while, there was a bridge across the ditch, despite the fact that the path follows the railroad right of way and everyone who walks there is technically trespassing.

The bridge was obviously made from construction scraps. It was about ten feet long and thirty inches wide. There were no handrails; it was definitely not up to code. Some of the timbers were painted and others are untreated and rough sawn. But it was solid; I knew right away that it was made by someone who used tools for a living.  

Spray-painted on one of the beams that supported it were the words:

TOURISTS MUST DIE

There was a more helpful (though no more welcoming) message on the bridge deck itself:

MADE BY LOCALS FOR LOCAL USE ONLY

I was not surprised to see those warnings. (Although logically, they made no sense; the bridge was not visible from any public thoroughfare and connected a small, residential neighborhood with a relatively anonymous beach. Only locals could possibly have used it.) 

Surfers call this territoriality “localism.” It is, to say the least, inconsistent with the laid back surf style that is packaged and marketed all over the world–including places hundreds of miles from the nearest waves. Ironically, the successful marketing of surf culture had the unintended effect of encouraging millions of people to take up the sport. 

Natural forces create surf breaks. There are a finite number of good ones, especially near major population centers. What was once a solitary communion between man and nature now often looks more like a bobbing, floating crowd. Collisions between surfers are rare, but friction is not. Professional surf journalists and photographers have had their cars burned or even been beaten up by local surfers who don’t want “their” still-undiscovered spots popularized. And even people who surf at well-known beaches resent web-based surf forecasters who can spread the word–surf’s up–too far, too fast.

All this proves only that surf culture has invaded the larger popular culture at the expense of popular culture invading surfing. It’s part pure cool, part environmental awareness, part sport, art, and business. It must have been nice, back in the old days in Hawaii, when it was just a religious experience. 

In any case, the bridge wasn’t there for long. Someone tore it out. Not an angry non-local surfer; probably someone from the railroad, or the town council, who didn’t want to tacitly encourage people to cross the railroad tracks far from the nearest level crossing.

Having been spoiled by the short cut, once it was denied to me I bought an old Motobecane “mixte”-framed bicycle and fitted it with a rack that holds a surfboard. That enabled me to get down to the beach along the roads, even faster than I used to get there via the guerrilla bridge. My surf bike also gives me access to a wider range of surf spots, maybe a mile up and down the coast from Swami’s to the rocky headland at the north end of Solana Beach.

The success of the bicycle gave me another idea, which was to build a surf motorcycle. Faithful readers (hi mom) will remember that I once accidentally bought a 1972 Suzuki TS125 scrambler on eBay. It ran–barely–but had a sticking throttle and questionable electrics. (Since it was missing its battery, the question was, did it have anything like roadworthy lights and horn?) The tires, chain and sprockets were pretty knackered too, but it was basically all there and pretty stylin’. 

Until now though, it’s been a bit of an albatross around my neck. I’ve moved it from California to Texas and back again without ever riding it. Since I don’t have a garage, it’s been stored outside; a cozy nest for spiders, a perch for sparrows, sprinkled with fallen pine needles. So it’s definitely time I did something with it. Lately, I’ve imagined buzzing up and down the 101 on it, with my ’board slung alongside. Hmm… I wonder how far I can go before I stop being local?

Somewhere, I have a Clymer manual for it. Maybe in the next few days I’ll roll it onto my little patio, clean it off and see if I can get it to the point where one could imagine licensing and insuring it. I’ll let you know how that goes. Unless the phone rings. Or the surf’s up.

My first bike. Almost.

I was at the Barrington Concours (outside Chicago) earlier this summer, and saw a bike that bore an amazing resemblance to my very first motorbike. It was a 1966 Sears Allstate 'Campus 50' made by Steyr-Daimler-Puch, in Austria. My bike, a Swiss-model Puch 'Condor' was very similar to this one, except that mine had slightly more primitive cycle parts (rigid rear end and trailing link front fork) and bicycle-style pedals. The frame and motor were identical.

This was the bike that I was riding as a 14 year-old in Switzerland, as described in this part of my book, Riding Man...

When I was a kid, my dad worked for a big international company. The company moved our family from Canada to Switzerland, so he could run their Geneva office. Our home was in Tannay, an agricultural village that looked down over orchards and vineyards to a big lake. Under Swiss law, at 14 I was allowed to ride a 50 cc moped. In surrounding countries, mopeds had three-speed transmissions, but in Switzerland, models sold to teenagers had the top gear removed from the box. Thus, in theory, they were limited to 30 kilometers an hour. Trust the Swiss to take the fun out of everything. 

I counted down the days to my fourteenth birthday anyway. My parents bought me the Cadillac of mopeds: a Puch Condor. To start it, I pedaled it like a bicycle. The pedals came in handy for assisting the motor on steep hills, or when we were racing out of slow turns (though digging the inside pedal into the pavement at maximum lean was definitely to be avoided,) 

All the kids I knew had similarly restricted bikes. Since every single time any other kid went faster was a serious personal insult, we endlessly attempted to eke out a little more power. One night, mulling over the possibilities of increased compression, we decided to skim our cylinder heads. Unencumbered by knowledge of milling machines, we cast about for a suitable tool. We found it in a neighbor’s basement: a belt sander. Not one of us waited to see if it worked for anyone else first. We’d have got better results skimming our own stupid heads. Over the next few nights, quite a few local mopeds (which were often left parked outside front gates, in the convenient shadows of stone walls and overgrown hedges) lost their heads. 

At every gas station there was always a special premix pump for motorbikes only. We’d decide how much fuel we were going to buy, which was never much. We told the attendant how much fuel–and what percentage of premix oil–we wanted. 

Knobs were set, and a handle was pulled down, sort of like the handle on an espresso machine. The customer was reassured to see a little spurt of oil sprayed onto the inner wall of the glass “fishbowl” on top of the pump. Then a second handle released the gasoline, which swirled in after the oil, dissolving it. It was a special mixture–different than buying gas for a car–that may as well have been a magic potion. All of us idiots concluded that by reducing the percentage of oil to two percent from the recommended three percent we could get one percent more gasoline, with a concomitant increase in horsepower. 

Of course, nothing we did had any impact on performance at all, except to occasionally make it much worse. The top speed of every bike was determined by the luck of the draw, though since I was the smallest rider, I could pull taller gearing. 

While the bikes were simple and rugged, we were awfully hard on them. We rode without helmets, so it’s amazing we didn’t kill ourselves, even at sorely restricted speeds. Low-siding on cow shit was a common excuse. Once, I took to the ditch at full speed when a tractor and trailer laden with 200 bushels of apples emerged from a hedgerow in front of me. Damage from such wipeouts had to be repaired at the local shop. If my bike would still roll, it was an easy push up the street from my house. 

The mechanic’s shop was a two-bay garage, which along with a tiny beauty salon, made up the ground floor of a two-storey house. He worked on bicycles and mopeds; his wife was the beautician. In general, his customers were not spoiled foreign children; they were real Swiss–farmers, cops, shopkeepers and like, who relied on motorbikes for day-to-day transportation. The wives and girlfriends of those guys were the customers for the salon. All of them were xenophobes. Their treatment of foreigners usually ranged from outright scorn to something resembling the Amish concept of “shunning,” unless money was changing hands. 

If I was pushing in the bike, or walking in to pick it up, I’d always make a little noise, sort of like throat clearing, to warn him of my arrival. He was an intimidating character for a 14-year-old to deal with. He was old; 60 or 70, tall and gaunt. Shaking his hand was like grabbing a bunch of walnuts. When he talked to me, he’d walk up to the sound of my voice, but stare straight out over my head. That was because cataracts had long since rendered him completely blind. His corneas were as opaque as a boiled trout’s. 

He did everything by feel. Routine maintenance, stuff like fitting a new inner tube and tire, was absolutely no problem. Sighted mechanics could do that with their eyes closed too, maybe. But he rebuilt top ends, replaced brake shoes; stuff that utterly baffled me. A few hours a week, he had a sighted assistant that came in, but usually he was alone. When I went there, there was always some little thing he’d borrow my eyes for, like having me read the tiny numbers on a carb jet. 

Occasionally, I’d stop by his shop just to fill up my tires. (The Condor came with a bicycle pump for the purpose, but you had to pump like a madman to overcome leakage in the pump itself. He had a pump powered by a foot treadle that allowed me to run the rock-hard tires I preferred for minimal rolling resistance.) When I asked if I could borrow his pump, he always sternly warned me to replace it exactly–exactly–where I’d found it. 

Luckily for him, the bikes he worked on were all piston-port two-strokes. Their basic design hadn’t changed since the introduction of the NSU Quickly in about 1947. When my bike arrived at his shop for the first time, though, he was fascinated. Until then, most Swiss-market mopeds were sold with rigid front forks, like a bicycle. Mine had an inch or two of suspension travel, thanks to a bogus leading-link arrangement in which a little block of rubber served as both spring and damper. He spent a long time “looking” at it, stroking and probing the workings with his fingers, memorizing the arrangement of the parts. It was not long before he got the chance to repair those forks. 

He had a name, of course, but we just called him “the blind man.” By the time I was old enough to get a moped, my family had lived in Switzerland for several years, and I spoke fluent French. Other foreign families came and went every year or two, so I occasionally introduced new customers to the blind man, and acted as a translator. Since his ability was so extraordinary, I sort of showed him off, I guess. He always took the work. He and his wife were making their living about five bucks at a time, so there was no turning away paying jobs.